People are asking for some transparency on how this decision was made, so here's my perspective.

Due to the racist origin of the term "The Dunk Tank," the decision was made that the community absolutely needs to be replaced by something which doesn't trace back to a carnival game titled "Hit the Coon."

Since we were re-naming / replacing the community, It was also considered a good time to reconsider the purpose of it. It served as an outlet for catharsis, but also has a misanthropic element to it, which, unchecked, leads to a smug self-satisfied "everyone is stupid but me" mindset.

The arguments seemed reasonable to me. I didn't make much input. I didn't find much to object to. I was under the understanding that c/gossip would be more-or-less the replacement, but that would focus more on significant public figures instead of the absolute bottom feeders of Twitter and Reddit. This was more or less the consensus among people in the discussion, so I don't think it is fair to lay everything at the feet of CARCOSA

So this was basically me:

I still think the changes were reasonably justified. I think they probably could have been communicated better. I also think we would be in a better place if the discussion thread remained constructive, rather than spiraling into a tornado of accusations and innuendo. That discussion was a fiasco. Decisions at the administration / moderation level could have been more transparent, but instead of discussing that we went straight to assuming everyone had an ulterior motive.

Happy CARCOSA is staying on board. I didn't feel strongly about the changes either way so I never imagined it would blow up like this.

I never really liked the dunk tank and felt it at the very least fucked up my vibes. But I can block it!

Someone else might be really mad and just want to post a shit take into the void. You aren’t going to entirely stop people frying their brains by doomscrolling twitter by banning twitter screenshots.

Having fellow pinkos dunk along with you has two effects: it makes you feel less alone and less insane … but it also motivates you to dredge your snout through the absolute filthiest of dredge in order to find more slop for the slop machine so that number goes up. So I think we do have some social responsibility here. We could disable not only downvoting but also upvoting on dunk type comms?

if you like your slop, you can keep it!

carcosa please don't feel like you need to step down unless you feel you need to for other reasons. if so I'm sure we would all understand but you have always been a great admin and even through this strugglesesh everyone still sees that

Hey, I took a couple of days off from Hexbear, what's going on here?

since the other thread is locked I'll post what I wanted to say in reply to @CARCOSA@hexbear.net about the ruse with the other lemmy admins here:

Damn lol, guess I'm not sure how that could realistically have worked with how much the other lemmy libs hate us, but I do get the idea, yeah. I appreciate the transparency after the fact at least. I don't envy the position of having to manage this place, because certain shitty tendencies and bigotry have ofc really required the iron fist to stamp out, like transphobia, but for other changes like this, the "alright its decided for you, here's what we're doing" approach kinda just feels shitty and unnecessary as a user.

But it would of course be a massive shitshow to attempt to decide something like this fully democratically, publicly, even if there were a majority of users behind it. I'd like to think we've grown past the need to have unpopular but necessary site changes pushed through by a vanguard of mods/admins, but idk if that's true or not tbqh.

for whatever it's worth, I'm much more interested in keeping a place for dunking here, and like, not repeating this sort of mess, than I am in seeing you step down, besides this I think you've done a very good job, and I hope I didn't ruin your day

I admit I'm a bit overinvested in slop, but dunking is also a huge part of site culture and somewhat important (insofar as anything on here is, which isn't that much)