I’m sorry, but as a mod on this site I feel like I have to say something that I don’t seem to see any other mods/admins saying:

The mod/admin team are never going to remediate relations with the general site user base if this post is indeed how things will be working moving forward. There is no self-crit at all regarding the main thing people are upset about, which is NOT closing the tanks, but that mods/admins get to voice their opinion on this site and what it should look like/how it should be run via executive action that is not available to the average site user.

I’m sorry to tell any of my fellow mods/admins this, but your experience as a mod/admin does not make your opinion inherently any more or less valuable in regards to what the site should look like than that of the average user. Yes, you may see more of what happens behind the scenes, lower quality/aggravating posts, etc. but that is something you took upon yourself as a gesture to the community you are a part of, not a leader of. Not thinking posts are high effort enough is your opinion. Thinking posts dunking on libs are boring is your opinion. Thinking Hexbear needs to change this way or that is your opinion. If you have a problem with things, you must act AS A MEMBER OF THE COMMUNITY and voice your opinion on necessary changes just like anybody else. You should not get to be a more privileged user than the average person here and go ahead and talk behind the scenes with other people who have the power to change the site and decide what needs to happen without user feedback. Mods/admins exist to enforce a site’s rules and act as maintainece, not to be a leading body of powerusers who determine what the site should look like and how it should be run. The reason there was so much pushback on these decisions is that they were never (and still haven’t been, for that matter) presented to the community as something to be discussed at all, and changes were made by executive decision.

The only power the average user has to voice their opinion on how the site should look is via posting, and that is the only way mods/admins should get to voice theirs. Acting otherwise is a classic leftist org blunder that cultivates a massively toxic culture of powerplayers and in-groups at the levers of power that leads to growing tension and eventually fractures both within the in-groups and between the in-groups and user base at large.

A whole host of other very important issues (notably transphobia, misogyny) have arisen as a result of the initial actions taken by the mod/admin team, and there is no reason they can’t/shouldn’t be addressed. That being said, the ignorance/arrogance of the mod/admin team of marching on forward after their wrongdoings have clearly been outlined is concerning and needs to be undone as soon as possible. The only thing worse than making a bad decision is committing to it once it’s well known that it went poorly.

Undo the changes, bring them up with the community just like any average user would have to, gain valuable feedback from them, and take action from there. To genuinely save face + demonstrate that this site is for its user base at large and not just for a few elite users who want it to be their pet project, this the only way forward.

While I shouldn't weigh in too much, especially post-hoc, I could've told you that having TC69 back as a mod or admin was a very bad idea.

As important TC69 was (and from a legacy perspective is) to creating an aggressively positive trans culture, she, for better and worse, acts incredibly narcissistically when she is placed into positions of power, and more importantly, in my opinion, she is/was ideologically incoherent as moderator. You cannot simultaneously say 'its just a website' while also banning people for small indiscretions or personal beef. After all, 'it's just a website' why should the moderators care that much? She tends to take so much shit that goes on here personally and yet expects nobody else to.

A poor decision unless you enjoy drama.

This is still goin huh

I was at work yesterday so I couldn't have my eyes glued to this.

Are the admins/mods still framing their the problem with the struggle session as just being about the banwaves?

Has anything been said or done about the ACTUAL spark that began the drama? That is, has there been a discussion about the way decisions are made without user input (let alone democracy) for reasons that are then lied about?

This will happen again unless the primary contradiction is resolved: is this website a social club for the mods in which we are simply extras, or is this our website as the users?

Can i get an apology now @booty@hexbear.net for being miscast as the site demon for no reason other than literally , , and a personal beef as a source

I'd like to add that a thing creeping into a lot of these discussions is the survey. the survey is not a representitive of all users, it is a self selecting group of people who took one to give us a sample of the userbase that we have extrapolated. the survey itself says around 600 people responded. a look at the side bar will show you the number of users a day/week/month regularly exceeds this. people in that thread of the survey results were debating about how many trans men and cis women were even on here because the data does not tell them this, so they invented readings from it.

furthermore, the survey does not say; are the 'he/him's cis, are the 'he/hims' white, are the 'he/hims' straight. you do not know who is behind the prounoun tag and username, do not invent a bogeyman out of users based on a survey. it is not empirical evidence. cis het jacketing he/hims is not useful, and can do a lot to hurt people in ways you do not know. I've seen this shit hurt trans men friends of mine so many times

This is what I wrote about zoomerists fake selfcrit post before I hit post and realized it had been cowardly deleted by creator

I read your whole post and came to the conclusion that you are a privileged liberal with extreme amounts of projection.

This is in the wrong comm. This isn't selfcrit, this is dredge material.

First you project your privilege onto all of us, then you do copious amounts of concern trolling and strawmanning.

You think the workers in the imperial core are redeemable, that's where your liberal brainworms are coming from. Almost every worker in the imperial core earns more money than the ones outside it. They have a material reason to support imperialism. They may be your comrades but that's because you are an imperialist liberal.

Then you suddenly want to decide how the comms you hate are named and run. Are you our emperor? Certainly seems like it, with how you talk over all the marginalized comrades who were deeply hurt by tc69 because of your liberal "protect the marginalized (but don't listen to what they actually want)" shit.

looks around

Every time I fuck around outside of hexbear for a few days some shit goes down... was this all my fault? Was I the sin eater holding everything together this whole time?

I don't like the implication that some of the admins apparently check every time you say something that annoys them what your pronouns are and tick a running tally until their grudge gets big enough to do something unpopular. Is this the sort of thing people brought up as concerns when they didn't want pronouns to be mandatory? back then it was [none/use name]s who "weren't beating the allegations". I really don't like puppygirl stuff. Do you think it would be productive to take that as an excuse to have a discussion about whether we blame [she/her]s or the [she/they]s as the source of more inappropriate kink comments?

I love my niche communist internet forum that avoids the pitfalls of niche internet forums and communist organisations