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Really though, I genuinely hope so too. I am really happy with how it has been handled since lyudmila started posting.

Yeah, me too, it's a relief to see people decompress and process things now that the action is over. I just wish we could have moved at this pace from the start.

I've gotten so much out of this site over the years, I hope we can keep things going here for many years to come.

No there weren't, that's a reductive representation... [paragraph I'm still wrapping my head around]

Sorry if I got it wrong. I don't have a very good understanding of what happened.

That said, I'm not here to re-litigate the details of what happened. I probably shouldn't have tried to find a real example.

My point is that the thread was not a functional discussion. People were escalating and not listening.

Following your analogy: The french revolution could have been avoided if the royalists weren't dumbasses

My analogy is that certain situations have their own emergent properties, not that the causes of a revolution can be mapped to the causes of a struggle session. I'm talking about the chaos itself.

Struggle sessions and revolutions are both examples of situations that gain a life of their own. Emergent effects dominate over the desires of the participants. No one's in control of the situation.

My takeaway is that we have to look at what happened and finally confront the current structure of moderation of hexbear is one that is inherently flawed.

That might well be, but I hope we can talk about it slowly and patiently from here on out.

My understanding is that struggle sessions are rarely one-sided, they're a feedback loop of escalation, hurt, and defensiveness in which all sides contribute. In this session, for example, there were comments accusing the mods of being a cabal of power-seeking transphobes. That's an escalation that shuts down discussion rather than fosters it.

I make the analogy that, just as revolutions tend to be chaotic and bloody regardless of their ideological content—libs conveniently forget how mess the French revolution was—struggle sessions have their own realities independent of the specific topic and specific people involved. The same unstable feedback loops arise in any struggle session.

My takeaway is that, in general, looking past this specific struggle session, we all have to work together to foster healthier discussion dynamics here.

We might benefit from a new thread mode for conflicts. "Slow mode" or "struggle session mode" or "effortposts only mode."

boycotting products /groups that advertise on their videos.

and pressure campaigns against those advertisers.

I think targeting the advertisers is the big one. It would work better if MeToo still existed, but the Biden campaign killed that. Maybe MeToo can be resurrected as an offshoot of the abortion rights struggle that will be escalating in the upcoming years. Maybe campaigns can appeal to parents of daughters. "This is what YouTube is telling your daughter's male classmates." "This is what those male classmates are saying. [Some vile quotes]" "YouTube is profiting off of victimizing your children."

Why would capitalist owned media companies stop boosting capitalist, right-wing propaganda?

Not voluntarily, but mass action can sometimes force concessions.

Okay, but regardless of who started it, we fed the other half of the feedback loop, and where did that lead? Big picture, are we better off for the experience?

People are cracking jokes to ease the tension, but underneath that? Most of the site hates struggle sessions. How many people leave and never come back every time we have one? How many people waded into that thread and formed lasting personal animosities with each other that will still spark conflict months or years from now, any time they see each other in a thread? Is the site any healthier overall now than it was before? What happens to the site culture over time if we drive away people who can't stand struggle sessions and retain people who can? Are we getting more and more terminally online every time we do this?

It's so simple to avoid. Our site has no meta-culture about how to handle large conflicts, which is a problem not only here but in any orgs we belong to, because it makes wrecking that much easier. Apparently, in this struggle session, there was some "debatebro" alt account stirring shit, and people thought the account belonged to an admin when it didn't. Is it really that easy to fuck with this site? All you have to do is make an alt account and fan the flames any time there's a conflict here?

To avoid this mess, all we had to do, as a community, in this struggle session and every other one, was slow down, try to understand each other, and avoid throwing personal attacks that push people to defend themselves with more personal attacks in an endless feedback loop. Like a slow driving zone around a school, we could have seen the struggle session coming, switched gears, and slowed everything down to avoid it. I guarantee we would be better off if we knew how to do that.

"Burn pit" is a great analogy, because this was more of a fire than a discussion, jumping from kindling to kindling. TC69 got overwhelmed, saw herself mutating in the eyes of the commenters with each passing minute, and started banning people as a firebreak, which only made it worse, until eventually she locked the thread. That's not a good result for anyone.

I don't know how to end this comment. I'm frustrated that this community tears itself apart so easily. It doesn't have to be like this.

My suggestions all sound really obvious, but they're obvious because we've all heard them before, because they actually work:

1. Recognize that a struggle session is happening
2. Slow the fuck down so there's time for real dialogue
3. Actually earnestly try to understand where people are coming from, be curious about the human—which takes time, hence bullet 2.
4. Don't throw personal attacks, because the other person will defend themself by throwing more personal attacks, in an endless feedback loop
5. Don't respond to personal attacks with more personal attacks, de-escalate by acknowledging the other person
6. Be patient, because communicating is hard. Not everyone can get everything out in a single perfect effortpost.
7. Conversely, thoughtful effortposts are good in a struggle session, because they facilitate bullets 2 and 3. Effortposts slow things down, and they make space for people to express where they're coming from as a human being, and try to understand where the other person is coming from. In a struggle session, it can feel like every comment opens three new fronts of conflict, and the gap in understanding grows faster than words can cross it. Thoughtful, patient effortposts can help mitigate that effect.

The reason most of us hate struggle sessions, the reason so many of us lay low until these things die down, is that struggle sessions are too fast and chaotic to be dialogue. Everyone gets too heated and pressed and defensive to actually listen or reach an understanding, so it turns into people talking past each other, sometimes building up personal resentments that last long after the struggle session ends and have little to do with the original disagreement. If you wade into it, you risk making enemies, and you don't chance making friends.

I think we need some site meta-culture or protocols for how to handle large conflicts in a healthier way in the future, regardless of the content of the conflict.

Asking in a hostile tone, in the midst of an active struggle session, is not really the same as inviting someone to sit down and talk things out with you. In that context it lands more as an attack or a challenge. You'll get a short response because they want to minimize the surface area for you to find fault in, and because they are trying to respond quickly to a large volume of comments in a frantic effort to stop things spiraling out of control. Once it turns into a struggle session like that, the only productive thing we can do is try to slow it down until it's a discussion, kinda like how, in real life, once a crowd of people are shouting over each other, the only productive thing you can do is try to get them to stop and take turns.

But the criticism needs to be directed at the people it applies to and it needs to be specific as to where they are going wrong.

I don't mean to be confrontational, but why? Why can't a person lead with a vague sentiment? Why impose a high barrier to entry? The goal of a conversation is not to accomplish everything with the first statement. If we have the patience to actually talk to each other and listen without getting defensive, then there's no rush to lead with a perfectly crafted effortpost that not many people here would be capable of writing. The truth will come out through dialog, through a collective effort of us trying to understand each other and overcome each others' limited abilities to communicate.

Rather than blanket statements about everyone who likes to dunk and saying only that they're misogynistic debate bros without any examples.

So you say something like, "This seems kind of unfair and vague to me, but I'm curious to know more about why you feel this way, and I would like to talk to you about it."

If there's no time to have that discussion in the midst of a struggle session, that is exactly what is wrong with struggle sessions.

I think it will take time to gather examples and identify who might need to self-crit or take a ban.

More importantly, though, we all need to be receptive to criticism without getting defensive. That is part of having a healthy culture on this site, where queer, POC, and femme users feel comfortable voicing criticisms when they see problematic behavior that those outside their group(s) may be blind to. All of us grew up in reactionary cultures. That doesn't vanish the moment we join a communist website. Building a better culture here is an ongoing process that will continue long after this struggle session ends. We need to know how to listen to each other and hold slow, patient, thoughtful dialog.