this sucks lol. offensively poor communication and solution for a fake problem.

How many times will i see more or less the same struggle session on this website

now ive said this before, im not the biggest fan of the dunk tank, half of my dunk tank comments are usually just saying the dunk tank is shit via astronaut always has been emotes within dunk tank posts, and i’ve reported a post on the dunk tank for straight up unadulterated hardcore ableism before, but the way this has been handled is deffo a moment, projecting vague criticisms of a comm that by its very nature needs to be more tightly moderated than other comms as cishet and white and then deleting it without community feedback is pretty unserious and kinda sucks to hear for the people who regularly contributed and weren’t white or cishet, and will do nothing but bring those types of posts to other comms, whereas before i could just block the dunk tank and move on with my week if i wasn’t feeling it that particular day

so as an on and off semi-hater of the dunk tank, just give it a new less racist name and bring it back idk, sometimes even the disabled gays like me want to put a funny disgust emoji on a random twitter user’s shit post once in a while without having to write a dissertation on them which aint gonna be likely for me and those like me lmaoo

Something I haven’t seen mentioned. Roasting assholes can be a great entrance to leftist thought. Imagine I’m a vaguely left individual. I think Dems suck. I hate Republicans. Ive never read even the most basic of theory. I probably don’t know theory exists. I see a wacky Twitter Nazi getting roasted in a dredge thread. Awesome. Then you follow that and see more etc etc. eventually you may actually start engaging in leftist ideas more seriously because the roasts do often hint at or explicitly call out actual theory.

If instead the only option is some 5 paragraph effort post dissecting said Nazi via a Marxist lens… Well probably ain’t reading that shit.

Honestly glib roasts seem like they’d be more useful or atleast as useful as more complex posts in having offline impact. Which is kinda what the mods seem to think hexbear oughta do.

The edits do seem to indicate that perhaps not all posts to these new coms need huge effort but as is the other major complaint… It’s not actually clear. At all.

Anyway I shouldn’t even be online right now so I should stop reading this thread and just see what happens.

800 comments in a day. that’s some good metrics. can we push 1k?

Nobody here has a problem with getting rid of the name “dunk tank” now that we know where it came from. However, having a place to dredge/dunk on shitty reactionary opinions is fun and cathartic.

This change seems to be a continuation of the mod initiative which started with dunk tank rule 8, and which seems to be at odds with the way a large portion of the site’s users use the site.

oooh and here I thought “dunking” was about like basketball… live and learn

Just want to say that I think the changes make sense, and I’ll always support the leadership team when it comes to taking thought-out approaches on how to improve site culture and in avoiding tail-ism.

There’s this strange drive towards “x variety of posting/content is not a productive way to spend time as a communist, therefore we must eliminate it” that emerges sometimes here.

I hate to break it to you, but hexbear will never be the most productive thing you could be doing to advance the revolution. If we follow this tendency to its conclusion, the wisest decision would be to close the site and everyone goes and reads books or does work for their local org instead.

Not a good decision. Changing the name of the dunk tank is fine if you care that much about the origin of the term, but nuking the comms and replacing them with new, far more restrictive ones (with opaque names that don’t convey their intent at all) is just a bad choice imo, and I hope it gets rolled back.

Changing the dunktank to “Counterpropaganda” is the nerdest move ever

I blocked those communities once i realized they were basically the only part of hexbear that consistently made me feel dread. This shit is not good for you, and you don’t even realize it until it’s gone.

I think I’ll be blocking these new communities because they will inevitably become like the old ones, and heavy moderation to try to change that is going to just cause whining.

My cheap 2 cents here, the content (not name, that should change) of the dunk/dredge tank makes me feel a bit more sane. The whole internet is full of disgusting fascist nonsense, it’s nice to see people rejecting it and often with really good educated takes. It honestly helps me to debunk the bad fascist shit to my lib friends. I know there are better ways of going about it but it’s good outweighs the bad.

This might not be what some of the more serious-minded folks wanna hear, but outside of the newscomm, Hexbear is mostly a shitposting site for me—a high-quality shitposting site, but a shitposting site nonetheless.

If the mod team wants to take Hexbear in a more serious direction, they’re welcome to do so, (NOT REALLY) but they shouldn’t be too suprised if it ends up with less trafic and fewer users.

The name change’s 100% cool, but I’m not sure the replacement comms are an adequate substitute for those of us who mostly just wanna have some lighthearted fun.

Like, of course we shouldn’t allow mysogny on Hexbear, but I’m not really sure what that’s got to do with me just making fun of MagaSSoldier on Twitter and posting it here. If this kinda content isn’t allowed anymore, I gotta say I’d be pretty dissapointed. It’s like when your favorite pub closes down—not the end of the world, but it still sucks. Just hope the modteam gets that.

Collected statements of mods in favor of this change:

“dunk culture” can be fun but it’s rarely constructive, gives off white cishet man vibes, and has the potential to shift closer to the reactionary reddit “snark”.

It promotes misanthropy and, depending on the post can serve as an outlet for “acceptable” bigotry by copy/pasting the most heinous takes without pushing back and sometimes without a CW.

We have all seen those toxic and reactionary opinions 200 million times, ultimately it is just getting really mad at other powerless people.

Counterpropaganda is where you can post Mike83829293’s takes. Posts require clear effort being made in countering the falsehoods of the original post, or furthering the discussion. What this effort looks like will be a dialogue between the users and mods.

Counterpropaganda posts cutting apart shitty Op-eds, MIC insider articles, journalistic stories, etc. are celebrated and encouraged, and will be separated from the shitpostier/chattier nature of the gossip community.

Gossip is the new place to post about people with power. The person being dunked on must be a public figure, and be paid to be a public figure.

The name gossip is because it makes the content seem deeply unserious, like the posts about Elon Musk, celebrities, journalists, all of the streamer infighting, YouTuber arguments, podcast guys, etc. Locking the dunk/dredge tanks will help with toning down the irony poisoning on this site esp from white people. it’s such a white internet communist turn-off for me and it permeates this site. A lot of people have mentioned that there’s a definite air of misogyny around the way the site is currently doing dunks, and calling it like it is, gossip, should prove to be not only a method of finding out problematic users, but also a more entertaining way of letting people talk about other public figures besides just Elon Musk and US political candidates

We absolutely need to be more vigilant about toxic behavior in these spaces, there’s a non-zero amount of ironic bigotry that has slipped through the cracks to the point where I’ve independently had multiple different people mention it as a concern.

Dunk culture is along the lines of doing mutual self harm, like a smoking social club. You all go in and smoke together and encourage one another to keep smoking, and you feel a sense of community and a sense that what you’re doing is cool and fun, like putting a poster over the hole in the wall instead of fixing the wall.

We want us to continue to be a fun shitposting forum. But there are tons of other kinds of shitposting. Remember “bad guy bit accounts” when we had like civility and neera_tanden and all those other bit accounts where they just posted and argued while larping as annoying liberals or chuds? We grew out of that, and I think the site is better for it. We still have bit accounts, but there’s not really that kind of arguing in the comments anymore. We can grow out of this one too, and I think the site will also be better for it. We don’t have to have a site culture defined by our flailing opposition to mainstream pop culture and politics, uselessly posted where nobody else will see it. This change has the potential to make HB a lot less toxic improve the quality of posts, we are assessing these changes over the next two weeks and will open the floor for discussion at that time.

Collected statements of mods against this change:

“dunk’ culture” isn’t inherently unhealthy for the site.
there are aspects of it that need to be cracked down on, and I don’t discount that some reformations to it will probably need to be made, but even after sitting on it for a bit I still think it’s not the best idea to strangle the aspect out of the site.

It is not an inherently progressive move for the site culture to totally exclude it. I think a third space for it should exist, with the primary purpose of a space for ‘dunk’ content is mutual catharsis.

As a leftist, online and a bit offline, is a bit of a maddening experience. A ‘dunk’ space, even one filled with low hanging fruit, allows me to vent my anger and negative emotions off in a way that gives a shared space for it. It serves these little capsules of exasperation that keeps me from sort of overdosing on those emotion