I don’t have a ton of interaction with you (that I am aware of), and I missed the party on this one since I was touching grass or something like that, but right now it sounds like you are one of the only admins who for sure should be staying the in decision making loop. Mistakes happen when running any organization, it’s unavoidable. I have seen the exact mistake you made (making changes to the site without consulting the wider userbase) so many times over the years. I’ve even done it once or twice myself. It’s one of the most common mistakes made by admins/mods. You have done a good job of holding yourself accountable, which is #1 what a good admin/mod should be doing and #2 is more than I can say for a lot of your “colleagues”. I don’t think should be removing yourself from the decision making process.

CARCOSA, I appreciate the candor and self criticism. But we know it was not only you who created this debacle

Transparency is needed about how this decision was made, who was responsible, and how large portions of the mod team (apparently) came to view the userbase and content posted here with such disgust. The rest of the mod team are cowards for hiding behind you. Let them come and tell us that we are toxic cishet white debate bros to our faces. I’m not going to forget about what they think about me now that they have done me the courtesy of telling me

GOOD self crit

I trust you and I think you should stay

omg I spent an unhealthy amount of time on hexbear, I love it and have been here for 4 years or some shit, but seriously…

why are we acting like this is such a huge deal? Got people writing paragraphs upon paragraphs as if it was a war crime tribunal.

Folks, I love you, but

maybe I’m being short sighted but I feel like nothing that’s happened is that serious

I think there are valid criticisms here (and I have grievances with the other admins handing down pronouncements from on-high), but you’re genuinely the most measured and professional admin on the site and it would be a shame to see you go.

I’m a LG user who was introduced to HB after Oct 7th and so I’m not quite aware of the full history of the community. I didn’t want to comment on the initial announcement beyond making a meme about the humorous “coincidence” of it being posted on Eighteenth Brumaire because it felt like a fait accompli. Since there has been more introspection, I want to properly throw in my voice on the chance it is possible to strike while the iron is hot.

@CARCOSA@hexbear.net, I deliberately went through your past posts before writing this to reinforce my view of how much you’ve done for this site. Your efforts to support the messy federation process, your defederation explanation posts (which I fully supported in that case). You care about this community, and this is why you actually stepping down would be, without exaggeration, disastrous for the site. Your absence would cede ground to the more “reddit brained” members that seem to be present on the team who see their role as more akin to a reddit power mod talking down to the filthy proles rather than as comrades taking refuge from an alienating world.

I don’t particularly have an opinion on the closure of the comms nor on the attempt to foster a new site culture. The real principal issue as I see it is that a “class struggle,” unironically, is being promoted within the site culture via the mod/admin-community dynamic showcased in the original announcement thread. I only really post on the newsmega and when I talk there and see Mods and Admins, I only see them as fellow comrades who simply have an extra responsibility of taking out the chuds and terfs. They’ve treated me in the same manner as well. As this was a leftist community, in the year I’ve been here, I had the feeling that everyone was an equal in the shared struggle of alienation from our deeply hostile societies that have no place for leftists (and especially LGBT leftists).

The noticeable thing is the team closing ranks and making one person the messenger. There is no reason for this. The update post made with the positions of each mod clearly shows that everyone on the team has a stance on the topic and they simply are not comfortable vocalizing it to the community themselves. The point of closing the r/SLS comms was to foster a more “ideal” community culture appropos of leftists but this ideal is a contradiction of how the team seemingly is itself uncomfortable with walking the walk. Apparently there is a private mod chat and I have no doubt the team is currently discussing the community response amongst themselves there, likely commiserating about how the community “just doesn’t get it.” This is inevitably going to foster resentment between the mod/admin and general community “classes.” You can already see it in how some (not all) mods responding in the thread already take a “we the mod team” tone and thereby solidify the “class” divide.

Aren’t we all (attempting, at least) to be fellow comrades here? I’m not sure what kind of mental catastrophism the team believed was going to happen if they descended down into the “masses” from the start and properly engaged with the community to push for the idea from the outset as fellow leftists rather than donning the robes of Vatican Cardinals, confining themselves indoors and the outside masses only being left to stare at the smoke color on the chimney.

HB can operate under Democratic Centralism if the mod/admin team understands properly what that system is, rather than the “Death of Stalin” anti-communist parody of it. Democratic centralism isn’t “shut up, we decided this and if you disagree, you’re a new Trotsky.” That’s the CPUSA style of “democratic centralism” where their wrecker-hijacked “Central Committee” only comes out to force the party masses to vote Democrat. Actual Democratic Centralism is where the idea is presented, the full party gets to have their say, then the decision is make and if you refuse to allow that decision some time in trial before making critiques, then yes, at that point you can be called a “new Trotsky.”

In any case, the problem is now this: by highlighting the mod/admin decision-making process, given that applying for mod positions here is hardly as rigorous as climbing the ranks of the Communist Party of Cuba, what this has done is that it is going to promote people with less than noble intentions into becoming a mod, so they can join the “inner circle.” Rather than becoming mods to primarily help maintain the community, fostering new comms and smacking down the chuds and terfs, these applicants will be doing so with the hope of joining into the “politburo.”

Even if the applicants were all hypothetically still comrades and not wreckers, this will inevitably lead into a downward spiral. Given that those applicants will join specifically so they can be at last among the “decision makers” and so they’ll resist passing down decision-making into the community and the more this happens, the more applicants with similar intentions will join. Eventually, the mod/admin team will likely become a more insular group, reinforced by the echo chamber of the internal mod chat, which could eventually turn into a sort of “dunk tank” against the community itself. More conciliatory members willing to break to help the team’s message to the community might be pushed out by the pressure of being the community’s target of ire, leaving only the anonymous hardliners. Over time, this could lead to a growing disdain for the opinions of the broader community. This dynamic could foster even more resentment, eventually resembling the relationship between Reddit mod teams and their communities—or, at worst, mirroring the real-world phenomenon where “cops start to see their own neighborhood as the enemy.”

This kind of exaggerated hypothetical feels justified, in my view, because this isn’t just any subreddit or random forum about potted plants—HB is one of the few (literally just this site and LG at this point) genuinely leftist public online platforms in the entire Western world. The stakes here are truly higher, and the consequences of these dynamics playing out could have a far more unfortunate impact on the community and its values.

Edit: Yikes, it looks like my concerns are already coming to pass less than half a day after making this comment. https://hexbear.net/post/3871189

At the time I also reorganized the new moderator protocol to make it easier for new mods to be added and for those mods to have the power to appoint mods at will based on a vouching system. Only moderators who submitted an application were invited to an off-site moderation discussion room.

Either I was invited to this room and forgot to accept the invite, or this was something I haven’t received. I know c/parents is a slow comm so I take no offense if I was simply forgotten. Might be moot at this point if things are changing, but if not let me know. I would have given my input if I was able.

I work on a team that makes decisions that impact a user base of about 1.5k to 2k people in my day job. I know how hard it is to try and account for all the different groups of people, and those groups opinions. Its not easy. I’ve learned lessons like this one in the past as well. People need time to process and accept change, and people need to have their time to provide input before a change is implemented.

Sometimes we have to make changes for purely structural or mechanical reasons, and even then, having that advanced notice allows for communication, even if these changes are happening regardless of input (like implementing 2FA in our org for insurance compliance). It let’s you address all the fears, uncertainty, and doubt that come with change up front.

Obviously, these are all things you’re learning too.

Changing culture is harder, because then your rubbing up against behavior. This is also something my team has dealt with in the past. Its obviously very different I’ll admit, since we were trying to cut down on waste for budget reasons. Culture change takes a long time though, regardless the reason. It also has to be changed with a high degree of certainty.

Looking at a budget, and seeing the cultural behaviors that impact that budget is one thing. You can do the math and make a good case for change. Changing the culture of a place like this requires a lot more investigation, evidence, and consensus. So I don’t envy that task. Once the investigation is done and analysed, you also have to be willing to throw all of it away if the conclusion is not what you expected.

All this to say, if I had left after every failed attempt at improving my organization, I probably wouldn’t have learned anything. I hope you stay on, because there are lessons in every misstep, and you only improve through learning what those lesions are and applying them to your practice.

Hexbear will be better for it.

Improper vetting and oversight of mods/admins is bad news when there has been doxxers, fakes, and sociopaths from the beginning. Because of the way the internet works however, this will never be able to be done perfectly. The culture of the site has to protect against stuff like this, it can’t be one or two people. Having a culture that encourages posts that piss off half the userbase will always end in disaster. This isn’t one person’s fault, and part of it is the design of the site its self. I agree with the others who have said that badposting and fake news were always more harmful than the dunk tank. Those comms specifically are used to push lines and piss people off and have been since their inception. Just my 2c I’m staying out of this one from here on.

edit: I see some people trying to pretend like there isn’t a culture of pushing lines with racism / misogyny etc, and that is really not helpful. The week of federation was a shitshow.

i had just deleted my latest account as i do every 2-3 months or so which i usually use as a little break time but i made a new one immediately just to say that i hope you stick around in the admin role and i’m glad youre sticking around generally. you’ve been the most consistent and level voice from the admin/mod side since we got here from the discord (ew) and even if this latest change was not implemented well it doesnt change that you’ve been a super huge positive to this community and hopefully will continue to be such.

but I am stepping away from all decision-making at an admin level

No the council has decided you must stay ❤️

Somehow, despite wasting the past several days online, I missed something. I have no idea what’s happening.

I saw this post with no admin badge. I upvoted it, and then it updated to show the admin badge.

I’ll cast my vote in favor of @CARCOSA@hexbear.net not stepping down and returning to the admin team. The point of criticism and self-criticism is to learn from mistakes and struggles so we don’t repeat the same mistakes and struggles. If the actions requiring self-crit are done from a place of good intentions and the consequences are learned from, this makes us stronger. I understand that others may have stronger opinions on some of the statements made, and that’s valid too. I’m not erasing that. It seems you already know that users want more important decisions to be made with more transparency and wider input, as long as we move in that direction this was a positive event.

What needs to happen, more than anything, is an open discussion on how sitewide changes should be proposed and voted on that includes more transparency, that’s what it seems like everyone wants. Additionally, toxic moderators and users should be called out and made to publicly self-crit, or be removed.

Really, I don’t think it was that serious to begin with. I love that we have a space that we can all be ourselves in, and many mods and admins who want to do their best to improve it. Even if we agree or disagree on what that direction is, I do think the fact that we all use this site is a testament to the myriad different vectors of value it provides. From shitposting to memes to high-effort news analysis to , this site provides so much for so many people with different wants and needs.

Those are my 2 cents as a half-year user of Hexbear. I’m not a long time user, so others should give their thoughts too. I mostly kept out of the drama because I had very serious personal issues going on the last couple days, so I don’t have the same perspective as those in the trenches the whole time, I’m not invalidating those who disagree with my more hopeful stance. Really, I just want to have a fun site to relax and shitpost on, keep up with the news, and talk about whatever games I’m playing, and I love that this site lets me do that. I’m sure many of y’all feel the same.

Anyways, I’m gonna and for a while. The people more invested in this drama can keep hashing it out, I’ll return in a few days when this has hopefully blown over and a consensus between users has been reached.

I’m struggling to see what you did wrong tbh, other than maybe not wording things absolutely perfectly (and the fact that you get butchered for this kind of proves the problem of the toxic dunking culture. Like you’d think the months of unpaid labor would earn you more goodwill).

The hexbear userbase isn’t the party. They’re the consumer of a product produced and maintained by the labor of the mod/admin team. There should be input from the users, but democratic power should be in the hands of the workers, not the consumers. The low barrier of entry for becoming a mod supports this. If you want a political voice, become politically active.

I’m not sure how everything works behind the scenes, but I remember there used to be a hexbear admin team account to prevent volunteers from getting harassed and doxxed. It also made it clearer when something was a result of internal discussion versus the opinion of a single mod/admin.