I think that this would be the perfect post to get this community going.
Under my direction as admin of Hexbear I restructured the internal admin/moderator order. A large part of this restructure was to shift the majority of the site decisions to a larger collective of people dedicated to the site.
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.
This room is where the proposals for the site were made, discussed, and voted upon. After a proposal was finished I would often write up a statement and post it for feedback and approval so that the entire process from proposal to post had as many opportunities as possible for the moderators to give input or present changes.
In light of the most recent decision I am taking responsibility as I established this decision-making process, I drafted the announcement post, I collected and edited the followup statement.
It is clear to me that I was mistaken in the effectiveness of this approach and that a more transparent approach is needed. As well as, creating more opportunities for user input need to be added.
I am more than happy to return to the admin team if the users want me to do so, but I am stepping away from all decision-making at an admin level. I will continue to be involved with Hexbear in any capacity I can and will not be leaving as a user.
Chapo.chat/Hexbear was never my project nor did I ever intend to take it over. My hope was to keep it going another day so the people that spent hours developing, coordinating, organizing, and educating on this platform could continue to do so. Everyone that has donated to mutual aid, organized fundraisers, wrote effort posts, and bad posts have done just as much if not more than I have.
I have faith in all the other admins both new and old to keep this place going and while I am happy to give my thoughts on any aspect of the site I think the best way to self-crit is to accept my mistakes and to let the other admins take the lead.
Thank you to everyone who has sent me kind comments and to those that continuously strive to make this place better.
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.
Except for the fact that the toxicity came from those who wanted to critique it. Look thru both threads. You’ve got the group arguing for the dunk tank largely writing out long posts where they present the arguments against the dunk tank and present counterarguments.
Then you’ve got the other group that just keeps yelling “IT IS CHAUVINISTIC AND TOXIC” ad nauseam. There’s plenty of bad faith debatebro-behaviour, but it’s very clearly not coming from the dunk tank. There’s no dunk tank users who decided to tell people to kill themselves, or who run around like obtuse ben shapiro losers jaq’ing off.