In particular the ones involved in drafting this tone-deaf and contemptuous statement:

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 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 is such a white internet communist turn-off for me and it permeates this site. In addition, 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 dunk culture 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.

I call on all involved to deanonymize themselves and take responsibility for jacketing the users here as toxic cishet white debate bros, and their general contempt for the contributions that the users of the tank comms have made to the site. CARCOSA has taken responsibility for their role in this debacle and it is unacceptable that the others involved in this remain cowering behind them, too weak to publicly put their name to their shitty opinions. Step up or be known as cowards.