How about just not issuing bans over upvotes.

If an undesirable comment has too many upvotes just let people reply and dunk on it if it’s bad, and let people who agree reply back. I don’t believe that anyone is being protected by the way you’re doing things right now.

Better than having hyper mods looking for reasons to ban people and extrapolating what users mean when they comment/upvote

The upvote problem can be easily solved by having a range of emotions as response to a comment instead of a singular upbear, like what Telegram/Whatsapp have been doing, but we can do without the negative emojis.

Thumbs up = GOOD post!
Heart = Send love
Laughter with tears = that’s funny
Hmm = not sure I agree but thought provoking for sure
Angry face = I’m pissed reading that!

The final score is then tallied by adding up all the different responses. Just a suggestion.

Someday someone will use Hexbear Proposals to do a marriage proposal

Something that I believe needs to be taken into consideration but has barely been referenced is how (un)educated someone may be when it comes to leftist theory/thought.

For example, at least one of the people who were banned for upvoting the comment explained how they interpreted it (and one mentioned ADHD too I think) in a way that conflicted with how an admin summarized it (a red-brown alliance).

A lot of other people summarized this site as the “dirty owl pig poop forum” in the other struggle session, so if the standard is going to be raised when it comes to how well versed a person is in leftist theory that’s fine but it should be openly stated. Given that there’s a disability community, and I believe at least one person with severe CFS, going down this route will probably lead to more conflicts, however.

Regardless, for anyone who genuinely cares about the users on this site or imparting leftist thought, having what’s pretty much a community to direct your “vitriol and scorn at” when someone slips up (on top of public ridicule due to the nature of the mod log) seems like an unfathomably bad idea.

Ty for the explanation.

:ah-shit-here-we-go-again:

We should seriously consider implementing special conduct rules for struggle sessions, to make them less toxic.

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.

Just as spouses should approach conflict constructively because they care about their marriage, hexbears should approach conflict constructively because they care about the site.

If someone can’t do that, they should be kicked out of the struggle session.

Slow down. Listen patiently to each other. Try to understand where the other person is coming from. Acknowledge them as a person. Respond in good faith without attacking. Maybe spend a few minutes collecting your thoughts and processing your emotions before you start typing. The frantic pace and hostile tone of a struggle session put pressure on you to respond fast and become hostile to defend yourself, but when you do that you make the thread even more frantic and hostile, in a runaway feedback loop. It’s a collective phenomenon where no single person has the off switch—and, consequently, no one feels responsible for their behavior.

Which is why we need rules, and a site culture of conflict resolution, to change our behavior on a collective level.

Ideally we would have an actual dedicated thread mode, “slow mode” or “struggle session mode,” which would limit the pace of comments and encourage thoughtful effortposts over whirlwind bickering, but that would require new code, and we would still need civility rules on top of that anyway, so let’s start with the rules.

How embarrassing is it if no one needs to wreck the site because we fucking wreck it ourselves? How bad does that make leftists look? Conflict resolution is a vital anti-wrecker skill, it should be part of leftist culture online and in person. It’s so fucking terminally online and shameful that we can’t work things out like adults.

i remember that trans comrade mentioned a plan to make amendments and updates to the hexbear code of conduct and site rules to make things clearer for everyone. i thought that was a good idea, is that still happening? obviously no rush i was just wondering is all.

i think that a lot of the suprise here (moreso speaking around the temp bans for the upvotes) may be mitigated by being reflected in the site rules and establishing how upvotes are viewed by mods and admins in the overall site culture. making it clearer how upvotes are expected to be used may be helpful especially for autistic and nd comrades to reference so then they can know the context a bit better as well.

I’ll be honest having my upvotes monitored by secret committee has always made me very uncomfortable and I do not like this as an approach to push the site into whatever the mods want to unilaterally create. I genuinely thought that ended after that giant purge in the first year I didn’t know mods still did that.

This is not to say I’m against any of the reasons mods want to moderate upbears. I just don’t like feeling like I’m under a microscope even if Ihave nothing to hide. I know it’s not popular to say, but I know I’m not just talking for myself here.

Traffic has seemed way down since the comm struggle session and I worry mods underestimate the chilling effect that unapologetic, undemocratic, heavy-handed moderation has an an ultimately delicate community.

I almost never upvote anything intentionally, so I’ve used Ublock Origin to filter all of the upvote buttons.

If you would like to do the same, here is the code:

hexbear.net##button:matches-attr(aria-label="/Upvote/"):style(pointer-events: none !important)
hexbear.net##.text-muted.px-1.py-0.btn-link.btn-sm.btn-animate.btn
hexbear.net###comment-5667690 > .ms-2 > .small.text-muted.align-items-center.flex-wrap.d-flex .unselectable .text-muted.btn-link.btn-sm.btn-animate.btn > .hexbear-score-icon.icon-inline.me-1.icon > use
hexbear.net##.featured-posts > div.mt-2.post-listing > .d-sm-block.d-none > .post-container.row > .flex-grow-0.col > .text-center.small.vote-bar > .text-muted.p-0.btn-link.btn.btn-animate > .upvote.icon
hexbear.net##.main-content-wrapper > div > div > div.mt-2.post-listing > .d-sm-block.d-none > .post-container.row > .flex-grow-0.col > .text-center.small.vote-bar > .text-muted.p-0.btn-link.btn.btn-animate > .upvote.icon

If you have any suggestions, please share them. I couldn’t figure out how to make the score counter unclickable without deleting it.

We host our own Matrix server, so if you want you can change matrix.org to chapo.chat.

Element says

Registration has been disabled on this homeserver.

for chapo.chat

…if we need new mods to reduce racism, that implies the last ones were kind of racist.

to our efforts to reduce racism and misogyny on the site

Of the hexbear users that were banned for an upvote on the reactionary comment, four had she/her pronouns, three had they/them pronouns, three had he/him pronouns, and two had any/no pronouns. Now before someone misinterprets my comment, I’m not saying that women and non-binary people cannot be sexist or racist, I’m just saying that our renewed efforts to combat this undesirable behaviour appear to be hurting those we aim to protect. Maybe we need to re-evaluate our strategies given this reality, and the events of the past week(s). Using the same methods we used in the past to combat undesirable behaviour (in regards to voting bans) are not working and just causing more tension between the userbase and moderators/administrators.

Every proposal will also be mirrored into a pinned post on the hexbear community. Any other ideas for helping to integrate the two spaces are welcome to be commented here or messaged to me directly.

Could a matrix room be embedded as a “live ticker” or “live chat” on that post?

If marginalized comrades continue to speak about aspects of this site that make them uncomfortable, then we have more brainworms to remove and work to be done. I don’t expect that process to ever fully end, either, until Imperialism, colonialism, and Capitalism have been abolished worldwide. That’s all I really have to say about this subject, and all I will say.