Hey everyone, I've removed bans for everyone that did not request one in the previous admin thread. (I think. If you got banned and I didn't restore your account yet, let me know and I'll fix it.) Don't worry! We're not gonna just ban people for no reason.
In case anyone hasn't seen it yet, Alaskaball confirmed that Sangria was their admin alt. They were messing around with their admin tools on their own account and figured it would be seen as a funny bit, but without being informed of the bit many of the mods and admins were just as shocked, confused, and appalled as you were. I've talked to the other admins and mods, and we're all gonna take it easy on bits for a bit. (Pun intended. This is the last one, I promise.)
If you're afraid that there's been an infiltration of transphobic, egomaniacal wrecker mods who hate the users, I want to assure you that's absolutely not the case. The overwhelming majority of mods and admins on this site are trans. Our admins are all trusted, long-time users in good standing. We regularly browse, comment, and post on our main accounts. You post and chat with us daily as comrades, and we value all of you. You may not recognize the usernames on our admin accounts because we regularly swap the alts used for admin privileges. This is why you'll see really old or unused alt accounts as well as really new accounts on the admin team.
I've seen a lot of speculation down below, some entertaining, some upsetting. We absolutely do not accept transphobia or any form of bigotry on this site. Some of the statements provided by mods and admins have been seen as transphobic and bioessentialist. I want to offer some transparency, but also clarify that I can't get much more specific on this for personal security reasons.
During the earlier discussions on how we felt things could be improved with these communities, multiple trans mods and admins described their reasoning in favour of the change by expressing with a variety of wording that it's the [he/him] demographic in particular that has been the source of toxic and troubling behavior in the tanks. That the he/hims haven't been beating the accusations, so to speak. With that group being largely cishet white guys on this site, these two terms were assumed to roughly correlate. We weren't making prepared statements for release, the comments that got posted here were paraphrased and combined from more casual comments made by trans people, in the mod chat to mostly other trans people about some of the chauvinistic and ironically bigoted posting habits that they saw as alienating and unhealthy for the site, and what we could do to improve the situation. We genuinely didn't foresee the potential for a miscommunication of those statements as being bioessentialist, and want to extend our sincerest apologies for the misunderstanding.
Edit: Please feel welcome to post in c/gossip as you would have posted in the_dunk_tank, and in c/counterpropaganda as you would have posted in the_dredge_tank.
Something 72T mentioned in their selfcrit
How exactly do we know this about the joining part? And how much of “site culture” is being misconstrued by liberals on other parts of lemmy? It’s no secret that other lemmy instances lie like anything else about here.
I can say for myself that i have friends who are trans, leftist and who i still wouldn't recommend the site to simply because the vibe doesn't fit them at all. I honestly don't know if i would join if i discovered Hexbear now and hadn't gotten used to our culture since the last days of r/chapotraphouse. In spite of the struggle session i'd still say we've gotten better on things like irony poisoning, edgyness, misanthropy and debate pervertry, but the place can still be pretty crass at times and we tend to be extremely hostile to people who aren't part of our niche culture. That's just not something everybody vibes with. And in spite of our anti-sectarian stance, this is largely an ML space that can be hard to navigate for Anarchists, DemSocs, classical Marxists and Trots. It's kinda grim at times and not a space that's very welcoming to a lot of the most caring and sweet socialists i know.
I'm not saying that we should transform the site in a way that fixes these issues. I don't know if they even should be fixed, and i'm saying this as somebody who is herself firmly in the "Hexbear is a safer space" camp, who has blocked comms like the dunk tank and fakenews since forever, who largely stays out of struggle sessions and who only browses by local because i don't want to be part of dunkfests with the rest of the lemmyverse, or even interact with it in the first place. That's my stance, but i'm very aware that we have a sizeable userbase who sees all of these things very differently and is vehemently opposed to changing our site culture. And looking back at the last days, i think it's better when we find a synthesis here instead of forcing a transformation of the site.
Yknow what deterred me from joining the first time?
A tagline
When you don't know how the site works, decide to check it out, and the first thing you see is a rabid liberal raging about how much they hate hexbear... well
I probably thought the site got hacked or something
Then that's a far more pertinent thing to change than the TDT's.
Should be an option that's visibility is off by default and can only be turned on in account settings.
The taglines are in-jokes, so it really should just be a thing for users to see. Telling an in-joke at someone who isn't in usually just confuses
I like this, only show them if you're logged in
That might really make new users think something's been hacked!
An automated welcome message sent to their inbox to try to onboard them could be nice.
I'm gonna miss the taglines, but yeah this isn't the first time I'm hearing about it. There's been a few new users who have posted something like "what's this?"
Maybe we should let the taglines be hyperlinks to some place that explains it's an injoke. Maybe we should just let them be off. Maybe they should be gone entirely, though I'd really miss them.
I like the taglines, too. I do want to save them, but I want to see if there's anything we can do to make them less disorientating (so many of them take up like 200% of your screen area on mobile and you have to scroll through a ton of unhinged texts before you even see anything that resembles a website.
:yea:
I feel like there's gotta be some good solution between losing a great piece of site culture and barraging new users with the most unhinged lib takes, without them understanding the bit. Maybe just "what is this?" type link. Maybe we have to remove some of the tags.
I always wish they'd link to the post itself, though that is difficult, made even moreso by people deleting their accounts
Yeah. Maybe we could have a wall of fame where all of the collected MOTDs (oh god, did I just age myself?) can be seen, but then only show short and sweet ones at the top of the page? Just spitballin' here, really. I definitely think everything should be preserved if changes do get made.
A wall of fame is a great idea! Also a fantastic way to shame libs/tell people to cool off/be able to laugh about things like this strugglesession after the fact.
and they accused me of doing digital blackface lol
Some of the things the wrecker-alts wrote were incredibly hilarious, wish we saved them. I posted this emoji
You're back! Yay!
Ah, I know that feeling as far as ADHD goes. Congrats on the play, that's awesome
Maybe we could have a bot that posts a tagline once a day in the successor comm to the [comm that shall not be named]
Someone's initial visit should be disorienting and alienating
That's how you know you're on the right track to finding the portal to the 00s internet.
As somebody who loves the taglines, this makes a lot of sense. It should be a toggle setting on accounts over a certain age maybe, that way you get a taste of the culture and intro to what some of them mean before you get met with some dumb liberal shit
the things that stop me telling people to come here are not the dunk tanks or that type of culture. this being such an insular place with an often defensive mindset does a lot more to removedoff new people who don't know the party line* yet does a lot more than 'they shit on random nazis'
*I do not mean liberals and bigots, I mean leftists. ofc there's no place for scum here
Eliminating this unwelcoming insularity and hostility between users is a primary goal of the ongoing community changes we're working on here.
I want this to be a welcoming place for leftists of all stripes to come shitpost, hang out, and feel safe in a like-minded community.
I was just suggesting sending automated welcome messages to new users to try to onboard them.
That's a good idea. ~~I'm gonna look into it and see if there's a way to do this with Lemmy currently!~~
Actually, it's not possible in base Lemmy. A bot could be made to do this if someone develops it. Unfortunately I don't know how to make one.
I think it'd be a good feature to have but idk if lemmy's devs would rather have bots do it instead, someone could open an issue and see what they think.
If the mod/admin team thinks it's a good idea, make a post about it and maybe someone will step up and make the bot.
I know I keep saying someone should do this and that
but I have no idea how to make a bot and I don't have a github account.