Original post here: https://hexbear.net/post/3856299?scrollToComments=false
I think we have a general path forward based on community feedback. “We see you, we hear you!”
I went ahead and unpinned the old post. I’m pinning this one for now and will edit this post when I wake up from eepy time. I had a very mid week and have no particular alarm set so be on look out. Love y’all and I’m amped for my first announcement post since coming back. :)
It’s poorly worded but the dunk culture that we inherited from Reddit is a close relative to the “SJW compilation” shit. If you think the only problem with that is the people and ideas it targets, then Hexbear’s dunk culture isn’t a problem.
I personally think the underlying mechanism of dunk culture, though, is fostering a superiority complex out of in-group out-group dynamics, which is directly harmful to us as leftists. The whole “bullying works” nonsense is reddit shit that does not translate to the real social groups we all have to interact with. The kind of people we see posted in the dunk tank are often gonna be similar to the kind of people we have to agitate and educate in real life. And walking into those interactions with an internalized in-group justifying our superiority just serves to isolate us more than anything.
There’s always been a split between whether hexbear is primarily an organizing tool or merely a water cooler for leftish people to hang out. It has potential to work as both. But it’s clear that a lot of the unpaid volunteers putting labor into the site would like to imagine their efforts are going somewhere, especially as contradictions heighten in the real world. So when they perceive that a part of the escapist aspect of hexbear is undermining its utility for organizing, it makes perfect sense that they would want to try and change that.
I’m not gonna read through 1500 comments to get an accurate vibe of the response, but I can’t imagine it was entirely pleasant. And when it comes down to it I value the opinions of the unpaid workers significantly more than the opinions of the consumers.
The mods/admins who were using the “it’s cishet white guy behavior” angle never attempted to explain why they consider it to be the case. They just asserted it and stuck to it when many marginalized people were dissenting against the rule change. Your 4 paragraph comment spent more time making a good faith argument for the behavior to be white cis etc than hours worth of comments made by the offending mods.
Sure, but I’d hope the amount of work they’ve put in has earned them some degree of good-faith interpretation. It’s difficult to put concepts into words, especially in the heat of the moment, so sometimes using a “vibe” as a shorthand signifier has to do.
Not to mention this debate has been ongoing for months or years, in various forms, so every statement has a depth of potential implications and contexts that aren’t gonna be obvious to everyone.
“Cishet white guy behavior” is perfectly understandable to me as shorthand for the in-group/out-group superiority/inferiority complex that’s plagued this site since the beginning, but I’ve been here continuously from the beginning. It’s a poor signifier for users who haven’t been here the whole time (whether new users or old users that left for a while) or even people with a different perspective/experience of the site.
I’ll defer to you on this since I haven’t been around close to as long and am not marginalized. A big issue I saw was that a lot of marginalized people caught strays for enjoying “cishet white guy behavior” and made it known that they saw it as invalidating.
Yeah that’s a perfectly valid critique. There’s an important concept behind the signifier, but there are better signifiers that can be used to communicate it.