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.
I mean, there was some discourse about gossip having some gendered/misogynist overtones, but other than that, it seems like just a simple reshuffling/renaming. How did this go so far off the rails?
It's not a renaming. Essentially, they had one comm where you're allowed to post low effort dunks of celebrities, and another comm where you're allowed to post high effort refutations
of random losers. The old dunk tank / new dredge tank would, once again, be removed.
IDK, I see some use in moving/categorizing things along that axis. But things seem to have gotten much further along than just the exact splitting of the two comms for mocking reactionaries.
Ok but whatever you 'see some use in' the point is that that is wildly unpopular. Absolutely does not fit the culture or desires of the user base of the site. We just want to post the shit we like posting. If you don't want to see that content you're perfectly capable of blocking it. I think the fakenews comm is bad, mean-spirited, unhelpful, useless, awful in every way. I blocked it (and the person who made it) the day it was made. I've never been affected by its existence since. Why exactly do we need people to remove comms for content that they personally don't like, when those comms are among the most popular on the website?
Bingo, it's like banning cth because you don't like the word cracker or whatever. Like, that's a core part of the site. I feel that if an admin doesn't like a core part of what comprises Hexbear ideology and aesthetic, the problem isn't with Hexbear but with them. They should go join a different instance.