I must admit I mostly lurk there and never quite made the jump culturally to lemmygrad, but I do respect your opinions and the last few days are making me feel a bit insane and wanting an outside perspective. I'll explain and provide links for context
A longtime user got banned for bad behavior in live chat on hextube. That part isn't all that surprising. But then we got dueling impersonators one and two making meta posts about the ban and a notorious also-banned user he had conflicted with a long time ago (melina).
This was... mostly just annoying, clearly someone was doing a nasty bit, but mods just banned them both and the site moved on which I guess is fair enough.
Fast forward to today, and we have an account (not brand new, but not a longtime account either, only a few weeks old with limited post history) purporting to be our resident China guy (and China doomer, to some extent) from the news mega, posting a long winded story about going to xinjiang and getting 1984'd or whatever. It starts to feel like it could be a bit as it gets more and more absurd, but this user was always very serious from what I recall.
If this is a troll/psyop I guess it's a good one because this garbage is giving me a fucking headache. What do you grad'ers think is going on? Were any of these real or all impersonators (and relatedly who? melina?) Am I just too autistic to get the joke? Is this a fed psyop? what else could be going on?
it's very likely just melina/the fake news folks. nothing to get too alarmed about. just kind of annoying.
Idk if it's "nothing to get too alarmed about" when it genuinely ruins peoples experiences on the site to the point they just leave. Like yes we can block the fake news comm but if that kinda "humor" it whatever is constantly spilling over into other comms then what can one do, yknow?
yeah sorry i didn't mean to imply it doesn't suck, just that it's not a psyop or anything so serious. i'm personally not really a fan but idk what can really be done.
Oh gotcha, no need to apologize! And yeah, it just sucks that it seems that people who get rubbed the wrong way appear to be disregarded when it comes to this specifically. I like the shitpost side of hexbear, the jokes are why i use it, but its like this specific brand just feels more like, mean spirited I guess? Especially to ND folks I think. It'll probably subside soon tho
it just sucks to have to weigh whether any given post is their anti-social behavior or genuine. at least right wing trolls get bored and leave us the fuck alone after a bit.
it's pretty obnoxious but i don't think they're necessarily being intentionally anti-social (even though it sometimes ends up that way). i think they all just have the same sense of humor. honestly you can kinda tell when it's one of them bc they tend to post about the same subject; off the top of my head i remember them all getting pretty fixated on making jokes about smoking crack, sounding rods, and now piss. i vaguely recall melina specifically kinda having a thing about people taking themselves too seriously on the funny bear website.
...i really gotta go the fuck outside.