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?
I enjoyed the Xinjiang bit post. The thing they got banned for was Impersonation, which isn't really the main funny part IMO, and the ban is totally reasonable, but I can see how the impersonation facilitated the joke's delivery.
I don't know anything about the rest. Hexbear has a lot of active posters so it coule just be normal stuff that any community has to deal with.
Idk if it is explicitly a hexbear problem, but it kinda seems like it might be. I feel like I haven't been around long enough to know.
I think a possible reason why the Xinjiang post upset people is because of the fakenews comm we have. A LOT of people hate it and it seems there's a lot of lore and drama surrounding it. I think with a lot of our autistic users, they kinda get whiplash from that stuff sometimes, especially if the comm isn't blocked and they don't notice that it's a fakenews post, a lot of people are really convincing on there. My guess is that, especially if the bits seem TOO real, and it is politics after all that very deeply impact people's lives, that it can really wear on people emotionally.
The Xinjiang bit was wildly well done. Thank God they FINALLY threw the pants pissing in at the end lol. I had an idea in the beginning that it was a bit because of how ridiculously verbose it was, but some people may not have gotten it, and to be really trusting and to see that possibly, your entire firm stance on human rights abuses and a genocide could be false??? That would feel SUPER jarring...Especially, intiutively you know that it's BS, but what if? What if you keep saying "Pfft! This is fake garbage!" but you question your beliefs because we can all be wrong on things and that can be pretty distressing. So I get why some people may have gotten really worked up about that in particular
I dislike the fakenews thing but the reason the actual fakenews comm exists is for containment. I think very few people actually “like” it. But the problem is you have some turbo nerds who will not stop posting it. If you eliminated the comm then these posters would just go and do it in other places. Having a comm allows you to block a comm when you’re logged in at least, as for whatever reason the people who post the fakenews actually do tend to stick the comm when they have it.
Yeah I know the comm has got utility, I just went off in a tangent there, I should probably block it myself