Was making a mod application (still might) and forgot about it/stalled as also wasn't sure I'm up to it/doing my own stuff but figured I hit gold with this: (might post in a genthread idk)

Personally (I know I've been making a few posts of such) I think hexbear should do more group activities- the kino sessions are already nice as is tracha, etc... but I'm very much of the "let 1000 flowers blossom" mentality. the world is large enough for many social circles/webs without requiring splintering, and they can all compliment each other, etc. etc... basically I think that we should branch out (have a hexbear + grad exercise, art, idk. group or groups? more gaming sessions (though then I'm not an opsec nerd) like the webfishing or hexcraft ones? I imagine there's probably a hexbear (non tracha/trans exclusive) matrix so not reccing that but if not there should probably be one.

There should probably be some megathread for socializing (non org, mostly "non political" for all that is impossible, etc) and various specialized matrix/etc groups (since societal alienation is a very common thing and hex/the grad are basically the best online repositories I know of of people who are... generally at least not ghouls and halfways decent) or activities to present themselves or be organized. things like the aforementioned art, exercise, etc. groups, or joining for different games (like webfishing), or creating other specific hobby oriented or motivation/etc oriented groups... etc. there are limitations (IMO) to the extent of community engagement that can be done on Hex after all due to opsec, yet even if things may not be on Hex they can be adjacent to it (or a bit further removed/plausibly deniable to varying degrees) and benefit Hex as well, especially as there is what I think could be called a ever-worsening and particularly massive "crisis of alienation" among most (actual) leftists, which we (leftists in general) should probably seek to address by creating such plausibly deniable and yet principled/non-ghoulish spaces.

I'll be honest having my upvotes monitored by secret committee has always made me very uncomfortable and I do not like this as an approach to push the site into whatever the mods want to unilaterally create. I genuinely thought that ended after that giant purge in the first year I didn't know mods still did that.

This is not to say I'm against any of the reasons mods want to moderate upbears. I just don't like feeling like I'm under a microscope even if Ihave nothing to hide. I know it's not popular to say, but I know I'm not just talking for myself here.

Traffic has seemed way down since the comm struggle session and I worry mods underestimate the chilling effect that unapologetic, undemocratic, heavy-handed moderation has an an ultimately delicate community.

If y'all are going to start making upvotes public, then mod actions should also be public, not hidden behind anonymity or "modding accounts". "Radical openness" in one direction isn't radical openness, it's just an excuse to abuse mod powers. If we have a right to know how people upvote, we have a right to see how you all are enforcing or aren't enforcing things.

to our efforts to reduce racism and misogyny on the site

I'll say it again and again. The Code of Conduct states:

We are committed to providing a friendly, safe and welcoming environment for all, regardless of gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, personal appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion, nationality, or other similar characteristic.

Do better. These struggle sessions, and the admin response, have weakened my confidence that you truly care to uphold this.

For instance, in this current struggle session, the admin team (Alaskaball's statement that carries a disclaimer that it is their view alone doesn't count) has failed to acknowledge how this action has made our users feel less safe. Many comrades called out how disabled/neurodivergent users can be disproportionately impacted and your response doesn't even come with an apology, let alone enough to reassure me that using the upbear button, perhaps in conjunction with a poorly phrased comment, isn't going to get me in this kind of situation — I have a hard enough time as it is ensuring that I've phrased comments acceptably and clearly (although feedback when I have erred in doing so is useful) or put posts in the right comm, etc.

For instance, Yukiko doesn't feel safe upvoting comments anymore, and the response to her comment about how the interaction between this and her ADHD makes her feel less safe is to remove it for being "hostile", instead of acknowledging the underlying concern. How is that commitment to welcoming regardless of disability?

P.S. If you feel like removing this comment, just permaban me. I would sorely miss the community, but in that case, I would know I'm not welcome.

How about just not issuing bans over upvotes.

If an undesirable comment has too many upvotes just let people reply and dunk on it if it's bad, and let people who agree reply back. I don't believe that anyone is being protected by the way you're doing things right now.

Better than having hyper mods looking for reasons to ban people and extrapolating what users mean when they comment/upvote

1. Am I missing something obvious, or is the new upvote policy and the motivation for it not in any way explained in this post, or in the proposals post, or anywhere visible? I had to trawl through a bunch of posts to even find out what's going on, from what I could see, the policy is explained and introduced in this comment, in a now locked thread, in a comm we've only had for like 3 weeks, that has a grand total, of, uh, 64 subscribers? Is this what we mean by transparency?

   Like, imagine if someone was, I dunno, hiking in the mountains for the past month, and they suddenly come back to some new moderation policies that will be entirely incomprehensible if you haven't gone through 10000 comments worth of site lore. I mean, I actually did fucking follow the tanks drama, but I guess I miss like one fucking thread and now I might as well be completely out of the loop.

   For a site where we often tell people to touch grass, we sure as hell seem to expect everyone to be terminally online enough to keep up with our incessant stupidity if they want to have any chance of understanding why any action is being taken.

   ⠀

2. I'm also throwing my hat into the ring as a habitual upvoter. Like, I don't quite use upvotes as a "read" button, but I definitely don't think too much about it. I upvote pretty much anyone who responds to one of my posts, unless they say something particularly disagreeable, I dunno, it just feels like... a courtesy somehow? Sometimes people will make some joke or obscure reference that goes completely over my head, and I'll just sit there and ponder it for a minute... and upvote it anyway

   I dunno, it sounds stupid, but am I expected to treat every button press through a purely rational and analytical lens here? I'm not the site's fucking UX designer, I'm just a monkey who clicks on things.

   I do use it as a "read" button in exorbitantly long threads (which, you know, we do get a fucking lot of), sometimes I'll see that a response descends into , upvote it, scroll down to read some other, shorter subthreads, and then come back to finish reading the first one. Now, sometimes I'll get tired and give up on reading the rest of the thread, and thus obviously not upvote the remaining comments in it, but this isn't any sort of indication that I agreed with the first few responses and disagreed with the remaining ones, it's just an indication of where I lost interest and gave up .

   I will also often upvote both sides of an argument too (as long as, again, one side isn't being particularly disagreeable or impolite, and it should obviously be noted here that the line between "I mildly disagree with this but will still upvote it" and "I definitely won't upvote this" is inherently vague, arbitrary, and vibes-based, I'm not a Sentiment Analysis algorithm, I'm a human being, with moods, and headaches, and various petty attitudes that I may or may not even be consciously aware of). There isn't much rhyme or reason to this, the idea of "upvote = agreement/support" is just entirely disconnected from users' behavior here.

   ⠀

3. I pretty much stay out of struggle session discourse (aside from, occasionally, uh... lurking the threads and silently upvoting the side I agree with , but I guess I'll have to stop doing that lest I end up backing the losing side in one of those ), this is maybe the first time I'm posting something serious in one, but this is genuinely starting to wear on me, it's been what, 3 weeks of near-permanent ~~revolution~~ struggle? Every time I see a new pinned thread a sense of dread comes over me, how long is this going to fucking go on for? Can we just like, put a fucking moratorium on policy changes until things calm down a bit?

   ⠀

4. I'll link a couple of @Frank@hexbear.net's comments from the past thread, since he's way more eloquent on this than I'll ever be, and I'm not sure how many people have even seen that thread (refer to pt. 1): on the inversion of mod/user roles and on discipline requiring trust.

   The last one in particular I will reiterate - discipline requires trust. At this stage, I am not sure if I can reasonably trust the moderation team: the mod statements from the previous drama, the embarrassing "self-crit" of one of those mods that followed, the fact that you made someone an admin with the reasoning of "well, they used to be an admin before!", said person proceeded to completely mismanage the situation, start randomly handing out bans as some form of humor (?!), and just casually nope out of the mess they created and delete their entire presence here (I don't care how many times you say "we disagree with her decisions", the fact that this was allowed to happen in the first place is such a severe lapse in judgement that I don't even know what to fucking say), the attempt at some kind of Tom Clancy scheme of manipulating other lemmy instances for some reason... given all of this, just this general caliber of decision-making competence on display here, how am I supposed to trust the moderation team to actually pore over individual users posts and upvotes and engage in some kind of internet psychoanalysis in order to discipline them fairly?

   I understand and sympathize that lemmy's moderation tools are lacking, but that's not the fault of the users. In fact, the general attitude of a lot of the userbase seems to be broadly critical of this site being a reddit offshoot! Although this is of course difficult to objectively judge (some of this is just ironic "phpBB forums... they don't make 'em like they used to *sip*" posting, and many users don't actively comment so their attitude is unknown), the broad popularity of the megathreads does seem to indicate the posters yearn for a different kind of site structure than the one we have. Now, at this stage it's of course not really an option to just throw the site away and begin anew as something else, but still, being stuck with a shitty website that lacks functionality isn't something the users should be punished over!

what was the point of the last few weeks?

to our efforts to reduce racism and misogyny on the site

Of the hexbear users that were banned for an upvote on the reactionary comment, four had she/her pronouns, three had they/them pronouns, three had he/him pronouns, and two had any/no pronouns. Now before someone misinterprets my comment, I'm not saying that women and non-binary people cannot be sexist or racist, I'm just saying that our renewed efforts to combat this undesirable behaviour appear to be hurting those we aim to protect. Maybe we need to re-evaluate our strategies given this reality, and the events of the past week(s). Using the same methods we used in the past to combat undesirable behaviour (in regards to voting bans) are not working and just causing more tension between the userbase and moderators/administrators.

In addition, comments or posts removed for racist or misogyny will also be accompanied by escalating temporary bans. Upvotes will not be the single reason for a ban, however they may be used in conjunction with other posts/comments/upvotes. Consider this post the warning, however, mods are encouraged to reach out to hexbear users before a long duration ban.

Good. Me getting slapped for what I've said twice now was nonsense. My fighting for trans and minority folks should've clued you folks in to the fact that maybe, just maybe, I didn't read the whole fucking post. Hells, you, Carcosa, have had experience with my bitchiness in the past for me fighting for my trans comrades, so it was kinda bonkers to get banned for that reason.

Seriously glad you're attempting to shed these issues. Cause like, the site's slowly dying and accelerating it through nonsense actions is just going to kill it much quicker than its expiration date.

That being said, I'm not removing my uBlock rule for the fucking upbear button. I'm not chancing that shit again.

I've been examining my own upbear behavior and... there's no consistency. It depends on my mood, what comm I'm in, what the discussion is about.

• Sometimes I'm upvoting everything to mark it as read, usually in the general mega and news mega

• Sometimes I'm not upvoting anything

• Sometimes I'm upvoting because I support an argument

• Sometimes I'm upvoting because I disagree but I think the argument is well stated.

• Sometimes I'm upvoting because I just want the writer to know someone read their post

• Sometimes I'm just idly, inconsistently upvoting without any thought at all, from muscle memory

• Sometimes I'm upvoting everything because "all posting is good posting", a years old joke dating to the way the Subreddit strongly, strongly encouraged users to post no matter what. This was in contrast to the rest of reddit where there were very few posters compared to lurkers. This contributed to our famous and unstoppable "posting power" - A very strong community norm of posting, even if it was inane or meaningless, rather than passive viewing. That, in turn, defined the sub and later Hexbear as strongly encouraging active participation in contrast to many online communities where "low effort" posting was either formally or informally punished, and which in turn supressed many would-be speakers due to a chilling effect rising from fear of being judged or scorned for "bad posts".

I have some screenshot, shit, let me find it.

Yeah, here, found it. So, Subreddit with EIGHT POINT SIX MILLION MEMBERS Vs. Small Communist Shitposting Lemmy, who would win? Upvoting everything contributed to the culture of user engagement that lead to Hexbear out-posting the entire rest of the Lemmyverse combined by a good margin. That's a big part of why I found this incident to be so out of line. Arbitrary policing of something as contextless and ambiguous as upbears is directly against what created and sustains this place. As I've said before arbitrary moderation actions that directly run against community norms create a chilling effect and discourage user participation due to fear of running afoul of un-written rules or the whims of inconsistent moderators.

It's late and I'm running low on steam, I'll try to come back to this tomorrow.

I'd just like to say I love all my hexbears. I hate seeing what has been going on lately because this place is the only good thing on the internet. I hope we are able to emerge from these struggle sessions stronger and better but I'm having a hard time holding on to my bloomerism.

Fuck it close all the comms and embrace Megathreadism! Nothing bad ever happens in a Megathread. (this is a joke... mostly)

Something that I believe needs to be taken into consideration but has barely been referenced is how (un)educated someone may be when it comes to leftist theory/thought.

For example, at least one of the people who were banned for upvoting the comment explained how they interpreted it (and one mentioned ADHD too I think) in a way that conflicted with how an admin summarized it (a red-brown alliance).

A lot of other people summarized this site as the "dirty owl pig poop forum" in the other struggle session, so if the standard is going to be raised when it comes to how well versed a person is in leftist theory that's fine but it should be openly stated. Given that there's a disability community, and I believe at least one person with severe CFS, going down this route will probably lead to more conflicts, however.

Regardless, for anyone who genuinely cares about the users on this site or imparting leftist thought, having what's pretty much a community to direct your "vitriol and scorn at" when someone slips up (on top of public ridicule due to the nature of the mod log) seems like an unfathomably bad idea.

I now appreciate your overreach even less now as I’m being treated like shit for this by other users. If this shit doesn’t let up, I’m fucking leaving. I don’t need to put up with this because my brain can’t easily process walls of text.

EDIT: I’ve spoken more in depth with one of the folks and it seems to be a case of mistaken tone, but I definitely have caught flak for this already from another.

The second is to increase transparency with regard to the site while not repeating the mistakes of previous attempts that were ultimately counterproductive, in part due to wreckers.

Previous attempts to increase site transparency and user participation were targeted by wreckers through increasing the intensity and frequency of struggle session drama.

Would be really interested to know what exactly these are referring to.
What previous attempts are being alluded to?
Who are the wreckers?

Regardless of what you decide, I hope you can slow down on these larger changes soon. As someone who casually browses Hexbear, I don’t want to have to read through pages of patch notes just to know how to use the website.

Im not opposed to change but it feels a bit much in the last few weeks- thats all

Every announcement by the mods here prepended with some communist quote before posting the worst ideas for managing hobby politics webforum is some level of larp I don't think I'll ever reach without a solid brick of methamphetamine in my bloodstream.

We should seriously consider implementing special conduct rules for struggle sessions, to make them less toxic.

The reason most of us hate struggle sessions, the reason so many of us lay low until these things die down, is that struggle sessions are too fast and chaotic to be dialogue. Everyone gets too heated and pressed and defensive to actually listen or reach an understanding, so it turns into people talking past each other, sometimes building up personal resentments that last long after the struggle session ends and have little to do with the original disagreement. If you wade into it, you risk making enemies, and you don't chance making friends.

Just as spouses should approach conflict constructively because they care about their marriage, hexbears should approach conflict constructively because they care about the site.

If someone can’t do that, they should be kicked out of the struggle session.

Slow down. Listen patiently to each other. Try to understand where the other person is coming from. Acknowledge them as a person. Respond in good faith without attacking. Maybe spend a few minutes collecting your thoughts and processing your emotions before you start typing. The frantic pace and hostile tone of a struggle session put pressure on you to respond fast and become hostile to defend yourself, but when you do that you make the thread even more frantic and hostile, in a runaway feedback loop. It’s a collective phenomenon where no single person has the off switch—and, consequently, no one feels responsible for their behavior.

Which is why we need rules, and a site culture of conflict resolution, to change our behavior on a collective level.

Ideally we would have an actual dedicated thread mode, “slow mode” or “struggle session mode,” which would limit the pace of comments and encourage thoughtful effortposts over whirlwind bickering, but that would require new code, and we would still need civility rules on top of that anyway, so let’s start with the rules.

How embarrassing is it if no one needs to wreck the site because we fucking wreck it ourselves? How bad does that make leftists look? Conflict resolution is a vital anti-wrecker skill, it should be part of leftist culture online and in person. It’s so fucking terminally online and shameful that we can’t work things out like adults.

Why are you doing this to yourself, i will never know. to watch though

Here is a proposal: don't remove posts with some amount of comments in "wrong" comms, like nerds. Your labor in removing that thread is less than a comment, its goal is roughly meaningless, and its result is annoyance. But some mod can have some no-fun-allowed fun i guess.

Want to show how much you care about comm sorting? make the mod repost and reprint all comments in "correct" comm, so that people can continue conversation.

another proposal:

Make upbear only visible to the poster own comments, hide them and only use them for sorting reasons otherwise:

pros: those who like upbears will still see them.

cons: that would require work

Someday someone will use Hexbear Proposals to do a marriage proposal

I'd also like to remind any mods that do not have element that the majority of the discussion that occurs on issues of the day occurs in Element. I know its a pain in the ass to fiddle around with the tech to get on there, but if I could somehow manage to do it I know you can too!

Whether you maintain a client on a phone app or in a desktop tab (the superior option because that's what I do lol), ensuring that you both stay up to date with what's going on behind the scenes and also lending your voice to the discussion is desired but still optional of course.

On the topic of Hexbear Proposals, I'd like to say that the goal of the project in my opinion is that it works similar to the little experiment I ran in the news mega in allowing users join the table of deliberations and discussion in collectively shaping the direction we'd like to see the site move towards. Keep in mind this is still very much a work in progress and not in any way shape or form a finished idea! So I'd like to ask anyone that decides to participate in the democratic posting trenches or simply sit on the sidelines and throw quippy one-liners to please grant us your patience and understanding as any unintended issues pop up.

That said I genuinely hope this helps us bring more stability to the site and helps us collectively move in a better direction.

Final note: just emphasizing the reminder to all you pretty little geometric ursines, please remember to be mindful of what you're posting! Make sure to add CWs and NSFWs to topics that need it! Remember to help remind each other if one of the posters forget to include a CW for anything, and if you'd rather not leave a reply doing so then please remember that the report button is there for your use to alert a mod that a poster is being forgetful. (Also please make sure to be descriptive when you write a report. Writing "sus" or leaving an emoji can leave us confused at times. So help us help you!)

really ought to just go back to web forums instead of all these clones of popular social media websites. What is even the point of being a reddit? does anyone like reddit enough to care? I don't.

slowly starting to process everything that has been said across the threads about this and I have questions. I would prefer to wait to process things more before posting, but I'm worried the thread will get locked before I'm ready.

(if you have DM'd me, I will reply eventually ❤️)

I have concerns and questions about the way mistakes are handled here that will echo things said during the Great -Tank Comms Struggle Session of two weeks ago. this is not an attempt to reignite it; the possibility of doing it is terrifying, but I feel compelled to try to get at the heart of the problem expressed by many neurodivergent comrades therein, and I have fresh personal experience with the importance of this problem.

we make social mistakes because social difficulties are part of our disability. punishing people for crossing hidden and ill-defined red lines is ableist, especially when there's been no other reason to doubt that person's good faith.

Questions & Concerns:

• can someone help me read this quote

For active hexbear users, we do encourage a mod sending a warning message, however that is not required. We frequently give 1 day temp bans without such a warning and while we do wish we had more mod tools available, we work with what we've got.

from @CARCOSA's comment here in a way that isn't contradictory with @Lyudmila's statement that you would not be banning users for a single upvote anymore?

this indicates to me that the exact same thing could happen again if I'm not exceedingly careful with my upvotes, which absolutely I will try to be, but I just know myself well enough to know that I'm going to fuck up again eventually. 🤷 if perfection is the standard to not have my RSD triggered to that degree, this is not a safe place for me.

• did none of the other upvotes I made in that thread matter or make anyone question whether I actually agreed with that comment?

I looked back at the thread this morning, and I see that I had also upvoted queermunist's reply to the objectionable comment (most of the other replies to it were made after leaving the thread to read other things and then go touch grass, sometime after which I was banned)

other comments in the thread that I upvoted:
https://hexbear.net/comment/5659695 (and several replies)
https://hexbear.net/comment/5659596
https://hexbear.net/comment/5659550

idk if there's a way to check the timestamp of when I voted on these things to prove that it was during that same initial viewing of the thread, but I hope so, especially when you're using a "pattern of activity" for bans.

afaik, I don't have a track record of consistently problematic upvotes, but I know my AuDHD self well enough to know that I've probably similarly marked a thing planning to come back to it and then totally forgotten, or just been autistic or uneducated enough to not understand the subtext that a better-informed mod is getting, or just not noticed that my thumb hit the button when I browse with my phone on night-mode, which is grayscale and makes it impossible to tell if I voted unless I see the little bear spin.

• is it not policy to look at contravening comments in the thread and see how many of the problematic upvoters voted on them, too? would that not indicate something other than support for reactionary views and merit deeper consideration?

the description of the "vote audit" process makes it sound like a fair bit of work, only a single comment at a time that was specifically requested (a process which includes both mods and users??), and names that stick get punished, except sometimes it's a first offense and that's okay but also it's not.

getting context sounds onerous, but it seems unfair and misguided to ban people for poor upvotes without taking them into context with their other upvotes. how do you establish a "pattern of upvote activity" without context? being highly selective in your choice of data points does not demonstrate a pattern. and apparently you don't actually need a pattern of activity for a one-day ban anyway because those shouldn't matter that much to anyone.

• is there a threshold number of upvotes on a terrible comment that triggers a vote audit? it seems like lots of things get removed without triggering an audit and collective punishment. is it based more on the awfulness of the content? is it entirely up to the mod removing the comment or are there rules for when something must be audited? how do users request an audit and action against the upvoters?

• it seems like even if a single upvote wouldn't merit a ban anymore (except it might!), going for a ban based on a "pattern of upvotes" when their upvote action is removed from the context of their other upvotes and actions and when someone has given you no other reason to think they're secretly a reactionary bigot is still misguided and cruel. especially when there were so many of your neurodivergent comrades telling you in the Great -Tank Comms Struggle Session of two weeks ago that we would welcome being called out on things so we can learn, because difficulties with social cues is an inherent part of our disabilities, and we want to both Be Better but also just not accidentally hurt anyone.

we're constantly getting accidentally hurt ourselves, we know what it's like when nobody gives a shit about your feelings, we are your allies or we wouldn't be here.

Hexbear: you want to be a safe and welcoming place for leftists, especially leftists from marginalized communities, but you are so quick to reject even the perception of bigotry that you are inherently unsafe to many comrades attracted by that expressed ethos.

I would like to believe that a single poor upvote will no longer be enough reason to ban someone, but that's super unclear, and also I guess I'm confused why it ever has been, or why there isn't further investigation of activity around questionable votes if mods are presuming intentions from them.

• is the power to ban vested in each mod individually, or does it require consultation? I think I had assumed the latter but am coming to understand that it might be the former, which feels like a giant lightbulb moment for my understanding of site dynamics and interpersonal issues.

• what is the policy on modlog deletions? how can your neurodivergent comrades hope to understand the rules when their application is often hidden and unequal?

and then my most important question:

• what is the Code of Conduct for the mod team?

there are people on the mod team with usernames that often appear above "deleted by mod", often for "hostility" – could you please help me understand how upvote activity is more impactful for creating a hostile environment than open hostility from mods? (are the people who upvoted those comments punished?)

it doesn't seem unreasonable for there to be higher standards for mod behavior, but it seems like they're actually lower. I completely understand wanting to give your friends/coworkers extra grace, but also, certainly you must understand how this fosters an in-group/out-group dynamic that contributes to a hostile environment.

I hope we can discuss these questions with assumption of good intentions from the people we disagree with and that the thread will stay unlocked long enough to discuss them.

it takes autistic people longer to process things. I know that is not convenient. 🤷

:ah-shit-here-we-go-again: