It's definitely not that most in there are assholes but the second part of what you said. It's that the assholes feel safer there and so tend to concentrate there. Since until recently it was mostly just about the news and geopolitics (hence this OP), any communist who is anti-imperialist will fit right in. This is good of course, but it's only one of several other bars that people have to pass to be accepted in the culture of the rest of the site. It meant that people who otherwise would get called out for their bullshit like (for example) transphobia and antiveganism would never get called out for it simply because those topics were almost never delved into, certainly not in the way or to the same degree they are on broader hexbear. When those topics would start coming up to the point that there were disagreements, they would get quickly and understandably shutdown by mods with "don't bring that struggle session shit here."

I'm not saying that any of that is bad on its face, but I think it's an explanation why it tends to be that a lot of the shittier takes seem to be from people who leaked out of the news mega. Someone who was permanently site-wide banned recently after multiple temp bans and warnings on the rest of the site would use obvious alts and go on the newsthread to say things like "once again the news mega is the best part of the site" because they weren't banned there and could get tons of upvotes for saying correctly anti-imperialist things. That just kind of exemplifies what I'm talking about, but it's not the only case.

I love the newsmega and used to read every single comment every day when it was more explicitly focused on world news. Most of the people there, even the ones who mostly only comment there are not assholes. But it's a lot easier for the assholes to hang out there, get a well known positive reputation there, then clash hard when they encounter the rest of hexbear and fail to do self crit. I do not think that's a failing of the news thread, just an unfortunate inevitability of the focused topic.

For me, the question is who is some?

It's the same guys who complain about Liam and Alice doing banter on WTYP episodes.

Yeah it made sense during the week of the invasion as containment for all the news happening in a tsunami.

I have a very high level of respect of what 72T does as well, and I say give them the keys to the comm, and continue posting the bulletins there.

I don't feel like I have any real say in this discussion but I wanna throw out that the stuff that gets shared in the news mega (also?) being their own posts would be very nice as a person who browses from another instance. If all that stuff showed up in my subscribed feed, instead of me having to browse huge comment sections, I would be thrilled.