Hey all. I’d like to open an official discussion regarding the upturning of the prior Hexbear party line on an :israel-cool: emote proper with the unambiguous Zionist flag.
I want to preface this by saying this is not in a ‘ceding the issue’ way. Over the past year I’ve been trying to engage in self-crit w/rt the chauvinism I’ve internalized growing up in a Liberal Zionist household, and my personal viewpoint on it did a 180 some months back, so I want to reopen this discussion proper in my personal capacities as Self-Appointed Emote Czar.
The reason it’s taken long enough beyond that is prior to July, I was essentially half-engaged with the site in order to finish out my degree. After that, it’s been mostly inertia of confirming with the admins and other /c/Judaism mods, as well as having to be rigorous about my job search personally giving me little free time to coordinate this.
I do not want to center myself in this conversation more than I inadvertently already have, so I will leave my own opinion on the issue as a comment rather than explaining further here.
The consensus we’ve roughly come to is to open up the discussion in an official manner for a day or so. After that, I’ll weigh the discussion in an entirely vibes-based manner (sorry Dean Norris enjoyers) and we’ll alter Hexbear party line on it accordingly.
Yeah, true and I’m once again willing to hold an L on this if @ShariaLawZ@hexbear.net is actually Z, but that would imply they were replying to their own other sockpuppets @SeekTheDeletion@hexbear.net and @BreathThroughTheTube@hexbear.net in a very uncharacteristic way.
The way I see it, this site’s current moderation is alienating to users who share a perspective like Z’s when those perspectives are valuable, even when Z is kind of irredeemable. I don’t think asking for changes in that regard is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
I’m with you on that in general, but I find this whole reaction very disproportionate and I’m kinda disgusted how many people are taking this opportunity to vocally back a sockpuppeting shitheel (no, posting analysis in the news mega doesn’t make the rest of their behavior okay). And at the end of the day, posting proof that an account was an alt is impossible. Admins could post any/all evidence they have and it would only make things worse with acccusations of fakery or attempted doxxing.
If you proposed specific changes in moderation I expect I’d be onboard with them though, from the perspectives you’ve shared so far.
Personally I think the whole userbase and mod/admins both have a tendency to get complacent and then flail when called out for it (though besides nakoichi the mods and admins are generally flailing in a “we don’t know how to manage this” way, not a vitriolic “why wasn’t this already handled to my liking” way as a solid chunk of the userbase do.)
To much of the userbase, this was a dormant issue for like over a year but suddenly once it’s been pointed out it’s the most pressing thing in the world and the admins must be condemned for allowing it to get to this point.
But for their part, the admins admit they came around on the issue months ago or more and did nothing until user sentiment bubbled over today and accelerated things.
Both have definitely screwed up, and frankly reading the threads on the topic from 2 and 4 years ago, much of the userbase at the time was wrong too. Should it have taken this long for the issue to be resolved? No, it probably could have been resolved as early as 2 years ago if the admin team was more ahead of the curve and less complacent. But they’re volunteers and they take a lot of abuse so I’m inclined to give (most) of them a little bit of leeway. No work, no right to direct, type vibe.
I’ll take a look back through the threads to see if my vibe check aligns with reality but my feeling is that until zposter and nakoichi (and to a much lesser extent lyudmila) took to fighting rather than conversing, this wasn’t actually an example of bad mishandling by the mods/admins, besides just the aforementioned complacency. My hot take is that the admins’ biggest mistake was tolerating zposter and letting that situation fester this long, long enough for people to forget their history and let their alts goad them into yet another struggle session where we all dump on the mods.
Specific things, off the top of my head:
Bring back some form of c/user-union. I’m not gonna ask to make a full on process for ban appeals until I learn enough Rust to make the PR myself, but that would also be nice.
Have some process for “declassifying” mod communications after a while.
I think it’s pretty clear that there is very little tension about the flag emoji itself (ProfessorOwl notwithstanding) and a lot more about the more general problems with the mod clique, Arab users not feeling welcome here, double standards, and other such things. This was just a conflict that struck close enough to those other tensions that it started to let the air out WRT them.
Remember the “he/hims” struggle session(s)? That stuff was never actually resolved and I think a lot of people are still pissed off about it.
Yeah, could definitely be done. Although I don’t remember it seeming particularly effective, so its rules/procedures would need some rework. It was mostly a venue for grandstanding back when it did exist.
This is impossible to enforce and wouldn’t assuage people’s concerns, IMO. If mods wanted to have secret conversations they would just DM or talk offsite and there’d be no way to prove they didn’t. I get the impulse, but I think it would convince few people at best and just add more fuel at worst.
I agree that there’s no longer much disagreement remaining about the flag emoji, but there was still a lot of pent up tension and anger at the mods that I find to be majorly overblown and more of an angry vibe than specific ongoing accountability issues with the mods. If it was really just about the old stuff, then why is 90% of the discussion people yelling free zposter or whatever
people just assume it’s a clique that’s against them whenever anything rubs them the wrong way from anonymous accounts like the admin alts, IMO. its ridiculously easy to become a mod (basically just have to have a posting history and offer to do moderation work for an under-served comm) but it’s pretty thankless so why would you. Getting tarred by a broad brush on like a monthly basis is some reward.
I’m sure the mods talk to eachother, or at least I hope they do, but that doesn’t make them a clique nor mean that they are doing nefarious things behind the scenes.
I try not to if I’m being honest. That one actually just hurt my brain and thats all I remember
Honestly I don’t know what the mods could do to calm everyone down if people are still this raw and reactive like 9 months later. besides unmodding nakoichi and digging into maybe one or two hyper-specific incidents
Do you really think? To what end?
If it is a long enough while to no longer be hot situations, then it’ll be like adding more JFK papers… stuff so old its impossible to have any accountability.
Restoring trust in mods.
You’re probably right that it runs the risk of being useless if the period is too long. I think it’s better for it to be too short than too long, so that it actually does provide accountability. If the mods don’t want to be dragged for suicide baiting users, or for sticking with other mods who are doing so, then they should just not do that in the first place.
Keep in mind, it’s currently pretty easy to become a mod, especially in comms like c/traa, so mod comms are always at risk of being leaked anyway (unless there’s some kind of hierarchy there that I’m unaware of).
The reason I’ve leapt to Z’s defense is that Nakoichi’s treatment of them and the other posters agreeing with them was so egregious that it really looks like a biased application of moderating privileges to force an opinion that, it turns out, is actually very unpopular especially in context, plus the clear examples of microaggressions that several other users have noticed and commented on already. But I’ll admit I’m not as up on site lore as other people, so I might have a less pointed opinion on Z than other users, so maybe I’m wrong about them as an individual. With respect to the flag emoji, this seems like one of those instances where someone had to rock the boat in order to get it moving again, and in all appearances it seemed that Z was being punished for being that person.
I agree but with 2 caveats. Z was far from the only person calling this out and rocking the boat in that way (nor were they the first), and received mod/admin attention because of their history not because of their stance on :israel-cool:
The admins should not have left someone unbanned who was such an unrepentant asshole and perennial sockpuppeteer, that they would not be able to restrain themselves from sniping back in the future