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It matters who those comments were made towards and in what context. they all contain a very clear YOU, referring to specifically Zposter, for being “obsessed” with the topic.

I don’t agree with them, (zposter is an asshole about this and most other subjects when disagreed with, but he did seemingly drop the subject until the next time it came up) but they aren’t contextless rational arguments floating in the ether on the marketplace of ideas, they are part of a human conversation between two people with a long history of butting heads.

I mostly think they’re incompetent who are slow to selfcrit when they inevitably fuck up

harsh but largely agreed

due to large egos and no real ability for the userbase to hold them accountable

not sure I buy this part as the primary reason

By all accounts, Nakoichi will continue being a mod because nothing’s going to stop them from continue being a mod, ZPoster will deploy their 426th alt with everyone in the news mega and most of Hexbear dot net knowing which account is the alt, and all of this will be quietly swept under the rug

I could see it happening, but I hope you are wrong. Mod status has to have some raised expectations of de-escalation and ability to stay cool, and being a noxious gaslighter should also have consequences. There’s making a new anonymous account, fine, but then there’s wink-wink nudge-nudge shit like zposter has been doing forever

I can see how one might get the impression that covid minimization is the norm on the left. it just depends where you live and who you interact with (and what you think constitutes the left, I suppose). Seattle DSA probably isnt representative of the rest of the country and even then 50/50 on supporting masking at mass meetings in theory is not great

Definitely a flawed example in some ways but this november 2024 NYC DSA event has maybe 16 masks visible in a crowd in the hundreds?

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GcJQ6xKXoAAaVl9.jpg?name=orig

(and the prominent candidate nor visible volunteers/event coordinators seem to be among that number)

Thank God the mods in /c/news aren’t loose cannons or have weird chips on their shoulders.

That describes like one mod on the whole site at this point but okay, continue believing the admins (except your one that you trust) are now a cabal bent on ruining the site, rather than just the same humans as ever

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

Bring back some form of c/user-union.

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.

Have some process for “declassifying” mod communications after a while.

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

general problems with the mod clique

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.

Remember the “he/hims” struggle session(s)?

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

people leaving the site is normal. its just a website, it won’t be a perfect fit with everyone forever, nor should it. There are definitely people I regret losing, but overall I don’t think it’s worth the heartache to worry about now that it’s done, we should just try to be better in the future. Both more principled, and less hostile

hate you? no.

But if what you mean is that everyone from diehard communists to blue maga barely-liberals needs to come together and kick out fascism? That isn’t happening. There have been attempts to unite liberals, spicy liberals, and the actual left (see: bernie) but there’s two big problems that come to mind:

1. The liberal true believers, especially politicians and the rich, will sooner work with the fascists than accept socialists (not socdems or demsocs), communists, or anarchists gaining a foothold.
2. The tactics of the squishy left (demsocs, etc) are not sufficient to defeat fascists. State power, along with that of the people, needs to be wielded against them mercilessly, and liberals won’t do it. There’s a line from a lecture I quite like that portrays it well how liberals react when such measures are used for the greater good:

And those who demand instant perfection the day after the revolution, they go up and say “Are there civil liberties for the fascists? Are they gonna be allowed their newspapers and their radio programs, are they gonna be able to keep all their farms?" The passion that some of our liberals feel, the day after the revolution, the passion and concern they feel for the fascists, the civil rights and civil liberties of those fascists who are dumping and destroying and murdering people before. Now the revolution has gotta be perfect, it’s gotta be flawless. Well that isn’t my criteria, my criteria is “What happens to those people who couldn’t read? What happens to those babies that couldn’t eat, that died of hunger?”

Link

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.

I can’t remember where I got it but it’s solid. I hate how much it rings true on days like today when I feel powerless to change it.

That kind of rule would do us so much good, even if it was hard to apply

@anon_ascend@hexbear.net and @ShariaLawZ@hexbear.net already seem to have caught strays as these accounts show no signs of being Zposter.

from https://hexbear.net/code_of_conduct

Tips for how to respond to moderation

If a mod has to take action on your post or comment, take their advice, quit doing the thing, and get on with your life. Do not:

• Carry on doing the same thing but in a slightly different way and then complain about how the rules aren’t specific enough;
• Prattle on endlessly to other users about The Injustice Of It All;
• Grumble passive-aggressively about how you’re no longer allowed to send people vore in the megathread;
• Try to rope the mod into a lengthy discussion about your interpretation of the rules, or how RandomUser once did the same thing that SomeGuy’s done twenty times and RandomUser never got banned for it but they banned SomeGuy after the 19th time, etc;
• Something to remember: the full details of mod interventions are often not public information, and in the above scenario, it’s extremely unlikely you would have known whether or not RandomUser was banned for the reason you think either way. We try to give as much context as possible in the mod log, but it’s not always possible.
• Mods are not obligated to justify bans and build a “case” explaining the reasoning for a ban.

I think nakoichi should have been demodded at the time of the death threat incident. But Zposter is a notorious and blatant abuser of alts and sockpuppets, and the admins are the only ones with complete information to tell what is and isn’t an alt (though even then it might be impossible). Going to bat for random users with no posting history who logged on to jump to Zs defense after the ban is far weirder than just letting it go. If their history of being an absolute prick wasnt so extensive, with such an absolute disregard for both our rules and norms of human interaction (I don’t like being sockpuppeted to, its disgusting), I’d be fine with unbanning them, but their main should never have been unbanned in the first place so I can’t support doing so now just because they happened to get banned today of all days, for this of all things.

And if the conclusion is “we can’t trust the admins at all” as many here seem to be advocating… then leave? not for my sake, I’d rather we were all here, but for your own sakes, clearly the anger and distrust is hurting people’s ability to enjoy this place.

Edit: this last paragraph isn’t directed at you specifically FunkyStuff, just the general vibe in the thread has got me thinking that way

The fact that Hexbear policy was/is to the right of the fucking American government on this is embarrassing

This just isn’t true (at least not since oct 7th, idk what the exact moderation stance was 3-4 years ago.) posting images of the zionist flag burning has been allowed that whole time, there just wasn’t an emote for it (which given the context of all the other flag burning emojis, was a mistake), because of one person’s discomfort with it. Other admins could have added it, but didn’t feel it was necessary or strategic (again, with hindsight definitely a mistake, but not “to the right of the American government”)

Anecdotally I know one person who’s made this jump and I blame it on being a shut-in with no IRL community that consumed too much tradwife type content online during covid (now has a much older boyfriend, works at a christian business and goes to church regularly). There’s been something of a culture shock resulting in her not liking the employer or some of the specific church people she fell in with initially, but I think the christianity and church attendance is here to stay for now.

overall I gotta say social alienation and material immiseration, but the political winds are a factor too

Yeah it’s unclear. Not that it couldn’t be real, but there’s no source and the phrasing is weird.

I read it as being percentages of the whole population of each age category, not just of christians themselves, but your comment made me second guess for a minute

I think this thread is relevant, at several points

As far as online communities go, this site is doing fine in the user growth department. Endless growth isn’t the goal, the shitposting site isn’t the revolution.

It’s more the “people using the site to immiserate themselves and others” aspect that really brings the site down.

The site will have ups and downs. I think it in many ways is better now than it was when it had more users, more novelty.

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There’s an element of that in every struggle session, I think. It’s exhausting. Because the form of the struggle session doesn’t really work in frictionless online plane where nobody is accountable to anybody and everyone just gets rewarded for riling each other up and getting unhingedly angry.

Almost no struggle session on this site has ever been productive, even those that ended in the “right” side “winning”.^[1]. IRL you can have a baseline level of trust in your comrades, and that you are all committed to mostly the same basic principles, and then build constructively from that basis. But online people just go straight to screaming at each other pretty fast, most people have no lasting identity or accountability, and we’ve decided that berating eachother at the slightest provocation is fine because to do otherwise is “tone policing”. And yeah, tone-policing can be an issue, but sheer animosity does undermine the effectiveness of the struggle session. It just makes everyone involved defensive and brings out the worst in them. Maybe not all the same principles from IRL can be used online, but certainly we can do better than this. People would do well to read Constructive Criticism: A Handbook ^[2] and not just operate based on vibes and the norms of the rest of the internet.

You’re correct, and I don’t think zposter is an antisemite, I think zposter is an uncomradely unrepentant asshole allowed to fester because they contribute to the news mega. They’ve had probably a dozen alt accounts (some openly admitted, if you check the modlog), and can’t seem to help but get banned on each one, and not just for flag-related posting or beef with nakoici