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 @[email protected]’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.