I did a similar post on Slops community, asking for feedback regarding how specifically their comm is moderated, I did not ask for their overall sentiments of Hexbear at large. “Slop” is not a clear demographic though.
This comm is different though, as the demographic is clearer. From your perspective as people who are more covid/health aware, what are your concerns with not only how this comm is moderated, but the site in general?
The site is largely pro-eugenics. Full stop. When historians look back at the absolute shitstorm of the next few decades , the failure of “The Left” in the West to protect and express solidarity with marginalized communities is going to be seen as a major pivotal moment in which the ball was completely dropped. And this site’s activity is the perfect recording of it.
For example, the anti-mask sentiment doesn’t even end at community care, it extends into opsec. Which is just wild. We’ve got people literally being kidnapped off the streets, panopticon cameras everywhere, llm’s small enough to hide locally and be watching our every keystroke and screenswipe; And yet, anytime I bring up opsec I always get at least one response pointing out that you can’t have a perfect defense, so why bother taking action? It’s like the “endemic” argument used to do embrace apathy about covid has completely infected the ability to give a shit about doing any sort of planning for the future. I really do wonder if I’m talking to Feds sometimes with how resistant Hexbear is to discussing the most basic preparation strategies.
I very much feel like I am surrounded by people on this site who don’t realize that they are basically illegal and the only the reason they’re still free is because their dehumanized status hasn’t been normalized among a large enough portion of the population, yet. And then these same people, through their own inaction and apathy, contribute to the dehumanizing of marginalized communities all around them.
Now, how can moderation can change that? I don’t know. I’m pretty happy with how the comm mods here ban covid minimization. Sometimes I think they’re a bit too quick on folks who aren’t happy with vaccines given how they don’t measure up to what the promise of them was, but I can appreciate the need for it. I don’t know that you can really have that sort of quickness of banning minimization of these topics to extend into greater hexbear because it’s a site culture issue, in much the same way dunking and shitposts are. This site’s userbase very early on decided it wanted to be the Jon Stewart of leftist sites (lots of dunks, no responsiblity) and for the most part they’ve succeeded in pigeonholing themselves. Most comms that do focus on topics beyond shitposting (covid, vegan) have to be “soft bordered” and then just don’t get a lot of activity.
Now, if you haven’t figured out by now, I’m not exactly very fond of hexbear at the moment. I mostly find myself coming back for c/covid and then shitpost in the rest of the site to agitate where I can and with what I feel I can get away with. But real conversations largely devolve in to
with folks that I find myself disengaging from, largely because they’re not at all familiar with the topic beyond what they’re repeating from seeing in other threads. Hexbear has its own set of misinformation 
on certain topics that have become trope-like at this point, and pushing back against that is just exhausting.
Idk, I don’t envy the job the mods and admins have dealing with all this shit (I run my own
so I get it) but also ever since the c/anti-union debacle I really have lowkey wondered, “WTF, y’all?”
lol, that about what you’re looking for?
Just want to say I see you around on here and always appreciate your comments and hardline stance. I mentioned it in my comment as well but yeah, unless this site’s culture massively shifts, I can’t see this issue ever being resolved. I tried to avoid being pessimistic, but I honestly have no hope that this will change any time soon, either just here on hexbear or among the left in general.
Thank you for the kind words, comrade. Much appreciated.
It’s a shame how inactive the good communities are here. I fully agree on all points. Sorry you’re feeling alienated, comrade.
Thanks. Yea, that sure is the word for it, huh.
Can you please elaborate on the “this site is largely pro eugenics” point? I have not noticed widespread anti-masking sentiment on Hexbear If anyhing I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see people talking about covid outside this comm. But I have of course seen irl that most people around me simply will not mask up anymore, many of them leftists
Most of these folks are absolutely not masking in their daily lives and it is very apparent in their posting. @mononoke@lemmy.sdf.org hits the nail on the head
(especially the comparison to veganism, something I myself am still largely guilty of.) but to add to that, while the site is for the most part okay with mentioning that covid still exists, you will often get crickets in response to the suggestion they should mitigate it or have to look at the consequences of it. Not to toot my own horn but I’ve been around here since pretty much the beginning throwing a lot of bits at the wall and I have a feel for what comments and posts are going to land and what to expect and anything I make that mentions/implies that the general hexbear populace should be masking tends to take longer to gather upvotes or just flatout tanks. It’s funny because people have a habit of just upvoting all the top level comments and I can’t tell you how many times over the years I’ve dropped the first comment of a post mentioning masking and when I come back later in the day like every top level comment in the post will have around the same number of upvotes but the pro-masking one will be significantly less despite containing the general sentiment of the other comments. And that’s if I don’t get pushback, because occasionally you will still get someone that does not believe covid is a thing anymore, repeats that “just a cold/flu” shit, or just gets flat out offended at the implication they’re contributing to eugenic policy.
I can’t remember the exact wording, but y’all folks remember the New Years Log Off Touch Grass and Kiss Someone post that got so popular a few years ago? If there was a moment where we really lost the site, I think that was it. That wasn’t the specific post that caused it, but in many ways c/covid eventually being forced to take such a hardline stance against minimization without the admins following through on the rest of the site was probably a point of no return.
It’s implicit. I’ve been a lurker for some time; check any of the social megathreads and you’ll certainly see people constantly going on about gatherings, restaurants, organizing this and that in person. These people are not masking. The ones that are will be talking about it, because it is impossible to be masking in the current year and also be social without noticing the dissonance. Any pushback to this point will be met with apathy at best, hostility at worst. It seems to be treated like veganism, where there is an unspoken policy that everyone acknowledges it is the correct stance to take…but if someone is not following it through for whatever reason, they just aren’t going to mention it at all, and doing so is breaking decorum. In this case “don’t ask don’t tell” doesn’t work when you still mingle about going to bars or concerts or whatever else like nothing is going on. This itself is a form of (normalized) violence, which is where “this site is pro-eugenics” comes from, a sentiment I am in agreement with because the base of modern society is pro-eugenics.
Literally a thread about having 600 kids showing up to one location for Halloween on the front page right now lmao
Maybe the kids were all in costumes that doubled as hazmat suits but I really, really doubt it.
There was an anti union com?!
Oh yeah, for like a day. It was melina “ironically” posting anti-union articles.
https://hexbear.net/post/1262095?scrollToComments=false
Wtf. That’s a terrible idea
much of melina’s posting was terrible
Ironically, I remember melina being really good on COVID—I think fae was actually a mod on this comm
I vaguely remember this. I think it was supposed to be ironic? I was around, but I can’t get my brain to remember the context.
dsplayer being a shithead
I can feel my fucking brain grasping like a shitty underused muscle to try to connect these words and names I recognize into a coherent narrative of an event that I was present to witness.
dsplayer/melina getting so many chances from moderation has been one of the more damaging trends to site health since Chapo.chat