Hey everyone, I’ve removed bans for everyone that did not request one in the previous admin thread. (I think. If you got banned and I didn’t restore your account yet, let me know and I’ll fix it.) Don’t worry! We’re not gonna just ban people for no reason.

In case anyone hasn’t seen it yet, Alaskaball confirmed that Sangria was their admin alt. They were messing around with their admin tools on their own account and figured it would be seen as a funny bit, but without being informed of the bit many of the mods and admins were just as shocked, confused, and appalled as you were. I’ve talked to the other admins and mods, and we’re all gonna take it easy on bits for a bit. (Pun intended. This is the last one, I promise.)

If you’re afraid that there’s been an infiltration of transphobic, egomaniacal wrecker mods who hate the users, I want to assure you that’s absolutely not the case. The overwhelming majority of mods and admins on this site are trans. Our admins are all trusted, long-time users in good standing. We regularly browse, comment, and post on our main accounts. You post and chat with us daily as comrades, and we value all of you. You may not recognize the usernames on our admin accounts because we regularly swap the alts used for admin privileges. This is why you’ll see really old or unused alt accounts as well as really new accounts on the admin team.

I’ve seen a lot of speculation down below, some entertaining, some upsetting. We absolutely do not accept transphobia or any form of bigotry on this site. Some of the statements provided by mods and admins have been seen as transphobic and bioessentialist. I want to offer some transparency, but also clarify that I can’t get much more specific on this for personal security reasons.

During the earlier discussions on how we felt things could be improved with these communities, multiple trans mods and admins described their reasoning in favour of the change by expressing with a variety of wording that it’s the [he/him] demographic in particular that has been the source of toxic and troubling behavior in the tanks. That the he/hims haven’t been beating the accusations, so to speak. With that group being largely cishet white guys on this site, these two terms were assumed to roughly correlate. We weren’t making prepared statements for release, the comments that got posted here were paraphrased and combined from more casual comments made by trans people, in the mod chat to mostly other trans people about some of the chauvinistic and ironically bigoted posting habits that they saw as alienating and unhealthy for the site, and what we could do to improve the situation. We genuinely didn’t foresee the potential for a miscommunication of those statements as being bioessentialist, and want to extend our sincerest apologies for the misunderstanding.

Edit: Please feel welcome to post in c/gossip as you would have posted in the_dunk_tank, and in c/counterpropaganda as you would have posted in the_dredge_tank.

  • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    80·
    5 days ago

    This is my understanding of it.

    The dunk tank stuff is an incredibly minor thing, that should have been easily fixed. Everything else has just been logs thrown on a paper fire over and over again.

    It’s all incredibly silly and it seems like nobody in this team understands that less is more when dealing with minor drama. Responses to drama should be kept proportional to their size, if something is major and deserves a major response fair enough, but if something is minor and you give it a major response then what you do is immediately blow it up into a major issue instead of keeping it the incredibly minor thing it should have been all along.

    In this case the entire admin and mod team should STOP FUCKING POSTING.

    Seriously. Stop. Just stop. It’s that fucking easy.

    • Hexboare [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      53·
      5 days ago

      I think the issue is that the argument around misogyny and “white cishet bro culture” hasn’t actually been made, with users being told to go look at the modlogs as a poor replacement for a good lesson on what characteristics are objectionable.

      I don’t really get it but I’m not a big tank poster, I haven’t seen anything that I wouldn’t see on somewhere like fauxmoi

      It also doesn’t help that it’s clearly not the only issue some people have with the tanks, with others finding them toxic

      As a total tangent, I find the use of the term chauvinism very strange, like I did feminism at uni and it’s definitely a word I would associate with writing 50+ years ago (I assume being used here as a shorthand for male chauvinism)

      • propter_hog [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
        46·
        5 days ago

        Yeah I’m still confused by it all, too. We’re clearly not being told the whole story. It sounds like some mods got their feelings hurt by tank posters, I guess. But if that’s the case, specific examples of that should have been included in their stickies. You can hide them in a spoiler so people who don’t want to read them don’t have to. Essentially a tiny modlog with just the examples in question included. But to say that I have to go scour all of the modlog looking for some arbitrary comment and I don’t even know specifically what I’m looking for is more than a bit asinine.

    • LeylaLove [she/her, love/loves]@hexbear.netEnglish
      31·
      5 days ago

      I think you underestimate the number of mods that were absolutely shitting on the admins in the private chat. Seriously, last night made me lose two weeks of sobriety, stop including “mods” when this was clear as day just TC69 being a petty shithead

      • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
        50·
        5 days ago

        I understand some stuff may have happened behind the scenes.

        Anything that isn’t user-facing is being seen even less by the community though and will therefore create even more confusion when the response is huge walls of text about it.

        As far as the 99% of the community that didn’t see private modchat stuff are concerned, the situation is as I laid out and they’re all confused and completely feel waylaid by what they perceive as a massive overreaction to it and an incredibly confusing pace of events.

        • LeylaLove [she/her, love/loves]@hexbear.netEnglish
          20·
          5 days ago

          And I’m in control of that? I invited people from outside the official mod chat into a different mod chat to talk about things safely, I really did my best. If I had the energy to respond to people insulting me as a mod, I’d be sharing tons of information from the mod chat. And as someone in the mod chat, I can firmly say 90 percent of the real fallout for this belongs to TC69 and AlaskaBall. Even from the posts it’s clear as day that it’s just TC69 and AlaskaBall doing this shit.

          I will say, mods (or most fairly well read people) are against the “dunk” culture (me included). We literally have known doxxers in this community that haven’t been banned due to dissapointing admin inaction. There is a very firm split between the mods doing unpaid labor on this site, and the most of the admins. We all told AlaskaBall to go fuck themselves last night very directly. Seriously, so many of us have had to deal with serious backlash from this shit with no warning, we are a bunch of volunteers getting absolutely shat on by people we try to help. That is so fucking hard to work through, and my therapist would probably tell me to delete my fucking account.

          I get the confusion, I never check the mod chat, I’m awful about it, I was confused too. But even when you look at the fucking modlog, there is no mod action, IT’S ALL ADMIN! And just like capitalists, TC69 and Alaskaball are simply farming out all the mods to take the actual backlash of this shit.