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WTF is happening on Hexbear?
(lemmygrad.ml)
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this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2024
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They said it was because “dunk tank” has racist origins, which it does, but idk I felt it was pretty excessive anyway. Almost nobody alive today even knows that and those that do are aware that it’s a term that hasn’t been used for over a century. It’s not even the same game anymore.
Yea no one was thinking about that. Blacklist, whitelist stuff all over again .
And it's not clear whether it's even about its "racist origins" that's just the reason provided.
Yeah I wouldn't have guessed that at all. My only familiarity with the idea of a dunk tank is white people doing it to each other voluntarily as some kind of fair/fundraiser thing. I always thought the idea of it seemed kind of sadistic (not that I knew the word sadistic back then). But I'm taking it to imagine hexbear's dunk tank is similar to the shitreactionaryssay that lemmygrad has, where it's posting takes of people who aren't even present, and in that sort of context, it seems more like throwing fruit at a picture of someone than anything akin to putting down someone who is trapped there and has to take it. There's also "dunking on" in the basketball meaning, which is sometimes used to refer to putting someone down on social media, like ratio'ing a person on twitter. That one is more directly humiliating, but doesn't use the term "dunk tank" and so unless the basketball meaning also has racist origins I'm not aware, we're looking at phrasing that can quickly overlap and could be confusing to people to take as inherently bad or racist to use.
If it was just a name change and it was an easy thing to change the name of without messing up links and existing activity and so on, I'd say, whatever, make it a name they don't feel icky about. But the internet often doesn't function that way. Screwing over logistics of user activity for the sake of feeling better about a name most people won't even know the real origins of seems like an odd decision, to say the least.
I don't know any of it beyond what I've been able to gather in this thread and the linked threads, I appreciate the context. Tbh, I'm probably overreaching on having a take at all, only going off of what I can gather about it. But I am also kind of biased, I think, against anything that seems obsessive over the minutiae of forum structure in a way that can fail to see the forest for the trees. I've been on a number of forums over more than a decade, including from before I had communist views, and I think sometimes the ease of exercising sweeping power gets used as a justification to be more rushed in decision-making and execution than the circumstances warrant. Most things in the tangible world have to go through more of a process, even after a decision has been made, to make them a reality; and that makes the cost of a decision seem higher. The internet has costs of a kind too, but some of them are harder to see. Like understanding how people engage with a website in the first place, why they come, where they come from, what makes them stick around or leave and for what reasons, whether what they're doing contributes to the goals of the forum, if it even has clear goals in the first place. All things that could get lost in overthinking if taken too far, but also seem to get neglected chronically across different types of leadership and subject matter of forums.
Does that make the dunk tank racist though? I mean, it could be interpreted in a revolutionary way: what once was a tool for humiliating black people is now being utilized against rightful targets, who are largely the people who would've been throwing the balls in the past. A device created for oppression repurposed into an instrument of justice for the oppressed.
idk I'm not black so take that with a grain of salt. A simple name change would've been fine though.