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this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2026
17 points (100.0% liked)
Slop.
883 readers
307 users here now
For posting all the anonymous reactionary bullshit that you can't post anywhere else.
Rule 1: All posts must include links to the subject matter, and no identifying information should be redacted.
Rule 2: If your source is a reactionary website, please use archive.is instead of linking directly.
Rule 3: No sectarianism.
Rule 4: TERF/SWERFs Not Welcome
Rule 5: No bigotry of any kind, including ironic bigotry.
Rule 6: Do not post fellow hexbears.
Rule 7: Do not individually target federated instances' admins or moderators.
founded 2 years ago
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This is not the "mod opinion" but my own.
I really dislike this name because it's speciesist. Hogs are caring, loving, social animals.
That said, at the time there were huge struggle sessions with the mod and userbase at eachothers throat. At the end people just wanted their "slop" and be over with it. Also "slop" had been in use on hexbear far before the more common usage now, it was even used positively occasionally, in the "comfy" sense of watching something that doesn't take a lot of effort to produce or consume can be a good way to destress. A bit like "guilty pleasure" or how not every meal has to be some gourmet, healthy affair, but can just be some deep-frozen "slop" that warms the belly and tastes good.
slop is at it's core a containment comm. A lot of people want to be able to filter reactionary stuff, they see enough of it on the internet, they want to be able to relax on hexbear and seeing @magaChudNo273482723's post of the same joke everyone already heard a billion times is antithetical to that. However a lot of people also want to share these stupid takes and have a place where they can just rag on these people and see that there are others who share in their outrage or sadness or whatever. slop is the compromise, the former group can block the comm and filter it, the latter group has a place here where they can just vent their feelings. That's what is meant by posting "reactionary's bullshit" that isn't allowed "anywhere else".
The "anything you want to post" comm is !main@hexbear.net. So if it doesn't fit any particular comm or someone just wants to post and not have to decipher which comms are exactly for what it can go there. Unless it's some reactionary bullshit of course, then it must be posted here.
I hope that doesn't happen to be honest, if the site is subsumed by "slop" and all we have left is outrage and anger that would be a sad thing. But I don't think that is an actual danger to the site. And I don't wanna remove posts just because they aren't an exact fit or would be better in some other comm, people shouldn't have to go through a list of different types of the same fucking joke before knowing where to post (reddit link: https://www.reddit.com/r/dontdeadopeninside/wiki/post_types/).
I preferred just calling it “the trough” because, in that situation, we were the hogs and this was our place to indulgently feast on all the garbage that was probably not good for us and we should go back to rooting for acorns.
Most people don't post into the slop comm thinking it's a containment. They think "I dislike this thing and I want to humiliate it by labeling it slop".
It does not feel like "slop" is a containment comm when it's the 3rd largest comm and growing. It feels like slop is trying to steal the character of chapotraphouse.
The characteristics of Chapo Trap House is a combination of comedy, pop culture, US politics, and US foreign policy. Chapo also had a weekly segment where they would read liberal newspaper opeds and criticize the liberalism.
Marx and Lenin have a considerable amount of writing where they criticize their liberal opponents. When Lenin criticized Kautsky or Bernstein, was it considered slop? No, of course not. In a certain sense, the purpose of left theory is to criticize contradictions and ultimately resolve the contradictions.
I do not mean that more content on hexbear is becoming "slop". I mean that posts which could better fit into other comms are being placed into slop.
We live in a world of contradictions, there are many opposing forces in conflict. The contradictions make people feel uncomfortable and people label those contradictions as slop, but not every contradiction needs to discussed in a containment space.
I agree with your principle of having this comm being a "containment". Then we have to ask, what is being contained? Is the purpose of the slop comm to contain every contradiction? Certainly not, because most of the real world is made up of contradictions.
I would propose that what is contained in a containment comm is the most fringe and socially unacceptable subjects. Things that one would be ashamed to say in public. For example, unhinged social media comments.
The purpose of a containment is to shrink, not grow, and yet slop continues to grow.
Norm Finkelstein is one of the most influential academics of our time. I DO think that Norm should be criticized for his problematic takes. However, I don't think Finkelstein is considered to be slop. I would not be ashamed to speak about Norm Finkelstein in a public space.
What I am saying is that the parameters of slop is too broad.
There has been a bit of evolution as you pointed out in your "history of slop" post. It was created specifically for "dunking on chuds", hence "The dunk tank", it wasn't meant as a containment comm at all. However not having to look at reactionary takes was one of the sticking points that came out during the struggle session for me and that's kind of what it evolved to.
One of the ways this could be handled is a "back to the roots" style downsizing, we only post reactionaries airing their ass and enforce rule 1. However then the problem becomes once again where to draw the line. This is certainly a reactionary take, however it probably doesn't need to be "contained" and filtered out for other people, this however likely would fit the type of post that would fit the comm, but what's a quantifiable difference between them that makes the former a bad fit for the comm. Or rather what makes the latter a good fit might be the more salient question?
I can see your point that if we let it evolve to whatever people nowadays associate with "slop" it might become the "low-effort", "just post" comm which wouldn't be helpful for people trying to filter reactionary takes either. Sadly I can't find a good way to easily see posts over time for a comm which could be a good metric to see if the comm is getting too large. Do you think this is a big enough issue to address with the wider community? Likely the site since we'd want to get people who want to filter /c/slop involved, though I don't even know if there a lot of people on hexbear who block /c/slop.
Removing posts is not a nice thing to do so I want to be able to communicate very clearly why a post had to be removed, and since we can't expect a "move" feature on lemmy in the near future this would be the only tool we have at our disposal. I suppose we could crosspost to a more appropriate comm before removing, but that's not really an appropriate way to handle that either I feel like.
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