I genuinely don't understand what this post is asking for.

Some people wanted an emoji. An emoji got added.

Why is there a wall of text about this now?

It's a fucking emoji, have a missed something?

Correction: Z_poster was rebanned.

The other thread was talking about how there was some "double standard" going on, but IMO, banning BMF for "sectarianism" while letting Z_poster fly was inconsistent at best. BMF was never hostile- in fact, they would never really respond to anyone, even comment replies were once-off.

I don't think the amount of time I spend on this site has changed much in 4 years, and the issue of arbitrary mod intervention seems to be much better now than it was early on.

Hi, I'm the dev for hexbear. I have an admin account, but i'm not an active admin and don't ever act as admin in any capacity. But i do have access to some admin channels, mostly just as an observer and to provide tech support. Speaking in a personal capacity:

Lots of people in this thread (and in the struggle sessions) need to stop assuming the absolute worst of the admin/mod team. We're all comrades and we're all human. The admins I see do discuss every potential ban/purge action (with rare exception, like the one in empoc megathread last week). They all take it quite seriously, far more than I would personally if I were an admin. There were people in the emoji thread calling the admins/mods zionists. If I saw someone calling me a zionist over my opinion on an emoji I would just instantly ban you. As a life long forum-enjoyer, hexbear's admin team is easily the most tempered team I've ever seen. They take wayyyyy more punishment than they need to.

The hexbear team works without pay, entirely as volunteers. It is a decent amount of work to be an admin/mod and it does take a mental toll. Especially when every action you take might generate a week-long struggle session.

Sometimes a user breaks a rule, sometimes its just bad vibes. Its not a science, its just making good judgements. Its fine to make a request of admin team to reconsider stuff; we make mistakes sometimes. But its extremely unnecessary to make accusations of abuse or reactionary thought towards the team. You can trust the current team to root out abusive actions on our own (as we already have at least once recently with a former admin)

Regarding calls for accountability, sorry, but this is just an online forum. There is the modlog that has all the admin/mod actions. I've seen multiple mods removed from position, as well as an admin. There is no reasonable way to be more accountable. Admins are responding to issues and make efforts to give clear reasoning in mod logs for any actions taken. @FALGSConaut@hexbear.net Sorry for picking you, but you're the only one I remember being in every struggle session calling the admins as being irresponsible/corrupt/powerhungry without any evidence. What exactly do you imagine making things better? If you don't believe the admins/mods are responding correctly, then guess what, its time to buy your own server, host lemmy, and spend hours a day on managing something you use to get for free.

Hexbear is just a forum; its not a political party. Being banned isn't the end of the world and its not an act of violence. You can make a new account pretty much any time and get back to posting. Sorry for ranting, and again, this is just my personal opinion, but I hate seeing certain people show up in every thread throwing barbs at the admin team for every imagined slight.

admins/mods that think the userbase hates them

Well, yeah. Of course we do. It is the sacred duty of all posters to hate their moderators.

Holy shit touch grass

I'm really disappointed how the admins/mods have been handling this. Another poster (who has not only been banned but completely purged from the site) made another post (now conveniently deleted/purged) in the same vein, asking when we will have any communication from the mod team about any changes stemming from the recent problems. I'm going to repost my comment on that here since this post hasn't been deleted (yet).

I couldn't agree more that we need mods/admins to be more transparent and accountable for their actions. I appreciate that they're all volunteers doing this in their spare time but as it stands its too easy for mods to abuse their power with little to no recourse available to the average user. Add in the fact that mods were/are able to engage in behaviour that would result in the average user being banned and the double standard is hard to ignore. Mods should be held to a higher standard, not given carte blanche to act however they want. As the recent situation with Z_Poster365/Nakoichi has shown there's no process for removing a mod who is engaging in personal vendettas & threating fellow users. The only course of actions available are reporting the mod to the mods (we all see the issue there I hope) or engaging in a struggle session.

I like the idea of term limits or some other method of rotating mods in order to prevent cliqueish behaviour but doing so would require transparency in mod appointments and generally more communication between the admin/mod team and the general userbase. As it stands mods are appointed with little/no input from the general community based on the judgment of the admin/mod team. For example, the new mod BeanisBrain was appointed to mod 4 coms basically as soon as they created their account (not trying to pick on them but it's a little odd to me). One can only assume they have a previous relationship with the mod team, but to the general userbase (or at least me) it looks like pure cronyism.

I do think we need reform (or revolution?) of the moderation system/clique because the current system of opacity only encourages the "us vs them" mentality. Maybe open elections of mods with term limits or some other system of spreading their responsibility & authority? We also need a method of recalling mods that are failing to adhere to the code of conduct because the current system of having a struggle session only to be ignored by the admins hasn't been working

I think there are some deep issues with the mod team, they have constantly silenced users trying to shine a light on their abuses of power. How are we supposed to have an recourse against a mod abusing their powers when they are happy to ban people and delete posts to silence them? There isn't even any reason in the modlog as to why MartinLuther's post was deleted & their account purged from the site.

The bar is so fucking low for mod behaviour and they still fail. Disappointing.

Yes, the next meta post will invite the user base to discuss updating the Code of Conduct, as well as how moderators are chosen and how they are removed. I will make the post next week, thank you for holding us accountable. Links to doxxing information will be removed from the database using the tools we have available which may be imprecise but are imperative to maintain the safety of our mod team due to past doxxing and death threats.

The structure of the site is as follows.

The users report violations of the code of conduct, moderators receive these reports for the communities they moderate and take action as appropriate. When there is multiple mod actions taken among multiple communities and/or the user has a history of mod actions across the account as well as previous alts as admin may take site action (such as a temporary or permanent site ban)

In the event a user continues to repeat the same actions that broke the code of conduct the admins may use tools such as looking at upvotes, posts, comments and username trends to act on these alts preemptively. In such a case we take effort to unban the account in the event we receive information that our mod actions are incorrect.

The way that moderators are added is an existing mod vouches for them (rare) or they submit a mod application to the admin team, we accept the vast majority of applicants. In the event a moderator violates the code of conduct an admin will asses and demod when appropriate.

The admins take a hands-off approach relying upon community moderators to handle their communities and acting in the event of a wrecker, spammer, or non-local user that is reactionary. Due to the moderators receiving death threats, and doxxing attempts we have anonymzied the modlog to protect our volunteers.

There was a post made by multiple users discussing the meta situation after the emoji request, there was a dedicated post allowing the EMPOC community to discuss the events. Due to the multiple posts on this topic we won't be featuring anymore, however there will be an upcoming post featured for discussing the code of conduct itself as well as the moderator approval/removal process.

The https://hexbear.net/c/hexbear community is where you can discuss meta topics or mod actions as well as the matrix room linked in that community's sidebar.

I have maintained that the admins have no goal other than enforcing the code of conduct, there has never been a "growth" mindset for the site nor can we speak to the direction of the site. We have always encouraged the users to take direction and create the community they want to see, the growth of the news mega, trans mega, movie nights, theory/reading clubs are all a result of users working together to create something.

It can be difficult to try and translate vague or unspecific comments into what could be actually changed.

I don't think people have speculated exactly why the leaker leaked the mod chat. Personally, I think it's pretty consistent behavior for a disgruntled mod. There are plenty of places to leak the chat logs to if they were a truly malicious actor while them leaking the chat logs to Hexbear user fits more with a disgruntled Hexbear user who wants the drama to stay in Hexbear.

Outside of the disgruntled mod spilling the beans on their true motivations, we can only speculate. Perhaps they think ZPoster shouldn't be banned, perhaps they have an argument with Nakoichi and leaked the chat to make them look bad, perhaps they are just unhappy with the general direction of the website, and so on.

But I do not think the admins are capable of this amount of self-reflection. They will most likely claim that the leaker was a wrecker (how was a third-party user able to gain access to a private chat that most Hexbear users don't even know exist) and sweep it under the rug per usual.

My predictions are this:

1. Since the admins failed to sweep the whole adding the emote-banning of ZPoster-banning and unbanning of LoveYourself saga under the rug partially because the leaked chat logs fuel drama, this encourages the mods who perhaps do not fully see eye-to-eye with the admins nor agree with the current direction of the site to leak chat logs as well in order to push their particular agenda.

2. The admins will try to solve 1 by becoming ever more paranoid about potential leakers. Maybe there will be a extra super duper secret no-ZPoster-stans-allowed chat that only mods who have been ruthlessly vetted are allowed access to, which will just instantly lead to stratification between vetted and unvetted mods.