That's right folks the year is drawing to a close so it's time to rehash last year's bit, nominate, and vote for your 2024 Hexies! These are the Hexbears you think exemplify what it means to be a real Hexbear 
Here's how it works:
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Pick from the below categories
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Nominate someone for that category by tagging them
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If you are nominated respond to the nomination to accept it
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Most upbeared accepted nomination in each category wins!
What do you win? The esteem of your fellow Hexbearian comrades of course. What more could you want?
The categories for this year's 2024 Hexie awards are:
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Best Effortposter of 2024
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Most likely to be called a tankie on a blocked instance
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Most comradely Hexbear
This year we have a special bonus category to commemorate some of the new comms we added:
- Best bad poster (this is not the worst poster, this is the best poster that is bad at posting)
We got a lot of new posters this year and have a lot of great comrades visiting from federated instances, feel free to participate too! We love all of our great posters, don't we folks?
Alright comrades that's it from me, be sure and do your democratic duty and 
for your 2024 Hexie winners and congrats in advance to the winners of this highly coveted and prestigious award!
And for one small trip down memory lane, here's last year's Hexies! https://hexbear.net/post/1477104
spoiler
This bit was fun last year so I hope folks enjoy doing this bit again this year too, as a bit though
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My read of the whole situation as someone with no access to any third-party or outside channels of communication is that the admins and mods were falling into the traps of commandism and lack any plan or procedure to politically develop the userbase. They were beginning to rely on purges in order to handle political contradictions except Hexbear doesn't have a good onboarding process either, both in terms of quantity (onboarding 20 users to replace 10 purged users) and quality (onboarding 2 users who are members of irl orgs to replace 5 terminally online users). This is a recipe for self-destruction. Part of commandism is also the commandist cadre being burned out and cynical towards the masses that they nominally are supposed to politically develop, and I felt the same cynicism happening among some mods. Mods who believe there is no hope in Hexbear politically speaking shouldn't be trusted to be mods because how can we be sure that their actions aren't motivated by self-sabotage. People who feel contempt for the average user should arguably not even be here (it's not healthy to be within a community where you hate an average member of the community) and they definitely shouldn't have mod privileges.
Commandism isn't a problem until it comes to unrecognised sectarian disputes. Then it's a problem because one group seeks to purge everyone that's from another.
My biggest concern with organisational structure is actually being horizontal and I've raised it. Previously the site was structured into two tiers, mods and admins. Mods would request things of admins and then admins would go through a fairly lengthy process of being fully informed of a topic before coming back on decisions. The admin team could talk about sensitive topics openly among themselves without concern about leaking or miswording things in a way that might mistakenly offend. And another benefit of this inner circle is that because they're fully informed on everything that happens they have full historical context of a situation going back years on the site. Mods on the other hand do not. Now the organisational structure is basically horizontal, and much stuff comes to a vote. The problem with this horizontal structure and voting is that many of the participants won't be fully informed of a topic, and won't have the historical context of a user going back years who is off their radar. So when stuff happens and happens FAST this structure is problematic. People are susceptible to just going along with something that sounds reasonable on the surface. It's also dangerous because of activity levels. Let's say you have 60-70 mods but only 10-15 of them are actually talking and participating in the decision process, well if you inject 3 people into that process who are collaboratively working together they can guide the wider group where they want them to end up. It's dangerous. This is dangerous in orgs too but it's particularly dangerous online, I know because I've personally done that shit to multiple subreddits and it works.
I feel this for like... The entire working class? I know some of the working class are fucking assholes right now but I am deeply sympathetic to them, to all of them. We are all victims of the system and yeah sure this does not excuse the harm they cause to other members of the working class but solving that requires engaging with them. Every communist needs to be driven by a distinct optimism in people, including the odious ones. To love and believe in people.
I'm not privy to what's happening behind the scenes, so I'll take your word for it. Having every mod vote is a terrible idea because mods are mostly entrusted to the comms that they manage and so aren't and shouldn't be expected to be privy to what's going on throughout the site. This is further hampered by no vetting for mods whatsoever. The "vetting" is being able to fill out an application and not type in a snarky answer when they get to the question about veganism. Most forums I've been to at least have an account age requirement so mod applicants have a history that people can judge.
I'm starting to see what happened. There's a ringleader with an older account and good rep, and to get the coconspirators onboard, the coconspirators request new comms to be created. Since those new comms need mods, the coconspirators would then request to be mods of those new comms, but the point is to become a mod and gain access to the modchat, not to actually moderate those comms. It's harder to become a mod of an existing comm since it would look suspicious if they request being a mod of a comm that barely gets any traffic, but for a entirely new comm, it's entirely mundane since comm requesters often become the first mods. Once the coconspirators are in, they and the ringleader move together as a bloc, being able to outmaneuver people since unlike the rest of the mods, they are organized.
What I meant is that there are some mods who have expressed contempt for the majority of Hexbear users. If someone thinks most people on Hexbear suck, then they're saying Hexbear sucks, in which case how can we trust that they won't sabotage something that they think sucks? How is this any different from making some dipshit from beehaw or lemmy.world a mod? They don't have to be a liberal or a fascist in order to sabotage Hexbear from within. Basically, their behavior is the opposite of what a socialist should be, which is a baseline compassion and optimism of the working class being able to transform themselves into something better.
Ehhh maybe. It's very hard to say. I'm not just saying that, it's not particularly easy to confirm one way or another. I'm only raising organisational structure because I see it as the largest weakness that exists, I'm not really convinced it played a role in this particular event.
If I was dead set on making this structure work I think I'd want an internal wiki that all mods can edit, all edits are private, and no additions can be edited out. This internal wiki would function as a mod-thoughts notepad per user. And would be anonymity would prevent internal conflict about notes such as one mod being suspicious about one user for x reasons or another. When a new issue arises then the information exists to be more fully informed about the history a user has. The downside of this is that I don't think volunteers can be trusted to maintain something like that diligently enough, it's more something that employees in a company would stick to. Additionally it's not without its own weaknesses.
I think I understand what you mean. I've seen this behavioural attitude occur between support agents and customers in tech support roles. A contempt for the customer they're engaging with. In some cases this is actually fairly understandable because some customers are rude and this builds up over time, but this interaction with the rude ones leaks over into contempt for ALL the customers which affects how they interact with the average/good customers rather than just the bad ones. An understandable outcome, but not particularly beneficial for the role. Also just generally a certain tact and tone can be extremely useful, Screamo always impressed me with this.
This comment chain being hidden on this post is a shame. I am quite surprised at how many upvotes people are getting though (How are you finding this?
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MLs stay winning.
Two possible sources: My profile page or viewing all Hexbear comments sorted by new. Possibly something some mods use.
what are you talking about, honestly, i can find this chain just fine. You're being conspiratorial.
It's an 18 day old thread that isn't on the feeds due to age, so the people here arrived through one of those two ways. There's nothing conspiratorial about it.