Yeah, I’m not exactly a power poster. I just like hexbear as Reddit but with far less shitty politics and cooperate astroturfing. However with these moderation struggle sessions I just find hexbear is less appealing. Hexbear is clearly a very important space to some people and who are getting very upset over things. And I think these events between these users and mods are chilling the community. It’s not a warm welcoming space to bring in new users and encourage interaction and exploring the community. Imagine your first interaction with the site: you open it up and the front page is all pinned posts about stupid drama. Even as a reasonably regular user I haven’t got time to read them and frankly don’t wish to. I’m sure I can’t be the only one who feels this way.

FWIW on the current issue, I think upvotes are good for surfacing interesting content. That’s why Reddit was so good, it crowdsources the curation. A million users is a better sorter of content than a desk of moderators acting as content editors. They’re open to manipulation sure. But I’m not seeing too many issues on hexbear.