this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2025
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Chapotraphouse
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No anti-nautilism posts. See: Eco-fascism Primer
Slop posts go in c/slop. Don't post low-hanging fruit here.
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Why are we going from "weekly relitigation of the already discussed shortcomings of the socdem mayor" to now doing it twice daily?
Are we not exhausted?
Given the continued decline in activity on our instance, it's very rare that I'll suggest "not posting" content (rather, one should post twice as much of what they would like to see, if they don't like the frontpage). At the same time, dredging up old news over and over is boring and uninviting to new users.
I am increasingly concerned that the site isn't going to survive more than one or two more struggle sessions, due to the constant "left -signaling". The most substantial discussion I've seen is coming from like 5 effort posters, when there used to be a good handful of threads with interesting discussion on a daily basis (even without an effort post!)
It just feels like hexbear has been becoming less healthy as time has gone on, and I think we have a lot of history that I'd like to sustain. Or maybe I'm just reading the room entirely wrong?
HB has in some respects definitely decayed, though I like to think there's a renewed interest in addressing some of its existing problems. The "left-signaling" thing has always been an issue though, one that really stems from the "we can't do anything, we can merely speak, so we must validate ourselves by speaking and saying better things than others" sort of mindset that I usually associate with academic liberals. It's alienating, doesn't help anything, and ironically has produced an ideological race to the bottom because the "saying better things," (perhaps due to being unmoored from practice or even study) isn't really about saying things that are actually better but about saying things that have a more progressive vibe to other people who also don't know what the fuck they're talking about.
The website signed its death warrant a long time ago when it decided that it wasn't interested in growing (not "grow by any means necessary!" but merely making an active effort at all) and instead has just been spiraling in circles in isolation, festering and disconnected from everyone else.
Great comment, I agree. It's been very sad watching this place decline after years of what felt like one of the few truly vibrant leftist spaces on the internet. I do have my own thoughts and opinions as far as a diagnosis for the decline, but I think they're right in line with what you're saying. The series of major struggle sessions where the moderators and admins were at odds with seemingly most of the users on the site were in my opinion what dealt the heaviest blows that this place never really recovered from. But what you're saying about how "left-signaling" has always been an issue here is at the root of those struggle sessions.
There was a comment that a lemmygrad user made almost a year ago that got to the heart of it and expressed the issue better than I could hope to. Here is just a small part of it.
It is a much longer comment than what I just quoted, and worth reading in full. It should be noted that the meaning of who is "in charge" isn't necessarily the mods and admins, but can just as easily be a nebulous group of frequent commenters who tend to set the mores of site culture. Incidentally, I think a lot of the problems have actually died down. Hexbear feels a lot less cliquish now then it did roughly a year ago. It is also significantly less active, but that's because of the damage that has already been done, and even if it's not as bad as it was, the problem never went away.
:this:
And honestly, thank God for that. Have you seen the rest of the internet?
I see people say this a lot, though often they speak just as fatalistically about hexbear itself, and I wonder if they are really communists if they feel like changing even a small niche on the internet that they themselves are a part of is such a completely foregone conclusion. If that's your attitude, what's the point in anything?
In my view, this is just thinly-veiled snobbery to suggest that it's not worth growing the userbase at all because everyone else is just so below us, though whether it's true elitism, an excuse to give up, or something else, I can't say. I really don't think that's an unfair phrasing of your response, and I think the problems with it are mostly obvious.
Granted, one of my differences with the majority of the userbase is that I have never once thought this community was actually functional as a safe space, it has always been ableist for reasons much more fundamental than that people use bad words and it takes active effort from a small minority of users to slowly push it in a better direction, so while I've tried to encourage making it a safer space, I could never imagine it in the terms usually presented of it being either a safe haven or an agitation platform. You can call me defeatist too that I've maybe only once in my life encountered a community that I'd say was kind of not ableist and I cannot imagine this one ever being like that, but I do believe that everywhere and everyone can at least be improved, including both us in here and the people outside.
I think the two people who posted this today didn't realize it was a clip from the same interview that was already discussed. This has been posted elsewhere as a new clip.
I'm tired of hearing about Mamdani because I already dismissed him as a serious socialist the first time I saw this interview, and so should anyone else who claims to be a socialist. If people want to keep their social democrat mayor, they can have him (that's fine), but I won't pretend he's anything other than that on a website for discussion of socialism and neither should they.
We all know where we stand on the Mamdani Overton Window. I think the discussion has been good. I want to have more discussion when something actually happens . The post yesterday on c/urbanism was fine, even.
It's an interesting illustration of how news travels around the internet and a single story gets covered multiple times, making it seem bigger than it is. It's not new and it's how social media amplifies certain narratives and how people become trapped in propaganda loops. I'm not saying this specific story is propaganda, I'm talking about how news travels around the internet in general.
It travels between sites in a loop. Twitter to reddit, reddit to hexbear. Or directly from twitter to hexbear. It's cyclical in time. A story gets posted, people digest and move on. It comes back around after traveling the loop, now the story is fresh again and seems like a new instance of the same event. News also gets digested and regurgitated. An initial story happens, gets posted and discussed. Then a news outlet in need of content writes a story about the reaction to the story. This makes the event seem like it's happening again or constantly.
All this adds up to people thinking one event happens multiple times and often. This is why crime reporting is so effective in detaching people from understanding real risk. Even if we understand all this, we're not immune to it. For all of our criticism and media awareness, we still fall into these traps.
Great points. My vision for our community would be that we discuss this exact phenomenon more often and even try and innoculate our community from that effect. We could even position ourselves in the media ecosystem and make ourselves relevant. I don't even think we can do that at the scale of the Lemmyverse anymore.
I want to be part of a community that has a higher level of self awareness. I'd like to do that outside of the bigtech ecosystem. Having a Lemmy instance is cool beans, so I'm frustrated that it is likely going to slip away.
We will continue catering to the ragebait slop demo until morale improves.
"It just feels like hexbear has been becoming less healthy as time has gone on"
I know I'm late to the party but I wanted to chime in real quick and say that while this is true, it mirrors society as a whole. Everything is going to shit, the strain on all of us is unyielding, and there is literally no light in the darkness for so, so many of us. So, when one star miraculously manages to shine bright, its only natural to have the temptation to foist those same hopes and dreams upon them. When that star dies out, as we're witnessing in real time with Zohran, then the most human thing you can do is grieve for that loss of hope.
I know many of you are feeling smug about this with the "fell for it again award" posts, but as a collective this isn't the path to help our brothers and sisters move forward. Telling people that they're fucking stupid for trying to put their energy and effort into some semblance of a better future isn't doing anything other than posting to make yourself feel superior.