this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2025
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Chapotraphouse
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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.