I got tired of Hexbear being so goddamn reactionary so I started using reddit, discord, dbzero, twitter, parlor, and truth social. Hopefully you all will do some growth and I can start trusting you as a platform again.

This came up in an unrelated thread recently so I'm just going to paste something I said last time this came up, with a couple edits:

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.

Without this educational and patient emphasis - and without structures that help democratize the way the organization communicates and functions - the group becomes at risk of toxicity and focusing endlessly on grievances based on whoever is "in charge" at the moment. Sometimes you get lucky and the people "in charge" keep things running well and avoiding turmoil. More often, you get toxic cliques, subsequent imbalanced application of norms, and a treatment of comrades as primary enemies. creates burnout and alienation between everyone.

This instance is increasingly tending towards the latter, with calcifying cliques at various levels that are increasingly hostile towards the userbase. They frame this using communist and liberationist language, though often inconsistently.

It is a much longer comment than what I just quoted, the quoted part alone doesn't really get at the heart of it, so it's worth reading in full. The comment was removed for "dismissing legitimate issues as tokenization" (perfectly exmplifying the point) but another less campist or beligerant mod reinstated it fortunately. 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 significantly less cliquish now than 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 entirely went away.

May as well tag @purpleworm@hexbear.net since I was speaking to purplworm in the pasted comment, who had some important things to say that I was responding to.

All sites experience user churn and all sites must put effort into combating churn with a new influx of users or experience the effects of negative user churn.

I used to spam the site over on the spaces I moderate on reddit but burnt out on doing it and there's essentially no effort from any section of this site to find other sources of new hexbears like there used to be.

The site was getting a sort of no-effort natural in-flow of new bears from lemmyverse but defederating from everything (or being defederated from) removed that no-effort source.

I wouldn't be against doing more to push the site elsewhere again but I would not want to be doing it alone.

I blame megathreads

So many good posts thrown into the pit of never being seen ever again

You mean there are more of us?!? 😍

(I recently joined Lemmy and have found a home here among you well-read, empathetic, principled, dope-ass bears. Seriously you guys have restored my faith in humanity.)

Posting requires going to sites other than Hexbear to find content

News has been depressing so that discussion isn't particularly post-worthy for me, and now that I have a partner I have that immediate outlet for talking about my personal life so I don't feel the need to journal post.

I just dont enjoy posting as much anymore

Busy with work and depressed...

Work is brutal and the Lemmy.ml trenches are awful.

got told off at work for looking at my phone (hexbear) too much

where butt

Well for me, the main thing I would log onto hexbear to check before was the newscomm and the news mega thread, then that would lead me to posting in other places.

But the news has been so bad lately that I'm basically avoiding this place, and other sources of my news, to keep a mind capable of continuing on and enduring daily life. Idk, it's just been that bad out in the world lately. Every piece of news is depressing. Every now and then there's something like Charlie Kirk incident, but for every one of those there's like 10 other bad events, and I can't keep looking at those and be a normal, functional member of society at the same time.

Need more bloomer content in here for me, but then I feel like that easily turns into begging for the same distracting slop everyone is seeking everywhere else.

I’ve been reading fiction as I’m burned out by this hellscape of a planet

the vibes have been dogshit and everyone is nasty to each other

ever since the ban of nakoichi the sites activity level went down by half

The "ceasefire" in Palestine is still more or less holding. Ukraine is the same as ever. The US is looming over Venezuela but hasn't started a war yet.
I'm sure in a month or two we will have some new adventurism or world conflict to post about. Until then we can chill a bit

I haven't been posting because we're all waiting for the butthole post

for american posters i think december checks bounced. as for me, im currently busy doing ur mum.

I've always been more of a commenter so my contributions are going to be a function of activity. But also I've just been tired. My workday and commute usually add up to about 12 hours so my interaction with the site is usually just to check out 'top 12 hours' before and after bed.

i went back to shcool

HexBear is DYING! On December 11th 2024 WE HAD 978 user / DAY!! 1.47K user / WEEK. AND 1.86K user / MONTH, now we ONLY have 731 user / DAY. 1.15K user / MONTH. AND 1.5K user / MONTH. Then NEXT year we will LOSE even MORE user!

ⓘ This user is suspected of being a cat. Please report any suspicious behavior.

Got slapped with RTO chumpfuckery and immediately caught some kind of plague from my zoomer coworker who always stands next to my desk, does the iPad kid stare, and open-mouth coughs on me regardless of whether I have headphones on and my status set to "do not disturb"

So of course I had to go in and make a point of breathing pestilence all over my boss

What does this community value? To me it appears to be crass shitposting and masculine posturing above anything else. A flimsy foundation for lasting participation of anyone who isn't in on the tired joke, as it were. Additionally most of this website is plague rats and/or Americans in denial about the severity of both conditions. Ironic detachment is seemingly the only tool left in the face of heightening principle contradictions among one's cohort and if one wants to continually deflect everything as "struggle sessions" as so many here do then this will be the result: people leave. The question then becomes what people do you want to stay? I get this is a non-serious post but this place seems to be having something of an identity crisis lately that does not look like it's being addressed satisfactorily.

Walks by with a comically large hexbear userbase shaped midsection

buuuuurp

“No idea, comrade Snort_Owl.”

The "cool" posters all left last week for a holiday in the Bahamas leaving our sorry asses behind.