Hello users of Hexbear, we wanted to inform you that we are going to be locking the_dunk_tank and dredge_tank communities. We have created two new communities /c/gossip and /c/counterpropaganda to serve a similar but clearly distinct purpose than the dunk/dredge tanks.
Not only is the dunk tank a term that has racist origins, but also many posts there were almost no effort and often times requiring later edits to show how they weren’t reactionary, not useful with regard to developing rhetoric and furthering dialectical analysis of that which we dunk upon.
To that end, we wish posts of reactionaries to be placed in !counterpropaganda@hexbear.net along with an accompanying explanation (as simple or complex as desired) with the intent of countering the reactionary propaganda in the post body, as of now comments are not subject to the same rhetorical rigor rule.
For the posts that are not "low-hanging fruit’ of notable people we ask that you use !gossip@hexbear.net .
These changes are mainly part of a continued effort to remove the racist and misogynistic elements from our community and grow.
Any moderators of the dunk tank or dredge tank that want to be a mod in the new communities let me know.
Any users with questions or comments please use this post, this change was made at the behest of the entire Hexbear mod and admin team. We will be looking for more moderators in an organized volunteer drive shortly, if you wish to submit an application you may send it to me via hexbear or matrix direct messages.
Use this post as a place for discussion to these changes. We will keep things as they are for 2 weeks and then reflect on the feedback, including this post: https://hexbear.net/post/3858346
As a personal addendum I am sorry if the closing of the tanks these changes removes a beloved space on the site and if you want to suggest a community to replace them you may do so at !commrequest@hexbear.net or submit a mod application to take a more active role in shaping the site.
Sitewide or community changes come from proposals put forth from the mod team, discussed, and voted on by the mod team.
Any users wanting to suggest a community to replace the tanks, may do so at !commrequest@hexbear.net current discussion is here https://hexbear.net/post/3858346 or submit a mod application to take a more active role in shaping the site.
You may also consider using !shitreactionariessay@lemmygrad.ml as a substitute for dunk/dredge tank posts as well
The mod statement can be found here: https://hexbear.net/comment/5613033
Application
What is your Hexbear username? Do you have any preferred pronouns? What are your thoughts on capitalism? What are your thoughts on imperialism? What are your thoughts on trans rights? What are your thoughts on racial justice? What do think about current and previous protests around the world? What are your thoughts on Veganism and Animal Liberation? Do you have any experience with other leftist online communities? What did those experiences teach you? What is your approach to moderation, and how do you work with teams? How do you deal with online drama and people who try to start things for the sake of it? What current comms would you be interested in moderating? Do you have any ideas for community engagement? What is your general time availability? (Time zone, amounts, common browsing times, etc)
I like the effort posts. When I was much younger and cruising the badphilosophy subreddit sometimes I’d get lucky when a comment actually explained the bad philosophy. it was illuminating at the time.
What do you mean by this? I can’t tell what c/gossip is meant actually meant for.
Edit: regarding the effort posts. I also appreciated the fact that /r/badphil was designed for just pillorying bad takes. It wasn’t a subreddit that was about “learning” (it had a specific rule against learning, in fact). It was just great when I could learn. I think there’s room for both. Effort, and vent.
In c/gossip you can “dunk” on public figures without effortposting
Rule 8 I think sums it up:
Recent Examples I can think of:
Maybe “Gossip” doesn’t exactly encompass the vibe fully.
The way I see it !counterpropaganda@hexbear.net is a place where you can post Ethan Klein doing Anti-Communist Agitprop and you must refute his Anti-Communism (example: Ethan in the last two months has said that Che Guevara personally shot a 12-year-old in the face for his beliefs during the Cuban Revolution). Where as !gossip@hexbear.net is a place where you can post Ethan Klein calling Hasan a “Tankie” and laugh at how dumb he is.
Who counts as a private person? It gets really weird once you get in to weird twitter/bsky and like you’ve got years of beef with @gwensnyderisuncivil and everyone in that circle knows who she is, but outside weird social media she’s a nobody.
I bolded what, I think, is the key part of this rule here. You can post private people, so long as they’re blowing up on the timeline or have significant amounts of engagement already. But if you’re just posting “texts from my neighbor” and effectively doxing them as a result, that’s probably no good.
But then again, I didn’t write these rules, I’m just interpreting them.
It seems very subjective. A post that goes fully viral might have 500k views, while a post in a much more niche community that’s still relevant bc it’s some organizer or fash influencer might have a few dozen. Like, public figures by the standards of msnbc? Or public figures by the standards of very online internet leftists?
I think we might be splitting hairs here, and naturally, everything is subjective. Because I could drill deeper and ask “Is the organizer someone organizing a national movement, or are they organizing a group of students at a community college?” I don’t know if the distinction matters. Not every Redditor leaving a comment though is also someone trying to be “In the public”. Even if they are, posting publicly. I think our issue derives from the language used in Rule 8 on the Dunk Tank, let’s look at the whole rule:
[preface: obviously, I welcome direct clarification on the intention of the rule from who wrote it, I’m going to provide my interpretation, maybe it doesn’t align with the actual intent, and this is in no way my attempt at putting words in the mouth of anyone here.]
The usage of the phrase “low-hanging fruit” implies easiness. Who are the easy targets, however? Elon Musk could read as an easy target, since, he posts some of the most base level dog whistles one might find. You could check in on Elon almost by the hour and find something worth posting. Anyone could dunk on Elon, right? It’s not hard to do, but it’s clear that’s not the actual target. The following clarifying sentence states:
I think we get hung up on all three parts of this rule. The “low-hanging fruit” part, the “Private Person” part, and the “Low amount of upvotes/likes/views” part. I think I understand the intent behind the rule, though:
The Dunk\Dredge split was centered around this rule, and it was clear some people wanted a Hexbear version of “Shit Reactionaries Say”
You can see the rule in motion if you compare the two mod logs side by side. There are a number of posts, even though they achieved high vote count, that were removed from Dunk Tank for violation of rule 8, either because the comments had low engagement or lacked a vote count to know if it was low engagement.
If anything, that is the defining part of the rule. Low Engagement. I could flood the Dredge Tank with content for hours by going to Reddit, finding a thread that is political or even vaguely political, and just sorting by Top and scrolling all the way down to the bottom.
I can see the thinking behind the change ultimately. Beyond the name change, there needed to be a harder distinction between the two communities on top of renaming The Dunk Tank. There was, however, a fun double meaning behind “Dunk Tank”. While Dunk Tanks are a real thing, it’s playing on “Get dunked on” which is rooted in basketball, and the comm was the “Tank”, where in it was filled with content the community could gather to dunk on. That in no way implies it should have kept its name, but “Gossip” as the replacement is really lacking.
Instead of “Gossip” it could have simply been called “Bad Takes”. Since, that is what the content was ultimately, a collection of bad takes. It’s still very on the nose, but at least more in line with the content. The other issue as well, is that the void filled by the Dredge Tank is now present again, since Gossip retained Rule 8, and Counter Propaganda is effectively !effort@hexbear.net React Edition. I feel Rule 8 also reads like an expression of some negative tendencies associated with Rule 1. If we’re linking directly to Low Engagement content, are we potentially encouraging a dog pile on someone with far less resources to deal with a dog pile? Rule 8 would mitigate that to some capacity.
I’ve read through a lot of the new comments since this thread was made, and I really do understand where the negative reactions are coming from. Getting consensus from the two user bases with some intentions for the change laid out up front probably would have gone a long way to making this change easier.
I feel like if rule 8 had just said “Obvious nobodies go in the dredge tank” and we relied on peoples’ common sense of what an obvious nobody is, then it would be so much easier. Trying to make lawyer-language-rules just invites rules lawyers
I’ve played far too much MTG in my youth, and now I can’t write rules without them turning into IF, ELSE, THEN statements fully nested to the core of the earth.
Same here, which is why it makes sense to me
If it’s obvious to you the person is a nobody, they go in the dunk tank. If you are in doubt, then it’s not obvious, therefore dunk tank.
I see. I guess this is using the established rule of “low-hanging fruit,” but that just made it sound like you cannot post things which can be easily rebutted. But it seems low-hanging fruit is being used to mean “things of low prominence/lacking notoriety”.
Yup, and I would add “things you don’t have the energy to critique but want to laugh at anyway”. I’ve desired a counter propaganda comm for a while without really knowing it, but those feelings never coalesced into a concrete idea, just this lingering thought of “Where do I go to get debriefed on this thing I know is propaganda” and not having a good answer. There is a lot of pervasive stuff, even new stuff, that is oft repeated and needs to be refuted. From Palestine, to Ukraine, to 2016 Russia-gate, on top of the endless amount of anti-communist history and beyond. I think the Gossip comm could be a kind of feeder comm for the Counter Propaganda comm. Take something from Gossip, cross post it to Counter Propaganda, and add the critique to the body or in a comment.