Greetings dear lemm.ee folks,
I have noticed an increasing number of lemm.ee users dissatisfied with Hexbearians. Reading through the modlogs on hexbear.net, I have observed truckloads of lemm.ee users being banned on hexbear.net, meaning that they won’t see any Hexbearian’s reply to them since Hexbearians aren’t able to see their comments. Despite this, I have yet to see the complaints from lemm.ee die down. May I politely ask, what is it that makes so many lemm.ee users hate us? And, how can we improve? Thanks!
I humbly request that all parties involved in the comments refrain from using slurs or name-calling to reduce the workload on mods and admins.
This type of thread does not work. There are too many misunderstandings and wrong assumptions between users, people treat each other as enemies and the thread just devolves into a flame war. I expect this thread will need to be locked very soon.
I am 100% convinced that the negative image many Lemmy users have of Hexbear is completely wrong. These “hexbear discussion” posts are just a constant escalation, where more and more users mutually attack each other, and these attacks pull in further “neutral” users into the conflict, forcing them to “choose sides”. It’s completely unnecessary and in fact counterproductive - I am sure that in fact most of us want the same things, such as good living conditions for all humans globally, sustainable use of the planet’s resources, etc.
I really hate seeing users get harassed on Lemmy, regardless of what instance they are registered on. I don’t really know how to solve this constant drama and internet fighting (other than simply isolating users through defederation, which I’m not interested in doing), so if anybody has any ideas, please let me know.
Side-note: over the past few weeks, I have received several DMs from users directly attacking me for not defederating Hexbear. This instance is provided through volunteer effort, I am not planning to respond to feedback in the form of demands or attacks, so I am not responding to these DMs directly, but I will write a generic response here:
yeah as much as I comment on stuff like this, it really doesn’t go anywhere. I fundamentally do not understand where the intensity is coming from or why people are so upset
the only thing I know to recommend is that if a user is not having an enjoyable time online, or if they’re still thinking about forum arguments for days/weeks, they should take a leave of absence from the internet entirely. Maybe it would be difficult but I think perhaps moderation should look for people who seem to be using these websites in an unhealthy way and send them a DM asking if they’re ok. Ask them how their experience with the site is going and ask if they’re becoming obsessive or find themselves often feeling angry or tense. If that’s the case then the best thing is to recommend taking a break from being online for a while
Sunaurus, I respect your opinions deeply- hexbear is a problem. They are engaging in outright brigading and vote manipulation to push their desired political content to the top of our instance, overwhelming users here.
That being said I don’t want to defederate from them either
Crying about “brigading” is the most Reddit thing one can possibly do
That’s what it is 🤷♂️
Brigading is when people comment on a post on their front page but I don’t like their opinions. Someone has to do something about this!
Vote manipulation is when they are more popular than me.
What am I supposed to do when I see political content I agree with? Am I supposed to avoid interacting with it? If I see something I find disagreeable, am I also supposed to ignore it? How am I supposed to interact with political content? We’re not doing any kind of malicious manipulation. You make it sound like we’re hackers unfairly using the website and that’s not happening. We upvote things we see that we like. We can’t downvote, since our admins disabled downvoting. We comment on political stuff we don’t like.
Am I just not supposed to be here at all?
I see. I did observe how people, both lemm.ee users and hexbear.net users, in this thread are just criticizing each other without opening their mind to what the other side has to say. I think this thread has already become a flame war, and I apologize for starting this. Do lock the thread if you feel the need.
To solve the harassment, maybe you could try using the approach that our (Hexbear) admins have taken? Namely, liberally banning Hexbearians like how we purged dozens of lemm.ee users a couple days ago?