this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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They're just an annoying bunch of wannabe communists who sound incredibly smug and post a ton of stickers in comments. Having said that I've moved to lemm.ee when lemmy.world defeterated from hexbear.
There's a lot to unpack in that one. First of all, how do you even gatekeep being a communist? Surely you don't hold a degree in Marxist-Leninist thought? Nor are you a hexbear yourself.
Or perhaps since you have this perception that we are all petite bourgeoisie (mostly white) in the imperialist core that we can't actually be communists (ignoring how paradoxical that is)
Perhaps communism in your mind is only for the "orient" and global south. Those in the "West" must just be play acting.
When you guys mention the imperial core, what are you talking about? DC? Hollywood? Wall Street? Brussels? London? Paris? Berlin? The Hague? Where is this imperial core you keep mentioning?
It's another term for 'the West' effectively, so the US and Western Europe.
I genuinely would like to understand what you guys at hexbear are about but every time I poke my head into that instance you guys are "dunking" every other instance with language nobody else understands. It's very alienating.
Lol that's fair. We've developed a pretty insular culture over the past three years and I can see how it's hard to decipher.
you guys are also like, just huge dicks without provocation. like all the fucken time. 99% of what i see from hexbear users is either condescension or outright hostility.
usually how conversations go is this
I see a reply to a post by a liberal stating a point which we regularly debunk
to help them see why they might be wrong, I politely, and in good faith, though often with a little force, push back on it and explain why they are incorrect
they then smugly and condenscendingly reply with a sentence like "Oh, so you've come along with your CCP/Kremlin propaganda now / Oh great, the Hexbear horde has arrived / Actually, it's much more complicated than that [refuses to elaborate] / Actually, you're wrong because of [link to wikipedia]"
we then start dunking given that they aren't operating in good faith
perhaps reddit's typical style of "debate", where you smugly reply thought-terminating cliches and decontextualized quotes at each other while being variously awarded and downvoted, is more harmful and damaging to actual discussion than our style of "You're wrong, here's why you're wrong with a bunch of references included, hell, most of them are to western media because if I don't then you'll start screeching 'CHINESE CCP XI JINPING PROPAGANDA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH' at us"
additionally, we have no downvotes, and haven't for three years, because it just fosters anonymized disagreement and even harrassment without any constructive points being made. thousands upon thousands of times, I've seen arguments become people just saying quotes like "Well, communism works on paper but not in practice" and "If you sacrifice freedom for security then you deserve neither" or "Did you know that the Founding Fathers warned against parties?" and just a hundred other pseudo-points gathered from a lifetime of being exposed to various kinds of media and irl interactions, without even the slightest curiosity as to the underlying philosophies and ideas and complexities and nuances behind, say, what authoritarianism really means, or whether democracy is necessarily "when you have elections" or if there's something deeper, or even just the basic histories of the USSR and China and Cuba etc. the average Westerner's knowledge of anything beyond culture is as wide and deep as a puddle. I'll even be a little self-depreciating and include myself in that, though I am actively working to improve.
no matter how often you remind people that downvotes should only be used for comments that don't "contribute to the discussion", no matter how good their intention, downvote systems online always devolve into "I dislike you and/or the point you're making and I'm not going to explain why. fuck you." disagreement on Hexbear can only be done through posting and replying, and sorting these things out through discussions (or "struggle sessions") rather than building up silent resentments over time that split everybody up, and because of that, it's by far the healthiest online community I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot. it's also why we come across as overbearing - even if we had only a third of the members, the site culture of "if you disagree, reply and tell them, you can't downvote" means that we're all used to commenting a lot and could overwhelm other instances which are more used to downvote-and-move-on tactics.
GOOD post
honestly it's a pretty friendly instance all told, we just have p strong feelings about politics and bigotry
and admittedly a lot of us have little patience for the worst among you bc we deal with that shit permeating society at every level on a constant basis
Oh, so you understand how everyone else feels about you then.
:smuglord:
Yeah, cognitive dissonance hurts, so you respond aggressively, perfectly understandable, if disappointing.
hey ditto! i have very little patience for the worst among you, because when i look through comment sections looking for discourse i instead see you fuckers starting the same 5 arguments.
also, coincidentally, i see a lot of folks from marginalized groups specifically complaining about y’all being insensitive and shitty. it’s hard to respect what you say your motives are when your camp is acting like it is.
Really? cause when I look through comment sections it's always liberals spewing the same fucking lines, and acting like everyone they disagree with can't possibly also be from marginalized groups. (In fact most seem to take the fact that you disagree with them as prima facie evidence that you can't be from a marginalized group!)
The amount of casual misogyny, racism, and generally sickening comments I've seen has shot through the roof since we federated, and it's exclusively been coming from lemmitors.
Give me an example of a user from Hexbear being racist/transphobic/homophobic etc.
Just one. Please.
we'd 'brigade' ourselves if he even found one lol
If this is how you initiate discussion - with hostility - then that experience does not surprise me. Consider being less shitty yourself.
I find that very hard to believe. The websites modteam is majority LGBTQ+ we have a diverse group of users, and this is because the mod team takes bigotry very seriously. If you see any bigoted takes please report them, and also please give me some examples of this from hexbear users.
Now that's a lie if I ever saw one lmao
"All the they/thems in this thread are bigots, they're actually right-wingers!" - WTF is this take
I see a lot of hexbear users be provocative, but I've yet to see it without reason. It's in response to someone else acting in bad faith. When you see someone act rude, take a step back and consider why they are acting rude.
Not to say we don't have users that are too quick on the draw of the ppb, but your website certainly has cantankerous assholes as well. Every site has.
Hexbear just has an incredibly low tolerance of debatebros, smuglords and bigotry, which I would say has fostered a site culture that allows for a wide variety of opinions to be shared, a deep analysis of current event and which is a safe space for LGBTQ+ members - our modteam is majority LGBTQ+.
Hexbear - "that's true, I see how our culture can be hard to decipher"
Lemmylib - "you guys are huge dicks without provocation"
Hexbear - oh well fuck you then :)
Lemmylib - "see, so hostile!"
If we respond to people being needlessly aggro with quip derision it's "so uncivil!" If we respond to people in good faith by trying to explain our differing views it's "wow im not going to read that!"
So what should we do?
You have a very strange idea of "without provocation"
Honestly your best bet is probably to do some reading first, unfortunately. A lot of Hexbear dialect is that way because it's tied to concepts that come from books and thinkers we're broadly familiar with.
If you're more into video stuff you could try this guy. I think he's pretty approachable.
Actually if you went into the megathreads and asked most people would probably give you suggestions too. We are fiesty but in my experience we also like to be helpful to people with questions.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/channel/UCGog4JPn5-W3_XIKccENysg
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
We're literally just communists. Read any introductory text to communism and 99% of what we say will make sense in context.
Well, I'd be more than happy to have a good faith discussion with you. No dunking, I promise 🙏
You've caught me going into a busy Labor Day weekend but sure, I'll think up some questions to ask.
If you ask good faith questions and give context for why "Hey, I'm a liberal and I don't understand X could you explain what you mean?"
You WILL get excellent engagement and people will give you very good answers
its easy, and if you genuinely want to learn give it a shot
New tagline dropped @[email protected]
Seriously though you are more than welcome to ask, I would recommend the news mega. If you ask questions in gold faith there's a wealth of users willing to interact with you
To be clear in the dunking threads folks are not usually engaging in good faith with us. When I was on another server and replied with actual questions to stuff everyone was incredibly nice to me and explained stuff super well. Can agree though that folks can see dunking as alientating. I promise though if you can get past that it's one of the friendliest communities I've found on the web.