well. to my everlasting shame it was the very website this post features. I got hooked in when it was still part of reddit. I was an angry young adult coming out of a terrible home situation and their collective “righteous fury” was appealing. after the move to a separate website, it just got worse and worse. hexbear, formally known as chapochat, had destructive drama outburtsts every single week right from the start.
I think it started with thousands of active users and rapidly dwindled down to only a few hundred because of how hostile and rigid it was. I was one of the few who stuck around because my warped sense of the world didn’t reveal how bad it was yet. I thought about quitting during many of these ridiculous “struggle sessions” as they called them. but something kept me hooked.
when the current ukraine-russia war started, the cracks were widening. a subsection of hexbear started to dominate. they were more openly bloodthirsty. they stopped pretending to care about the common people, which is what I cared about, and were cheering on the killing of civilians and conscripted soldiers. they posted videos of ukrainians getting shot and blown up accompanied with the site’s absurd emojis and weird in joke phrases. they were also just extremely hostile to anyone who wasn’t lockstep with their view. they would use vicious insults and accusations against naysayers and the mods would almost always rule on their side.
I rarely ever participated in the arguments up to that point because I didn’t see a reason to, but I got in fights with people about this. they were treating war like a football game and it really rubbed me the wrong way. but then that subsection of the site started to contain themselves mostly to the “news megathread” which I could easily ignore.
I became less and less interested in hexbear as time went on. I think other people were noticing these disturbing trends too because the number of active users dwindled down to around 150-200. the remaining users were the worst of the worst. so fucking mean and nasty, in that abusive family type of way. they proclaim themselves to be friendly, proclaim hexbear to be a welcoming and caring community, tightly knit, when behind the curtain they are horrible to each other. of course I had only ever known that type of life so I didn’t see it for what it was and continued to use the site.
I finally had a breakthrough internally and got the courage to go to therapy and try to reckon with the damage my upbringing did to me. and once that started to work, hexbear’s rose tint rapidly faded.
now I look back on my several years as a hexbear user with so much embarrassment. I can’t believe how much hatred was in my heart. I try to forgive myself and remember that I was young and broken and taken advantage of by malicious people online but I was old enough to know better. once in a while I’ll check hexbear out just to remind myself of how much I’ve grown and improved. I see people in there who claim to be in their 30s and 40s and i feel disgust at how they are manipulating young adults and even kids as we see here. I feel sad for them too. I don’t think anyone that old would be part of such a group if they didn’t have a seriously damaged worldview.
wow. sorry to dump on you. just seeing someone so young get roped into hexbear brought up a lot of feelings.
After discussing that event before, the rule I settled up on is ‘Valid for a newbie to Lemmy’.
Newbies shouldn’t be exposed to the nuances to server vs server infighting IMO. But this post while there’s an element of it here… Has enough other benefits that I think it can stay.
This isn’t a post I’d put up here, but it doesn’t seem to be so server-vs-server focused to trigger my worries for a newbie reader. A newbie probably would see hexbear and not really know the full context (as the post really doesn’t focus on Hexbear aside from in passing).
The other post was so egregious it crossed the line for me. But this one is fine and can stay up.
It’s not the server vs server part that I’m against. What I am against is the anti-newbie kind of drama that’d turn people away from Lemmy. If newbies are coming here feeling like Lemmy is full of people yelling at each other or making fun of each other’s communities, that’s a bad thing that I’m worried about.
But this post: I can see where your concerns are. But from the ‘Is a newbie going to be disgusted by this’ ruling I made before? I don’t think so. So that’s why this post can stay.
Thanks for writing that out. I didn’t post this intending to break rules or stir up drama. I thought it was interesting on its own merits, in essence the same as “How I left Scientology” or “How I left Jehovah’s Witnesses”. I also thought the mention of dwindling users was interesting. If you’ll excuse the LessWrong link (which is a site with its own weird in-group thinking), here’s an essay called “Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs” that talks about that effect.
Doesn’t seem to be dwindling at all, not sure where that idea came from. Hexbear has remained as one of the most active instances. WAU is at 1.4k, MAU is at 1.8k. Funnily enough, Hexbear’s users tend to be more consistently active on average.
I can’t really seem to find a good way to see active user growth over time. That site has a chart at https://lemmyverse.net/instance/hexbear.net/user-growth, but that only goes back to January, and a simple user count isn’t really enough to say anything. Something like https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats but per-instance would be pretty informative, especially going back a few years.
At any rate, this is the sort of productive conversation that I thought would be good to have about the post.