Yesterday was intense for everyone. Some quick updates as of last night:
- A large amount of the sitemod team has stepped away from the project. Other comrades from the community have volunteered to pitch in and been modded.
- Some core devs also stepped away from the project. For the time being, you should not expect any further development of new features or bug fixes as we reassess our capacity.
- Main has been locked. No immediate plans to unlock.
- Registration is closed and will remain so for the time being.
We 100% understand and support everyone who left yesterday and are also looking forward to the next stage of Hexbear.
We're probably not going to be making any additional announcements or formal communication until after the weekend at the earliest. Thanks.
Site team really needs to compartmentalise community management and PR from development from moderation.
The combining of all areas creates a mentally draining and emotionally exhausting environment for the entire group. You need a very specific type of attitude to deal with it day in and day out. Those working development should be kept away from it. High turnover in team members having to handle that should also be expected.
Really think the team should consider instead structural changes in the organisation rather than complete abandonment. The problem isn't that we're dealing with anything unique, the problem isn't that the site is dealing with anything that any other site doesn't have to deal with, the problem is that organisation is a mess of people trying to keep up with absolutely everything every single team is doing instead of just focusing on their own thing.
It doesn't matter if there's a small drama outburst in one comm or another or whatever. They're small short lived events that get handled and the community moves on from them.
Too many team members are involved, too many are getting emotionally involved. Things should be handled by a much smaller number of people and those that are part of that should be the types of people who can take an emotional step back from events.
Agreed. Please DM me if you're willing to help organize this, we could very much use the help.
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There are 74+ accounts in the modchat. It is a free for all.
Burn out keeping up with that incredibly online space is not at all surprising to me.
We have other working channels besides that, but I also agree additional organization is necessary.
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I don't know. I think that a lot of burnout comes down to a need to DECREASE the amount of drama various key individuals have to be involved in.
In essence, the goal should be for decision makers and the incredibly important developers to be as separated from the emotional impact of decision making as humanly possible.
I'm sure there are various things that could improve the lives of users but the problem first and foremost seems to be that there's structural issues in the team that requires structural changes to address turnover problems with volunteers. The first and foremost issue there is to prioritise key team members and making sure turnover and burnout happens as little as possible with them. When they burnout things get really bad. That hurts the whole site, users included.
Emotional impact on key team members seems to be the most pressing issue at hand.
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The other side of this is user expectations. The site hasn't got limitless resources and the team isn't paid to work on it fulltime despite the fact being that they clearly are working on it fulltime.
User expectations need to be readdressed, probably with some change to site branding, in order to adequately communicate to users that this is a project, that it is developing. Good but likely to have various flaws and kinks to work out through further work. Other major project have the sense to use the "beta" tag for this, Hexbear probably needs to consider something like that in order to manage/communicate that people set their expectations at the appropriate level.
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Yes, admins I’m begging you, allow some back channel from union to admins for hasty/(presumed yeasty) bans/concerns, which is filtered through some judgement. Or to relay stuff back from mods to there. Right now it exists in hanging state, where people are lucky to receive some answers, so disappointment builds there without info (or get banned, which is bad)
deleted by creator
Well, yes, I mean faster response from this inbetweeny relay. Last time drama happened admin posts in union have gone like a lead ballon, if I remember correctly. So now union just exists with occasional bans, but otherwise silent treatment
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This.
This definitely hits the nail on the head.
I come to this website (like the sub before it) to basically just shitpost, read shitposts, maybe occasionally learn something or teach some people something. I see an obvious drama thread that triggers the red flag in my head, maybe I'll read some of it out of Bile Fascination for shits and giggles and eye rolls, but I'll almost never engage with it. If I even click on it at all.
This is really the kind of attitude you have to have when approaching this bullshit on the internet. Yeah, I have some deeply held opinions on these topics, and frankly, they've so far mostly gone against the grain of the authorities/majority opinion here at least in broad strokes. But I also know just how fruitless and unnecessarily stressful and emotionally taxing it is to engage deeply with online arguments like these. After years of taking yelling at people on the internet way too fucking seriously, I know when to just keep my mouth shut and walk the fuck away. It's not that important.
When I was a terminally online lib in my early Reddit years, a frequent user of /r/SubredditDrama among others, going way way way too fucking deep into the anti-GamerGate rabbit hole, that level of time and emotional investment into petty online argumentation led me to a very dark place when Trump won in 2016. My response to that (aside from deep depression, identity crisis, and an escalation of my alcoholism) was to almost immediately cut myself off from all political and meta-internet communities, basically everything except sports. Eventually I suffered a second identity crisis and came out at the end as a communist, diving back into the online world as a result, but I knew then from experience how deeply toxic and self-harming it is to become addicted to meta-internet drama. It's equivalent to turning self-medication into self-harm.
Remain detached, at arms length, from this kind of shit. It's not worth it, and considering this community past and present already attracts emotionally unstable personalities becoming addicted to that is almost literally making suicide a self-fulfilling prophecy. Stepping back and bricking up a barrier of ironic detachment is, in this case, a lot healthier than binding yourself intimately to these topics.
This post hit the nail on the head.