Another point there is that the tankie triad is actually HEAVILY moderated - any comment remotely reminiscent of possibly being negative (or perhaps not supportive enough?) about Russia, China, or North Korea gets removed.

This is untrue, a common criticism about china on hexbear is their continued trade with the zionist entity for instance. There is especially quite a bit of criticism of Russia, especially about their homophobia and stamping out of worker initiatives.

but the fact remains that they are HEAVILY curated echo chambers.

I have yet to see an instance where a person respectfully disagreeing gets modded. I’ve been on hexbear for 3 years and I’ve seen people post about every topic under the sun. Yeah if you come in and post tank man with some smug one-line people will respond in kind, but I have also seen good-faith discussion with liberals and on contentious topics

Having personally witnessed mods calling for users to kill themselves, then doubling and even tripling down on that, I for one have no trouble believing any of the thousands of other stories about Hexbear’s toxicity.

This is not what happened. I know this because you’re talking about me^[1] and there was no suicide-baiting involved. What happened was that a user posted a “cutesy” comic about the SA scene in stardew valley involving Shane with no content warning. In the scene Shane kisses the farmer out of nowhere, without their consent and later apologises is for it because he knows it’s wrong. The comic even goes further into the “poor Shane just needs some love” angle than the game itself iirc.

I pointed this out at first politely:

That’s not cute. The second panel is quite clearly not an invitation. And the kiss is quite clearly not expected. And he clearly knows it was wrong of him to do so. This man does not respect boundaries.

Actually you know what this comic got me really mad, from the “guilty puppy” look, to the “i just had too much to drink” this is classic SA apologia.

Oh also she is completely stunned. Limp, while he is forcing himself on her. Textbook SA.

Not to say it wouldnt have been SA if she had reciprocated, but it’s just so much more obvious.

Then the mod of that community came out to defend with this stuff like “it’s posted in the stardew valley community”, “it’s just a game”, “shane’s really depressed and an alcoholic”, “the playable character has shown interest in them” all in one reply. Just a cornucopia of SA apologia. Now I’m not gonna pretend that I was absolutely clear-headed here. A person very close to me struggles with CPTSD, and on a bad day a comic like that might have sent them into a seizure, might even have hospitalized them for a day depending on how they fell when they seize up. And that’s the more violent, visual part. It affects them every day, it has literally disabled them, it robbed them of their future this is not “just a game”.

So the first time I say “I wanna shoot you. It’s just a comment.” this is in in direct response to his “it’s just a game”. The full line is

Secondly: the fact that your first line of defense is “it’s just a game” makes me want to shoot you. It’s just a comment.

I wanted to highlight here the kind of violence we are talking about that is getting pushed aside with “just a game”, in a “what if it was targeted at you, but brushed aside as ‘just a comment’” kind of way. Admittedly I could have phrased that more clearly but I was very agitated. I believe emotions are an important part of conversations and showing that this is important to me on an emotional level and not just a debate where we trade arguments was important. Also I was trying to vent my anger at this whole aspect of society in what turned out to be an unproductive way.

The doubling down on it was me getting more agitated because I heard these trivializations myself in real life and I have to grit my teeth and look for a diplomatic way of resolution, the name of the game becomes harm minimization, and processing it later in a safe environment. It can take days to get back to a normal daily routing not to mention the injurious effects of repeatedly getting confronted with people downplaying or ignoring their trauma. So not having to do harm minimization here I fly off the handle. I believe there is a special place in hell for people (and especially men) who refuse to stand down and defend this kind of shit, but it’s not my place to send them there.

The “tripling” down is actually me backing off and simply saying “I hope [they] die soon”. Because at that point they even acknowledged the harm that the comic can cause but refuse to do anything to mitigate it. So I hope they just go away before they deal more harm.

Firstly, there has been a shift on hexbear away from dunking and more towards explaining but it’s a process. You can check the Code of Conduct on Hexbear that got revised a couple months ago. The “dunking” culture stems from back when the community was on reddit and was a self-defense mechanism to not have to deal with people constantly trying to get smug zingers and one-liners in. It was actually hexbear (then chapotraphouse) that was getting brigaded. And lastly you won’t see me do it again because (and it’s actually that instance that showed me this) because it does more harm then good and doesn’t actually help. So I will continue to swallow my thoughts, be more polite and process them later on.

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1. https://hexbear.net/comment/5518159 ↩︎