I must admit I mostly lurk there and never quite made the jump culturally to lemmygrad, but I do respect your opinions and the last few days are making me feel a bit insane and wanting an outside perspective. I’ll explain and provide links for context
A longtime user got banned for bad behavior in live chat on hextube. That part isn’t all that surprising. But then we got dueling impersonators one and two making meta posts about the ban and a notorious also-banned user he had conflicted with a long time ago (melina).
This was… mostly just annoying, clearly someone was doing a nasty bit, but mods just banned them both and the site moved on which I guess is fair enough.
Fast forward to today, and we have an account (not brand new, but not a longtime account either, only a few weeks old with limited post history) purporting to be our resident China guy (and China doomer, to some extent) from the news mega, posting a long winded story about going to xinjiang and getting 1984’d or whatever. It starts to feel like it could be a bit as it gets more and more absurd, but this user was always very serious from what I recall.
If this is a troll/psyop I guess it’s a good one because this garbage is giving me a fucking headache. What do you grad’ers think is going on? Were any of these real or all impersonators (and relatedly who? melina?) Am I just too autistic to get the joke? Is this a fed psyop? what else could be going on?
Sucks that I just have to assume everything is some irony poisoned bullshit and try to parse it as an inscrutable joke, and then fail, and then ask everyone else to explain to me like I’m a baby. I don’t have this issue anywhere else in my life, even online, I never have. Frankly I don’t think it’s good or acceptable behavior, it just feels socially corrosive, but I probably just need to log off.
I’m not gonna judge hexbear on this cause I don’t really go there much, so it wouldn’t be fair to try to judge based on limited info. But FWIW, I can say as a general principle, that I think “bits” and lefty politics tend to go together like oil and water. Jokes are cool and normal in my book, and the occasional sarcastic representation of the opposition’s views is not going to end the world. But especially online, if it’s not a person others are familiar with for having clear lefty views, and the goal of the bit is to lean into it so hard that some people could be fooled, the priorities are off IMO. The normalization of that stuff is one way that Schrodinger’s Douchebag style messaging can get through. (Whether any of this applies to hexbear is not something I can properly judge. Just saying “generally”, how I feel about it; you aren’t the only one who doesn’t love certain kinds of clowning.)
I’m sure everyone has their own tolerance level for it but I don’t completely disagree. the grad can feel a bit stuffy but times like this I wonder if that’s not for the best.
But I will say hexbear is 98% fine for me, as an insider. I mostly get the jokes, and there’s some social norms about what is and isn’t appropriate in which comms. its a relatively few people who take things way past where I’d draw the line, both in bits and in just like, sheer aggression and uncharitability/uncomradely behavior
Gotcha, so sounds like a fringe issue of things going too far then. But nevertheless something that bothers you, which is fair.
The normalization of that stuff is one way that Schrodinger’s Douchebag style messaging can get through.
I was trying to say something akin to this in a comment above. Well said.
Times like these I think “I’m glad I’m not online enough to get all this”
Yeah and being extremely online still didn’t save me from the embarassment of making this post. its highly overrated.