Lately I’ve been seeing posters here express some form of the sentiment that Hexbear has fallen from its previous heights of glory and now we post amongst the ruins of greatness. This is not a response to anyone in particular, and I don’t want to call anyone out. In fact, it seems to be a normal human tendency to romanticize the past. But I’ve been here since the beginning and want to provide an alternate view.
1. Hexbear just isn’t like it used to be. 
This is one I am particularly suspicious of, since people started posting this after the site had been around for a couple of months. Before that they posted about how chapo.chat wasn’t like the old chapotraphouse subreddit. If the good ol’ days ever existed, they always seem to have been just prior to the current moment. If anything the site culture and vibe have been remarkably consistent since its inception, for better or worse. Faces have changed, people have come and gone and sometimes come back again, but Hexbear remains.
2. People used to be nice here and treat each other as comrades. Now there is just a culture of shallow dunks. 
Seriously? Be for real. I’m not going to deny that we love a good dunk around here, but let’s not pretend that this is a new phenomenon. It’s a big part of the culture around here that predates the site and even arguably even the subreddit. You can be free to like it or not, criticize it or not, say its productive or not, but its definitely not a new development. There’s always been a lot of love and mutual support, but also a lot of vicious arguments intracommunity arguments here. If anything I think there’s less of this now. The early posters would laugh at what passes for a struggle session around here these days. The VCJ struggle session seemed at the time like it might legitimately end the entire site.
3. This site had the potential to be a place for organizing and building something rather than just posting. 
This one is an interesting counterfactual. From the beginning there was no clear agreement on what the ultimate purpose of the site would be, and there were definitely people who saw the site as having revolutionary potential. There were also people who saw it as a place to hang out and shitpost among comrades and were skeptical of its potential for organizing. Over time, I think it’s become clear that we’re closer to the latter than the former. I’m okay with that, personally, but more than that I think it’s worth considering why despite having a lot of smart, determined people on the site, organizing never really materialized, or if it ever had that potential in the first place.
4. People used to post effort posts and stuff and now its just a bunch of shitposting. 
It’s always been mostly shitposting. This is one of my first comments on this site. It’s hard to say if there really used to be more effort posts or not, but what’s stopping you from writing an effort post if you feel like Hexbear needs more of them? I’m doing it right now, and so can you.
One thing that really has changed is that we used to have more comrades actively working on developing the site. Hopefully more people will step up to do that (not me though because I can’t code).
In conclusion, Hexbear is mostly, for better or worse, as it always has been. Enjoy your time here without worrying about whether it measures up to some imagined glorious past. If there’s something you feel is lacking, step up and contribute it. This site is nothing more or less than the sum of our contributions.
- Hexbear just isn’t like it used to be.
Does anyone actually miss how Hexbear used to be? I’ve been here since day one, and most of my memories of the first twelve months or so are of endless drama, Kerryposting and people being awful to each other. Remember when people hated the mods so much that a lot of people called for “mod elections”, and then the mods called it a “colour revolution”? That shit was ridiculous. People on hexbear are really good to each other now compared to the chapochat days. Look at any of the trans threads, mental health threads, self-improvement comm, anywhere in the megathreads.
personally my favorite memory was the vegan war because holy shit was it easy to dunk on carnist arguments, I was like fuckin Lebron James for an entire week until the mods had to shut it down because we were too powerful
Oktherebuddy
I don’t know how to read.
1: Hexbear is dialectics in action. Shit is constantly changing. Stagnation is death.
2: we’re all in a polycule marrage with everyone that posts here. sometimes we’re nice and kind and loving to each other. other times we’re catty bitches that take really mean swipes at each other and won’t talk for days at a time afterwards.
3: Lol no.
4: The one constant I remember all the way to CTH sub is a bunch of shit posts that are more often than not X, formerly twitter, screenshots with the occasional real gem of an effortpost. We are all content hogs digging through the muck and sub-par slop with our snouts looking for truffles.
you are getting older and getting boomerbrain when you nostalgiapost. keep your brain young and go out and learn something new.
This site was extremely aggressive and full of constant fighting and struggle sessions in the early months. The people who couldn’t just accept that this isn’t Reddit and your fellow posters should be given the benefit of the doubt either mellowed out or left and I think this place is better for it.
It was filled with infighting for… a lot longer than that i feel
In the effortposting post I made this point and I think it stands for basically any cultural quirks we have here aside from maybe our more deeply held ideologies. This is a really small site - according to the stats in the side bar there are less than 1000 visitors per day. I would love to see what the daily comments per user distribution looks like but I suspect the median is close to 0. This means that the site is just really suceptible to noise. Small numbers of users who do particular things like effortposts can become part of the ‘culture’ even if it’s really just like 3 people. When a couple of those people get tired of doing it and leave then things are no longer ‘how they used to be’.
I think this applies to more than just effort posts. The ‘culture’ is going to change pretty rapidly in some cases because it’s not really a culture. It seems like a culture because our view as an individual user is zoomed in but in reality it’s just a handful of people doing a thing and they might stop doing that thing at any time.
People are funny things. Change too much and they’ll say you’ve jumped the shark, change too little and you’re accused of being stale and outdated.
Honestly, I think we have a good number of silly and serious posts. Although I do want to start making more effort posts.
I think the problem with using Hexbear to organize is the danger of being doxxed. It can make it hard. I think more posts about union tactics and organizing, how to spot feds etc etc would be welcome.
This site does do good though. Particularly when we get together and donate money to our struggling comrades. I think what we do does help people, even if it’s not much.
If people want to get more serious I welcome it though, theres always a good reason to help people get some real praxis done.
Like you said, this site has survived so many crazy things. I doubt it’s going to die anytime soon. Hell, I’ve been here long enough to remember that people have been crying wolf about the site since day one, lol.
When I first found this site back in 1999 by opening Netscape Navigator and typing “Can bears have more than five sides please?” into AltaVista, it was perfect. I think the Y2K bug hit this site particularily hard.
hexbear was better when it was a bbs
Eh it was really at it’s peak back in the 70’s when it was an underground zine. It turned downhill fast when it’s main editor got kicked out of the scene for creeping on little girls - It was a different time!
Pshhh, everyone knows that we were at our prime when we were the main delivery service for Yippie activities to be coordinated without USPS surveillance
As somebody who was on the subreddit then here, the subreddit was quite different.
For starters, the subreddit was about a million times more active. You could read a whole front page of new threads (sorting by hot; not new), come back an hour later, and the whole front page would turned over. That amount of content is night and day different.
With that much increased activity, there was also a significantly greater amount of people who posted there, including a lot of chuds who walked in. This presence of chud posting allowed for easy dunk for people to rally around, and I think served as a lightning rod to deflect sectarianism. It’s that combination of obviously wrong posts deflecting dunks as well a moderation policy which allowed for dissent and questioning of some mod’s orthodoxy (which is something this hexbear’s moderation policy does not allow - hence why in spicy threads you will sometimes see heavily upbeared posts deleted) that I think fostered more interesting comments.
So yeah, idk about the rest of your post, but insofar as you’re questioning the differences between the subreddit and here, I’m a bit confused. They were definitely very different places with different vibes. Maybe you prefer the vibes and smaller posting culture here - fair enough. But it was quite different, so if somebody preferred those differences then pining for the good ol’ days makes sense.
This post is really just about Hexbear. I also was on the subreddit, and yes it was a lot different than here for both better and worse
Nostalgia is reactionary.
An Internet forum is never going to be a place to seriously organize. That happens IRL. It is nevertheless important to build community, that is a precursor to real organizing. I have lived in very right-wing areas in my life, and something like Hexbear can be an oasis for isolated leftists.
If anyone is concerned with the quality of Hexbear, then it’s ok to feel bad about that for a moment. But then step up and make the change happen. I personally don’t find it a waste of time to have a space where leftists can vent or just feel like they aren’t crazy to think the world sucks. Shitposting is praxis on some level, even if it’s not massively changing the world.
I’ve always been interested in the third point. has there ever been a solid proposal for the site could have been, organizing-wise? Or is it just vague gesturing towards Organizing as something that we think is good and based and that’s it
People talk about organizing a lot but I honestly don’t even know what effective organizing looks like in the imperial core. irl it seems to mostly become reading groups, marches & demonstrations, or charity. Which is fine I guess but like… the concept of volunteering has been around for a long time and that’s pretty much what this ends up looking like? The only thing I’ve encountered that really seems like a viable route to power is salting workplaces, which requires (literal) full-time commitment. I’m sure there are also some hard-to-find organizations that do various types of sabotage for people who are willing to run the risk of spending 20 years in prison.
Salting and organising for a union is good organising in the imperial core. A lot of the more dogmatic users on this site do not enjoy this, because it involves cooperating with people who aren’t their particular strain of leftist.
Interacting with local orgs can be good, and if you have experience with activism then joining and helping political youth groups is also good. Creating parallel power structures is also a good thing. While conditions for a revolution aren’t around, they won’t come unless you help them arrive. Creating a sense of community helps facilitate further organising. Some users on this site will mocn this sentiment because you’re not mortaring your local alderman or demolishing the walls of your local prison. This is because they do not understand that twitter posts aren’t representative of real life.
They will call for
though I doubt they themselves have ever or will ever do anything like it.Yes I am bitter
Edit: To make it simpler and practical - If you work in a place with no union, talk to your colleagues. If you have the time, talk to your neighbours or get involved in a local cultural or political “scene”. This involved showing up physically to events and talking to people and getting to know them. Maybe there’s squatters or people arranging blockades or whatever, they will definitely need help. As will people organising protests - which I do not think have an effect in themselves, but they are good places to grow a platform for other action or activities.
If you have special knowledge (like legal, worksman, martial arts, language, whatever that might be of use) make it known to these groups and help them either by doing stuff for them or by teaching them. You can also do stuff like: Bake bread for the houseless and hungry and pass it out, volunteer in a soup kitchen, volunteer elsewhere. Helping as a volunteer is both good in itself, but also in the long run something that helps build a base for other actions.
How much time you can and will devote to this is completely up to yourself.
We should all do
and I am definitely not 
.Organizing doesn’t really seem like something that should be done on a public forum. Just join an org, I’m begging y’all.
deleted by creator
It was borderline-wreckers who wanted all the Chapo stuff removed and podcast links and stuff avoided so they could get DSA or PSL people to use the site or something. It was dumb as hell.
Hexbear and its predecessor CTH have always been shit, will always be shit, and that’s the way I like it thank you good post.
also - because once again it is relevant and it is funny
Hexbear has to be serious at all times and we cannot find any humor in the absurdity of hell world. The last time I smiled was on June 29th, 2020. I wear a dirty ushanka at all times, do not shave, and only take cold sponge baths because hot running water is bourgeoisie decadence. Every day at exactly noon I have the same DunkTank posts of a 200 follower twitter account saying some dumb shit that wouldn't be paid attention to in even an 'open discussion' 100-level Political Science course at a private university. I sleep in a bed made of meta-jokes from every banned ChapoTrapHouse subreddit so that they are never forgotten. In the evenings I stare at a picture of Matt Christman by candlelight, but I do not allow myself to chuckle because there is nothing to laugh about. Every Hexbear comm has banned me after I dared to make a 'sectarian' joke about assassinating the Anarchist mods. There is no plumbing in my house. I shit in a brass bucket with a picture of Gonzalo and Deng french kissing in the bottom of it. My house is actually an overturned T34 in an abandoned junkyard in Wisconsin. I have a single friend in this world and it is a tapeworm named Bordiga that I met after ingesting spoiled borscht on 9/11 in the ruins of building 7 (I blew it up after finding that a nominally leftist NGO inside of it wasn’t sufficiently anti-imperialist, the attacks on the world trade center were a perfect revolutionary moment for me to enact direct praxis against liberalism). My source of income is various MLM schemes in the former Soviet bloc that have been running for so long no one remembers who I am, they just keep sending money. I have not paid taxes since Bernie Sanders lost the Democratic nomination for president and my faith in electoralism died more brutally than my childhood dog after it got into an entire jar of Tylenol. I own 29 copies of Capital and three crates of translated Maoist writings entirely incompatible with it or any other theory I own. My double PHD in Marxist Economics and 18th century Swiss philosophy (required to understand Engels) sits over the fireplace of my home, my fireplace is a salvaged drum from a 1950s washing machine that outdoor cats use as a litter box. I chose that washing machine model on purpose because I am anti-natalist. During the latest BLM protests I was posting on Hexbear in the middle of a peaceful candlelit vigil. Virgil Texas and I wrote hatemail to one another for 7 years until my final letter made him realize that disappearing from the internet completely was the only way he could salvage his leftist persona after his alleged pedophilia was discovered. The only leftist podcast I listen to these days is Well There's Your Problem. Bong Joon-ho and I dropped acid together during a visit to the Korean DMZ and he went on to write the movie Parasite about our time together. The best way to test whether an electrical wire is live is to drool on it and shrimp salad is racist. You can make an IED out of potassium and the instructions are online thanks to Timothy McVey, who was actually a committed antifascist communist slandered by the deep state as part of operation condor. Every time a liberal mod removes one of my comments, I carve a mark into the wall. I am running out of walls. When Amerikkka finally collapses I will be ready to lead the revolution thanks to the serious discussion curated across Hexbear. I am very smart and people like being around me.
This was my first post, I don’t think it’s changed that much. I feel like every time I’ve checked in since /r/cth went down it’s been only more welcoming, so maybe it has.
I’ve been here since the r/cth days and imo this place is about as good as it’s ever been. There was a 1-2 month period right around the start of federation where it became 100% dunking on idiot libs 100% of the time, which got a bit tiring, but I think things have stabilized and this is a basically good place to hang out online. Honestly I’m really happy with the state of the fediverse in general, I’m enjoying mastodon & lemmy more than I ever did twitter or reddit. We did it! We fucking did it! We built a real actual place to hang out online that doesn’t just feed into some VC’s pockets! And all we had to do for that is do what we do best: posting (and a lot of unpaid work on the part of people building & maintaining the infrastructure lol).
Mastodon, like Tiktok, inexplicably becomes good if you stick to images of pics of wildlife, zoos and landscapes etc
In conclusion, Hexbear is mostly, for better or worse, as it always has been
I am mostly criticizing a recent peak. I’ll be realistic that the tone has always been semi-hostile (when it wasnt extremely saccharine) with people being angry you said something tongue-in-cheek or trying to start a fight over the correct way to shit or something, but I feel there was a spike and I like to think the people here can do better - but at the end, I don’t care that much anymore. It’s what it is. Everybody’s gotta be the smartest and the bestest, even online
Everybody’s gotta be the smartest and the bestest, even online
I’m here to be the dumbest.
