No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
Childish? Kinda. Insane? No.
There are three relevant things to say about hexbear.
1. It is not a serious instance. Or at least not completely serious; they're mostly there for memes, funposting, "I know that feel" etc.
So they're less like the meeting room of a communist party than like the bar where those communists hang out and drink beer, after the meeting is over.
I feel like this is often misinterpreted, as HB users say something that is mostly a taunt and others interpret as actual argumentation. And it also tends to attract younger users, who... well, behave like young people?
2. Even if not a serious instance, they're serious about their views. Your typical HB user is communist, antifa, vegan, anti-cop, and interprets things in a very specific way. They're rather transparent about it.
And, because of #1, they aren't really willing to spend their time entertaining anyone's counterpoints. It'll be interpreted as sealioning or similar.
3. Hexbear was already its own thing before federation. As such it developed social norms that often conflict with the norms typically found in the rest of the Threadiverse (Lemmy, Mbin, Piefed etc.)
For example, even if Lemmy as a whole is prone to intrusive political discussions, HB users tend to do it far more. Because they're used to an environment where this is typically taken as OK.
When it comes to dealing with HB users here, my advice is the exact same as dealing with other users:
This is the most reasonable response.
A lot of people here have long since made up their mind about hexbear based both on repeated meta posting on the topic and possibly a bad experience or two with them on a topic they assumed was uncontested but is a landmine topic for communists of a particular bent
I've personally never had a bad experience with hexbears, possibly because I'm more empathetic to their perspective, but more likely because I know when it's time to disengage. There are users on lemmy who feel strongly about a certain topic that's abrasive to hexbear users and dig in their heels when jeered at (or maybe feel a personal responsibility to stand them down) and are usually the users here who have the most complaints, because the standard reaction from hexbear users is irreverence (both the users and the mods).
Unlike a lot of liberals coming from reddit, communists often don't have delusions about the neutrality of moderation and so they'll ban you on a whim if they think you're there to stir shit. They use the ban hammer judiciously even with users on their own instance. That's often the biggest complaint both with hexbear and with lemmy.ml.
To be fair I've had a few bad experiences with Hexbears, but I think that most of them boil down to "unfunny guy interacting with unserious kids". But since I'm often lurking there in my political account, I feel like my opinion about them is a bit less ungrounded than this whole "Hexbear bad! EDIT WOW THANKS FOR THE GOLD KIND STRANGER!" echo chamber.
(I also have a few bones to pick with .ml [the people in charge, not the whole instance], but they don't apply to LG or HB, it's a matter of transparency.)
Interestingly those points all applied to The_Donald as well.
I think that this is a red herring.
Even if the first two points apply (do they? I don't think so, but I'm not going to dispute it*), the problem with T_D was neither, it was users there actively promoting hate against marginalised groups.
And, while you can complain a thousand things about Hexbear, they are not promoting hate against marginalised groups. On the contrary - if they even smell that you might be potentially promoting it, they'll ban you under a "better safe than sorry" approach.
*reason: I don't care about USA internal politics.
Ah yes, famously communist, antifa, vegan, anti-cop the_donald.
Thank you for saying this in a more detailed way than I have been. This is exactly right. They built their own leftist haven and became a whole culture of their own, and then became federated. There is bound to be an initial clash, but honestly I think most of the people who hate on them never gave them a chance. All they saw were the shitposts and the in-jokes and you closed the door.
I see a lot of leftists (and leaning leftists), even on .world, who would be better off interacting with the users there (maybe blocking the shitposting comms). And outside of those most-seen comms (chapotraphouse and dunk_tank), there is genuine conversation and less shit talking and in-jokes. I believe, with more instances coming in that are federated with them (mine, .ml, and lem.ee? are a couple), some of the Hex-natives are understanding how to interact with curious left-leaning people with unintentionally wrong-headed ideas.
Downvote me all you want, I stand by Hexbear. o7
Answer me this: are they or are they not consistently in support of Russia/China? Because I've seen it a lot from them (and blocked the instance soon after joining Lemmy when I noticed the pattern).
Is it just some big joke that went over my head?
Support for PRC? Yes.
Support for the Russian Federation? Purely the anti-NATO role it takes, Hexbear hates Putin and the reactionary nature of the Russian Federation.
Yeah, the famous antifa-tankers. Every single person I've ever seen that identifies as antifa was a tanker. Other people run away from that label.
I really hate that I need to point this out, because I feel like it will derail the discussion from Hexbear to fascism:
"Antifa" boils down to "people who actively oppose fascism", instead of either supporting it or sitting on their hands while doing jack shit.
Maybe you can clear this up then:
Why does everyone there unequivocally, wholeheartedly, unquestionably support Russia?
Russia has barely a trace of communism anymore and it is hard right oligarchy that fits almost every definition of fascism. Not to mention HEAVILY racist and anti-LGBTQ (I have multiple friends who were from Russia and they were the ones who originally told me that before I saw it for myself in Russia)
Yet the "antifa" hexbear will literally down vote you to hell and ban you if you say anything even slightly bad about Russia.
Also news@hexbear is 80% articles about the war with everyone citing Russian propaganda as absolute truth and every western media, every human rights group, etc... is completely lying about the war.
An interesting juxtaposition as they are in the same way pro Palestine and cite those human rights groups as telling the absolute truth in that case
I don't know for sure. I'll voice a strong belief in this regard, but take it with a grain of salt.
I think that Hexbear's views on Russia is a specific case of a general tendency that you see all across social media (not just HB or Lemmy): to dichotomise complex matters into exactly one good side and exactly one bad side, while assuming that everyone belongs to those two bags. It should go like:
It gets messier when you add Ukraine into the equation, or consider people conflating governments and populations, but it should give you an idea - it starts with somewhat sane premises but quickly devolves into insane lack of logic.
It explains nicely why they're supporting Palestine, even with the apparent contradiction: Israel is associated with USA and thus with NATO.
IMO their dichotomy in this topic is idiotic. However it is not just from their part, and blaming specifically Hexbear for this, like some people would do, would be unjust (and a self-demonstrating example). We, people using the internet in the 20s, are collectively doing it.
By the way, you see another example of the general phenomenon in this comment chain. Ctrl+F "elephant shit" and look at the comment I was replying to - "you either treat two types of bad as the same, or you're defending one."
[Now I probably drew the ire of all sides at the same time. Frankly? I don't give a fuck; I'm too old and grumpy to play along.]