I have come to the conclusion that meta-posts suck. They drain everyone of their energy, and they quickly fill up with essay long paragraphs that I have no desire or attention span to wade through and fuck up my mental health.

Rather than focus on site-wide issues, the purpose of this post is to get feedback on this specific comm. What issues do you see here specifically that you would like us to focus more on?

I hope to address problems in a pinpoint manner, and then cross reference those concerns across other comms through similar posts in order to address the bigger picture in the end.

I have no intention of having this post pinned. Too much visibility will drown out everyone’s voices in a cacophony of noise. Please keep your comments relatively short and concise, using frequent paragraph breaks for longer comments so that the information can be easily digested. It helps with my ADHD

If this goes smoothly, I plan to work my way through other comms I moderate and address the specific problems there, too.

edit: I was advised to pin it to this comm, it shall remain unpinned to the main page though.

    • Philosoraptor [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      1·
      5 months ago

      Throwing my support behind this as well. I get why the renaming needed to happen, but splitting the comm into two never really made much sense to me, and just seemed like a solution in search of a problem. Reunite the comms, call it c/dunk or c/slop, and let people post what they want. I think the fear that the resulting comm will get flooded by type takes is probably overblown, but that could get addressed later if it turns out to be a problem. People who don’t want to see the dunking can block the comm. I can’t imagine that there are a ton of folks out there who had c/slop blocked but not c/gossip (or vice-versa) anyway. deep-nesting

  • KobaCumTribute [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    28·
    5 months ago

    Formally dropping rule 8 and mending the old dunk/dredge schism would probably be for the best imo. c/gossip’s purpose as the prestige slop comm is kind of unclear, and I for one say that all slop should be slop regardless of how prestigious it is.

  • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    11·
    5 months ago

    Merge /c/gossip and /c/slop into /c/slop and remove rule 8. Almost every change to the_dunk_tank/slop thus far has been disastrous:

    • Adding rule 8 to /c/the_dunk_tank. The old rule 8 was that the person had to be a “public figure,” which is so vague (I eventually settled upon “if the person has a Wikipedia article, they count as a public figure.”) It’s also pointless too. Why does someone having a Wikipedia article or a Twitch channel with an arbitrary amount of subscribers warrant different treatment from someone who doesn’t? It just feeds into weird parasocial bullshit. Like, a mayor is more of a public figure than some Twitter account with millions of subscribers by virtue of the mayor being a public servant and the Twitter account being an online rando, but good luck having anyone follow this because “public figure” is a vague term.

    • Splitting /c/the_dunk_tank into /c/the_dunk_tank and /c/dredge_tank. The (old) rule 8 was terrible, but instead of just rolling back the change, the admins decided to have two comms, one with the rule and one without. And people predictably just posted in the more popular comm because their submitted slop would get more engagement, which contributed more to the mod’s workload for no conceivable gain whatsoever to the point where the mods have long since completely given up enforcing the rule that they came up with. I also remember /c/the_dunk_tank, which had the old rule 8, had nothing but Musk tweets for a time since he fits the “public figure” criteria and UlyssesT really loves shitting on Musk.

    • Picking /c/gossip as its name even with its vaguely misogynistic connotations. I remember so many people complaining about it only for a minority to claim that calling it /c/gossip was “femmes reclaiming a misogynistic slur.”

    Getting rid of /c/the_dunk_tank because of its racist origins was the right call and /c/slop is a fine name for what /c/slop is. Now, we just need to merge /c/gossip with /c/slop and remove rule 8. People who don’t want to see transphobes seething about trans women in sports or Twitter fascists malding over interracial marriages can just block one comm instead of two.

  • PKMKII [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    10·
    5 months ago

    I’m fine with merging slop and chisme; while on paper the difference between them is clear, in practice the difference is too fuzzy to be meaningful.

    As long as feedback is on the table, the one kind of post on here I don’t like are the ones that are like “check out this reactionary’s hot take” and then it’s a screenshot, or multiple screenshots, of a 30+ comment-deep thread from some random lemmy instance or subreddit. It doesn’t feel in the spirit of the comm, especially if the person posting it is involved in the screenshot exchange. Not sure if there could be a rule regarding it, maybe a lightly-enforced brevity rule?

    • buckykat [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      9·
      5 months ago

      I don’t really see a reason for this and c/gossip to be separated. Is there a way to tell how many users are subbed to one but not the other? My guess is very few if any.

        • FunkyStuff [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
          8·
          5 months ago

          The original idea is that looking at posts of something that a random internet user with no platform and no power said as if it mattered is akin to digital self harm. Initially it was implemented as a blanket ban with no comm where it was allowed, but this comm was added as a substitute. Obviously a lot of people disapproved of it because it felt like admins were stepping in to take away content that users wanted to have, or were unnecessarily making a distinction where none was necessary. Hence the current situation where few users find that rule to be any good at all.

          • oscardejarjayes [comrade/them]@hexbear.netMEnglish
            6·
            5 months ago

            honestly I think the slop takes of important public figures can be just as much self-harm. Have you seen the kind of things Elon Musk posts?

            If important people ever say anything worth hearing about, it’ll end up in c/news.

          • Trying2KnowMyself [they/them, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
            4·
            5 months ago

            Personally, there are absolutely times where consuming any type of slop is bad for me, but I generally find the people who have a bigger audience to be more harmful than the ones who don’t - it’s easier for me to dismiss a shitty take from a nobody than someone with a large following. Overall, that tends to mean that stepping away from all types is the best route for me if I need a break, but that basically means I need to entirely tune out all current events.

            Part of where the lines sometimes get too blurry for me is that an r/conservative post with 1.7k upvotes might be posted by a nobody, but it absolutely has reach, while I had no clue who Heather Morgan was until recently, and yet the distinction between the comms wouldn’t help me to filter down to either set of bad takes, even if rule 8 were enforced here.

            • FunkyStuff [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
              4·
              5 months ago

              There may have been some people who felt that way, yeah. But they were either a minority or far less vocal than those who felt the mods were making a change for no reason.

        • Infamousblt [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
          5·
          5 months ago

          Mostly some people only wanted to see big celebrity sort of goss while others wanted to still post random Reddit nerds or no name Twitter weirdos. So there’s a comm for each

        • KobaCumTribute [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
          4·
          5 months ago

          I really don’t get why it was done

          The old containment comm for posting weird and horrible takes to mock or brigade instituted a rule requiring things posted there to not just be random bad takes from random nobodies with no engagement or support (and this threshold, although never specifically defined, seemed to be around the level of “a reddit comment/post that had at least around a hundred votes on it”).

          A second comm was made for the real dregs people dredged up somewhere, the random twitter posts with no engagement, reddit comments with single digit scores and no replies, etc.

          Both of those got shut down and replaced with renamed equivalents (c/gossip for the high profile stuff, c/slop for the rest) in a struggle session that saw a notorious power poster most known for finding and posting the absolute worst dregs (and for killing Henry Kissinger) delete his account and leave the site.

      • Trying2KnowMyself [they/them, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        5·
        5 months ago

        I don’t either - perhaps it was too implicit, but part of saying “drop the rule” was intended to also be “and close c/gossip in the process”. I’m sure someone has the power to see the deltas, but it might require database queries - I certainly can’t see more than that slop has 704 subscribers and gossip has 514 (and I’m subscribed to neither).

  • Diva (she/her)@lemmy.mlM
    8·
    5 months ago

    I like the grab-bag slop-trough approach of Lemmy drama, random reactionaries on twitter, literal AI slop, posts that belong in other comms, etc.

    I’d be interested to see if there’s anything people would like either more of or less of.

      • Trying2KnowMyself [they/them, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        4·
        5 months ago

        And in case it’s not clear - I’d love to hear from anyone who agrees too. I upvoted because I want to understand, but presumably the other folks upvoting are doing so more out of agreement.

        If I’m coming across as in any way combative in my replies elsewhere and anyone would like to provide their thoughts without having me engage with them further, I’d like to also make it clear that if you want to “pre-emptively disengage from further comments” just let me know and I’ll not reply.

  • Thordros [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    7·
    5 months ago

    Merge all dunking communities into /c/dunking

    This includes the dunk tank, gossip, which is less racist and more misogynist also gossip but in Spanish which makes it less misogynist somehow, and also slightly more racist? EL CHISME, and slop.

    That’s it. That’s the post.

  • Speaker [e/em/eir]@hexbear.netEnglish
    6·
    5 months ago

    Mfs in the comments saying “oh, merge c/slop and c/gossip” don’t know what the preparation for a decapitation strike looks like, apparently.

    In seriousness, the distinction between the two comms is too esoteric to be enforceable and most people don’t read the sidebar.

    Merge would be fine, though I am putting a card down for “6 months from now c/trough splinters into 12 comms that differ only on some hyper-specific ideological point”.

  • dead [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    5·
    5 months ago

    My suggestion is that comms not be divided into “good thing vs bad thing”, but instead posts be categorized by who is involved and the material impact of the subject. People most often complain that there are posts about things that they don’t care about, so basically this splits posts into order of material importance. We are materialists after all, right?

    Category 1) news-worthy events

    government actions
    politicians doing things or talking about policy
    world events

    category 2) political events and formal commentary

    political figure says something related to policy
    political organizing
    opinion essays/articles

    category 3) cultural events (ex https://old.reddit.com/r/Fauxmoi/ )

    political figure says something unrelated to policy
    celebrity says something or does something insignificant
    internet personality says something
    social media trends

    category 4) snark (ex r/ShitLiberalsSay)

    stupid things that non-famous people say
    non-famous internet posts that you hate
    internet personalities that you would be ashamed to talk about in public

    Category 4 is stuff that you can’t explain to a stranger in public. Example, some misogynist on twitter writes a screed about women in video games.

    Right now, c/gossip is most similar to category 3 and c/slop is most similar to category 4.

    I also would like to consider the idea that “c/gossip” shouldn’t just be dunking on things, but instead an observation of pop culture. Roger Waters. being pro-Palestine and Thom Yorke being a Zionist is kind-of in the same category of discussion. Someone who doesn’t know or care about who Thom Yorke is, also probably doesn’t care about Roger Waters.

    Hexbear currently lacks a place for posting cultural events. There are niche entertainment comms, there’s no comm for general cultural. Every newspaper has a culture/style section.

    I think c/gossip should be a general pop culture discussion, which could include dunks on public figures, but also good things that celebrities do, or weird things that celebrities do. Let the commenter on the post decide whether the thing is good or bad.

    Then have c/slop be the dredge comm where you can make fun of internet posts that you don’t like.