This came up in an unrelated thread recently so I’m just going to paste something I said last time this came up, with a couple edits:

It’s been very sad watching this place decline after years of what felt like one of the few truly vibrant leftist spaces on the internet. I do have my own thoughts and opinions as far as a diagnosis for the decline, but I think they’re right in line with what you’re saying. The series of major struggle sessions where the moderators and admins were at odds with seemingly most of the users on the site were in my opinion what dealt the heaviest blows that this place never really recovered from. But what you’re saying about how “left-signaling” has always been an issue here is at the root of those struggle sessions.

There was a comment that a lemmygrad user made almost a year ago that got to the heart of it and expressed the issue better than I could hope to. Here is just a small part of it.

Without this educational and patient emphasis - and without structures that help democratize the way the organization communicates and functions - the group becomes at risk of toxicity and focusing endlessly on grievances based on whoever is “in charge” at the moment. Sometimes you get lucky and the people “in charge” keep things running well and avoiding turmoil. More often, you get toxic cliques, subsequent imbalanced application of norms, and a treatment of comrades as primary enemies. creates burnout and alienation between everyone.

This instance is increasingly tending towards the latter, with calcifying cliques at various levels that are increasingly hostile towards the userbase. They frame this using communist and liberationist language, though often inconsistently.

It is a much longer comment than what I just quoted, the quoted part alone doesn’t really get at the heart of it, so it’s worth reading in full. The comment was removed for “dismissing legitimate issues as tokenization” (perfectly exmplifying the point) but another less campist or beligerant mod reinstated it fortunately. It should be noted that the meaning of who is “in charge” isn’t necessarily the mods and admins, but can just as easily be a nebulous group of frequent commenters who tend to set the mores of site culture. Incidentally, I think a lot of the problems have actually died down. Hexbear feels significantly less cliquish now than it did roughly a year ago. It is also significantly less active, but that’s because of the damage that has already been done, and even if it’s not as bad as it was, the problem never entirely went away.

May as well tag @purpleworm@hexbear.net since I was speaking to purplworm in the pasted comment, who had some important things to say that I was responding to.