askchapo

CHAZ deserves a place on the list

affiliated with the podcast

yes this place is affiliated to a podcast

For around its first year of existence (when it was still called chapo.chat) this site was a bit of a dumpster fire, despite having mostly great admins and users. Constant struggle sessions, user drama, some actual wreckers, and heavy-handed moding (some of it justified, some not as much) made for an often toxic environment that bled users. Capped off by one of the founders getting doxed and falsely accused by a rightist op.

Thankfully things have calmed down alot since then, and we've gone from regular exoduses of users to stable (if small) growth, with a considerably kinder and chiller community.

Even still I try to avoid dramaposts or struggle sessions just cause I remember how bad things can be when they dominate discussions.

Hexagons are the optimal shape for stacking many bears

Alright I'll have a go.

The CTH subreddit got quarantined. Partly for being a leftist subreddit that was revolutionary and blasting off in popularity, and partly because it was run like a crack house and its userbase behaved like that's exactly what it was. This was hilarious and partially responsible for its popularity, but also not so good when it comes to placating admins. This of course gave them pretty easy excuses to come down on it.

The quarantine didn't work however, quarantines on reddit are supposed to kill subreddits. They're supposed to stop growing and they're supposed to go into a decline spiral that leads to them eventually just fizzling out. For CTH this was not occurring, it continued to grow albeit at a slower pace. Only a ban could stop it.

Many reasons are given for the ban, "slave owners should be killed" is the main one. I don't think it matters too much what the exact reason was because they wanted to do it and would have found anything to excuse it.

The ban came unexpectedly and the subreddit was not prepared. A very hasty lifeboat was set up on discord which turned into a shit show for various reasons because discord always turns into a shitshow.

Then Chapo.Chat was born. Eventually people decided to rename it Hexbear because association with the podcast was hurting initiatives to reach out to people, many of which didn't want to be associated with the podcast. Thus the name Hexbear was born, which worked out really because Chapo.Chat already used Hexbear as its logo, very little change was necessary.

The site started out pretty much just like r/CTH, utter chaos and a lot of emotions that probably could have led to it being closed down if various people weren't convinced to just continue the long march and pushing on. It mellowed out considerably over time.

The name Hexbear itself literally just comes from the "Look at this dope ass bear" meme that was extremely popular on the subreddit.

In the beggining there was a dope ass bear

The sub started as an unofficial sub for the pod. Over time it became a focal point for the " dirtbag left", unapologetically hostile and uncivil leftists who wnated to name names and apply blame where it belonged instead of playing the normal civility politics game. It was initially boosted by hope for the bernie campaign and then became a kind of maladaptive group therapy thing.

The sub culture was "all posting is good posting" and we posted a lot. We were the second or third most active sub by post velocity, in roughly the same bracket as the nba sub with millions of members. That made the sub extremely visible beyond it's membership numbers. We also gained a notorious reputation for being bernie bros when the dems were going hard on discrediting bernie's street level movement.

And when people would come on to the sub to complain at us we'd bully them ruthlessly.

All of this was embarassing to reddit. One of the far and away most active subs were a bunch of cruel leftist assholes who loudly supported bernie and were mean to everyone. Spez is a nazi, reddit is a psyop, and libs and fash alike are delicate in the face of critique, so we became the specter haunting reddit.

Seriously people were so fucking mad the subexisted. We were constantly accused of brigading although i don't think we did much. The usual tactic was to @ shitheads to lure them in to the cth sub and then crucify them.

Evetually the admins quarantined the sub on some bullshit excuse, along with most of the other left subs. But that wasn't enough to stop the red and black menace, so when /r/thedonald finally did enough terrorism to force reddit's hand they banned all the left subs at the same time on bs pretenses.

That's what eventually spurred the creation of this site.

Latest iceberg as far as I know (updated 2023-06-18), courtesy of @[email protected]:

Web version, in case you want to search for specific text. Originally posted at https://hexbear.net/post/273309.

The Volcels needed a vanguard.

It started as a good subreddit. I was the only actual leftist on the subreddit though.

check out this dope ass bear:

I think we still have parental rights on Matt Christman

Started out as r/cumtown

Any one have a copy of the "my dad works at reddit" post that predicted us getting bothsided by reddit a day later ?

That's our lore.

Historical bit: Shoutout to and the Kerryposters as well! I forget if the kerryposters were just mega-shitposters or actual wreckers, but the Silver legion guys (guy? I don't know how many there actually were) were so fucking melodramatic about their wrecking attempts. Some of their self-aggrandizing quotes are still used as site taglines today!