I know it was originally a spin off of the chapotraphouse subreddit but I don’t know much else. Is it it still affiliated with the podcast? How has it grown etc? Why was the subreddit closed etc.

Give me the lore, baby

  • chauncey [he/him]English
    1•2 years ago

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

  • Lester_Peterson [he/him]English
    1•2 years ago

    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.

    • Awoo [she/her]English
      1•2 years ago

      Hold on let’s be real here, the subreddit was also a dumster fire. Chapo.Chat continued what was basically exactly the same thing that had been occurring on the subreddit.

      The modding was actually significantly worse on the subreddit you had several mods that would just do shit because it was funny, which was great in its own way but in no way could you call it professionally run. The subreddit was “dirtbag” in every single way.

    • thelastaxolotl [he/him]English
      1•2 years ago

      I remember it all started because some vegans shitposted in c/food about how to cook a dog and some people took the posts too seriously until it affected all the site

      • Abraxiel [any]English
        1•2 years ago

        It was specifically that they kept posting variations of it until it got a rise out of people. That’s also a lot of why indigenous practices became such a touchstone in the fight. Because someone finally replied to those posts that their culture actually did traditionally eat dogs and that was the spark that caught.

        • ElHexo [comrade/them]English
          1•2 years ago

          someone finally replied to those posts that their culture actually did traditionally eat dogs

          Fucking Switzerland at it again

    • Sphere [he/him, they/them]English
      1•2 years ago

      Without going too deep down the rabbithole (because doing so risks re-igniting the whole thing), vegans basically said standard vegan type things about how eating meat is morally indefensible, and people who ate meat got very angry about it, and people on both sides engaged in argumentative tactics that were bad and offensive and got the other side very angry. It lasted like several days I think, across several threads, and led to a lot of mods, admins, and even devs burning out on this site, and even now there are still a lot of hard feelings about it on both sides.

      Edit: I should probably clarify that while vegan struggle sessions had always been a thing here and there, this one was precipitated by an attempt to lifeboat the VeganCircleJerk subreddit, which was full of users who were very outspoken about veganism, often in ways that even many vegans would find abrasive.

  • GnastyGnuts [he/him]English
    1•2 years ago

    Historical bit: Shoutout to silver-legion 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!

    • VILenin [he/him]MEnglish
      1•2 years ago

      My favorite one was when they gave a Hexbear apocalypse date prediction and then the site actually crashed on the date they gave

    • HornyOnMain [she/her]English
      1•2 years ago

      Oh god yeah those guys were great, that time they pretended that that PSL member who publicly left was one of them in disguise was also pretty funny. though it’s a shame she left because she seemed pretty cool

  • DiltoGeggins [none/use name]English
    1•2 years ago

    Hex was conceived in a Paris brothel, fathered by a liberal priest and a notorious whoremonger from Brussel. As far as we know, there was no mother involved. From the beginning life was disturbing for young Hex, certainly it was no Paddington “bell vita”. At the age of 18 (months) Hex was placed into foster care by the French Aide sociale à l’enfance (ASE), which operates within a strong framework on a territorial basis, with priorities and protocols being decided in each of France’s 101 départements. Unknown to most, the agency is source of a notorious human trafficking network, and so it was that young Hex found themselves living rough, on the mean streets of René-Goupal, a notorious quarter of Montreal, or as the Chicagoans pronounce it, Moan-real… (TBC, should sufficient interest manifest itself…)

  • Shinji_Ikari [he/him]English
    0•2 years ago

    When the subreddit was quarantined, a couple diaspora communities were started in anticipation of a ban. One being the discord server, the other was this lemmy instance crafted up.

    There’s basically no affiliation aside from the origin story of coming from a sub named for the podcast.

    The sub was closed over “violent threats”, basically the members would not stop saying that john brown was right to kill slave owners and that slave owners should be killed. Many think that the sub was banned mostly to keep things equal when the_donald was banned. I think it was a combination of fash reddit admins taking offense to violence against slave owners, and using the_donald banning as an opportunity to say “look we hate all extremism”.

    Edit: lmao how did i get it so wrong, I’ve been here since the first days and I’ve totally forgotten the details of how it went down, and I was fuckin addicted to refreshing /r/cth.

  • Awoo [she/her]English
    1•2 years ago

    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.

  • vomit_sounds [any]English
    0•2 years ago

    You forgot the part where beatnick made the post that called the discord server the literal vanguard lmao

      • vomit_sounds [any]English
        1•2 years ago

        Discord had some rows and people got antsy, beatnik made a post where the only thing I remember was calling the discord ark after the reddit ban the literal vanguard and something like comparing this to bolsheviki in exile or something, quite the exaggeration and it coincided with banning what would later become the Kerryposters I think