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

  • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    2·
    11 months 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.

    • Sphere [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      1·
      11 months 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.

    • thelastaxolotl [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      1·
      11 months 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

  • GnastyGnuts [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    2·
    11 months 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!

  • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    2·
    11 months ago

    In the beggining there was a dope ass bear hexbear-retro

    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.

    • Lovely_sombrero [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      2·
      11 months ago

      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.

      IIRC; The Donald was closed months before that by the TheDonald mods, since they moved to their own Reddit spinoff. You could only view posts, but not publish anything. So it was the opposite, they closed the lefty subs and then closed the inactive TheDonald to look evenhanded.

    • MerryChristmas [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      2·
      11 months ago

      The bullshit excuse was “calls to violence” against slave owners who have been dead for hundreds of years. It was “John Brown did nothing wrong” that got us quarantined, right?

  • mittens [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    will menaker shut down the chapotraphouse subreddit because it kept attracting too many people to his patreon. matt christman had made a vow of poverty with an eldritch being to manifest trump into the white house because it’d be hilarious and having too successful a podcast may have had devastating consequences, it managed to claim the life of lowtax…

  • SoyViking [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    One upon a time Vladimir Lenin made love to a bear from the deepth of Siberia’s forest. Nine months later a bear cub was born but this was no ordinary bear, this was the hexagonal bear promised in many prophecies, the bear who will lead the vanguard of posters to victory in the coming great proletarian revolution.

      • vomit_sounds [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
        2·
        11 months 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