I think we might be splitting hairs here, and naturally, everything is subjective. Because I could drill deeper and ask “Is the organizer someone organizing a national movement, or are they organizing a group of students at a community college?” I don’t know if the distinction matters. Not every Redditor leaving a comment though is also someone trying to be “In the public”. Even if they are, posting publicly. I think our issue derives from the language used in Rule 8 on the Dunk Tank, let’s look at the whole rule:

Rule 8: The subject of a post cannot be low hanging fruit, that is comments/posts made by a private person that have low amount of upvotes/likes/views. Comments/Posts made on other instances that are accessible from hexbear are an exception to this. Posts that do not meet this requirement can be posted to !shitreactionariessay@lemmygrad.ml

[preface: obviously, I welcome direct clarification on the intention of the rule from who wrote it, I’m going to provide my interpretation, maybe it doesn’t align with the actual intent, and this is in no way my attempt at putting words in the mouth of anyone here.]

The usage of the phrase “low-hanging fruit” implies easiness. Who are the easy targets, however? Elon Musk could read as an easy target, since, he posts some of the most base level dog whistles one might find. You could check in on Elon almost by the hour and find something worth posting. Anyone could dunk on Elon, right? It’s not hard to do, but it’s clear that’s not the actual target. The following clarifying sentence states:

“that is comments/posts made by a private person that have low amount of upvotes/likes/views”

I think we get hung up on all three parts of this rule. The “low-hanging fruit” part, the “Private Person” part, and the “Low amount of upvotes/likes/views” part. I think I understand the intent behind the rule, though:

The subject of the post should be someone of influence. This could be someone whose clear goal and intention is to launder their reactioary sentiment through their relitive social status / social capital. The subject should not be your average commenter, or someone simply shouting into a void. These low impact, and low traction posters are typically every day people engaging with their given platform. If you wish to dunk on those people, “Shit Reactionaries Say” fills that gap. The exception to this rule are posters from other Lemmy instances federated with Hexbear, for what I am interpreting as an invitation to engage with the poster directly via our federated connection.

The Dunk\Dredge split was centered around this rule, and it was clear some people wanted a Hexbear version of “Shit Reactionaries Say”

You can see the rule in motion if you compare the two mod logs side by side. There are a number of posts, even though they achieved high vote count, that were removed from Dunk Tank for violation of rule 8, either because the comments had low engagement or lacked a vote count to know if it was low engagement.

If anything, that is the defining part of the rule. Low Engagement. I could flood the Dredge Tank with content for hours by going to Reddit, finding a thread that is political or even vaguely political, and just sorting by Top and scrolling all the way down to the bottom.

I can see the thinking behind the change ultimately. Beyond the name change, there needed to be a harder distinction between the two communities on top of renaming The Dunk Tank. There was, however, a fun double meaning behind “Dunk Tank”. While Dunk Tanks are a real thing, it’s playing on “Get dunked on” which is rooted in basketball, and the comm was the “Tank”, where in it was filled with content the community could gather to dunk on. That in no way implies it should have kept its name, but “Gossip” as the replacement is really lacking.

Instead of “Gossip” it could have simply been called “Bad Takes”. Since, that is what the content was ultimately, a collection of bad takes. It’s still very on the nose, but at least more in line with the content. The other issue as well, is that the void filled by the Dredge Tank is now present again, since Gossip retained Rule 8, and Counter Propaganda is effectively !effort@hexbear.net React Edition. I feel Rule 8 also reads like an expression of some negative tendencies associated with Rule 1. If we’re linking directly to Low Engagement content, are we potentially encouraging a dog pile on someone with far less resources to deal with a dog pile? Rule 8 would mitigate that to some capacity.

I’ve read through a lot of the new comments since this thread was made, and I really do understand where the negative reactions are coming from. Getting consensus from the two user bases with some intentions for the change laid out up front probably would have gone a long way to making this change easier.