What's the history of Hexbear?

Hexagons are the optimal shape for stacking many bears

Can anyone give me a quick non-biased rundown on the 'vegan struggle session'?

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!

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.

CHAZ deserves a place on the list

i absolutely did not think we were gonna get banned until we did. I was making john brown post and saying BAN US YOU COWARDS. and then they DID.

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

I think we still have parental rights on Matt Christman

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.

The Volcels needed a vanguard.

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....

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...)

cant tell u rn im eatin a burger

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.

From an early age, young Hex showed a strong interest in the arts. Young Hex focused primarily on architectural representations, but their style was very awkward and stilted. Instead of progressing, they copied their works from nineteenth century artists, mainly. Hex claimed to be the founder of many artistic movements but drew primarily from Greco Roman classicism, the Italian Renaissance, and Neoclassicism. Given that there was little interest in their art, Hex soon had no other options, and found themselves on the front line, occupying a foxhole at the intersection of the Dardanelles and Gallipoli, fighting off massive swarms of flies and choking on unappetizing bread loaves. It was no place for an up and coming leftist to be and Hex, fully aware, soon managed to desert their post, fleeing for the relative peace of the Italian Riviera.

Started out as r/cumtown

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.

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.

I woke up, I found her, that's all I know.

Latest iceberg as far as I know (updated 2023-06-18), courtesy of @WIIHAPPYFEW@hexbear.net:

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

check out this dope ass bear:

The history of Hexbear is the history of class struggles.

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

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.