this kid is eventually going to look back on this era of their life and shiver from embarrassment. I’ve been there
Was it alt-right or communism for you?
I started as alt-right, realised I actually like queerness. Then I went communist, realised murder is childish and how much I was being played and then decided to do my own thing.
well. to my everlasting shame it was the very website this post features. I got hooked in when it was still part of reddit. I was an angry young adult coming out of a terrible home situation and their collective “righteous fury” was appealing. after the move to a separate website, it just got worse and worse. hexbear, formally known as chapochat, had destructive drama outburtsts every single week right from the start.
I think it started with thousands of active users and rapidly dwindled down to only a few hundred because of how hostile and rigid it was. I was one of the few who stuck around because my warped sense of the world didn’t reveal how bad it was yet. I thought about quitting during many of these ridiculous “struggle sessions” as they called them. but something kept me hooked.
when the current ukraine-russia war started, the cracks were widening. a subsection of hexbear started to dominate. they were more openly bloodthirsty. they stopped pretending to care about the common people, which is what I cared about, and were cheering on the killing of civilians and conscripted soldiers. they posted videos of ukrainians getting shot and blown up accompanied with the site’s absurd emojis and weird in joke phrases. they were also just extremely hostile to anyone who wasn’t lockstep with their view. they would use vicious insults and accusations against naysayers and the mods would almost always rule on their side.
I rarely ever participated in the arguments up to that point because I didn’t see a reason to, but I got in fights with people about this. they were treating war like a football game and it really rubbed me the wrong way. but then that subsection of the site started to contain themselves mostly to the “news megathread” which I could easily ignore.
I became less and less interested in hexbear as time went on. I think other people were noticing these disturbing trends too because the number of active users dwindled down to around 150-200. the remaining users were the worst of the worst. so fucking mean and nasty, in that abusive family type of way. they proclaim themselves to be friendly, proclaim hexbear to be a welcoming and caring community, tightly knit, when behind the curtain they are horrible to each other. of course I had only ever known that type of life so I didn’t see it for what it was and continued to use the site.
I finally had a breakthrough internally and got the courage to go to therapy and try to reckon with the damage my upbringing did to me. and once that started to work, hexbear’s rose tint rapidly faded.
now I look back on my several years as a hexbear user with so much embarrassment. I can’t believe how much hatred was in my heart. I try to forgive myself and remember that I was young and broken and taken advantage of by malicious people online but I was old enough to know better. once in a while I’ll check hexbear out just to remind myself of how much I’ve grown and improved. I see people in there who claim to be in their 30s and 40s and i feel disgust at how they are manipulating young adults and even kids as we see here. I feel sad for them too. I don’t think anyone that old would be part of such a group if they didn’t have a seriously damaged worldview.
wow. sorry to dump on you. just seeing someone so young get roped into hexbear brought up a lot of feelings.
my experiences aren’t nearly as intricate as yours. For me, it was gamergate. My little self enjoyed videogames, and hearing that someone wanted to take that away got me mad and put me into the pipeline. I snapped out of it when the alt-right started praising Trump, at which point I remember asking if everyone was actually serious.
I didn’t have too long of a communist stint. I was repeatedly told that the revolution will happen any time soon, and… It never did. I then questioned why we’re praising hyper-capitalist China and was basically told to trust the plan lol.
I have zero interest in reading what these people think about me.
You’re an absolute chad dude
Ah yes, let’s turn our children into terrorists. (At least that’s what it sounds like to me)
Seriously though the teen years are when you are most malleable. You can teach someone to not feel sympathy for groups of people and to be ok doing terrible things.
The first three paragraphs seemed fine but holy shit has this guy been radicalised. I honestly feel bad for these people who think they’re standing against facism when they’re just a different type of a facist
Yeah, it’s a shame to see that they connected all the dots but came to the wrong conclusions.
The political spectrum is a torus
All fascist regimes are known for targeting children with indoctrination. It why child soldiers are so effective they dont question orders.
Thankfully they’ll grow out of this extremism.
I just hope it’s not a growing through pain experience.
A danger with a lot of these idealogical groups is the classic cult/abusive behavior of “love bombing”, which can be especially effective with younger people trying to figure out themselves and where they “fit” in the world. Add all that to the lack of life experience causing that sort of behavior to not ring alarm bells and it’s a potent recipe for learning things the hard way when it all comes crashing down.
Sidenote: Even if this was a kid publicly declaring healthy beliefs, I really don’t get why the response isn’t “Ok, cool. Moving on…”
This sort of “championing” of impressionable youths by strangers, in response to the youth simply saying they believe a certain thing, just gives me the skeevies. Doesn’t feel genuine to me.
Nah, it’s very cultist, ain’t it
Probably not as 14-18 is when you are most susceptible to beliefs. The brain is developing still and as it locks in the stuff around it. It becomes your core belief system.
Your brain doesn’t lock itself as you get older. how else would ya learn?
It kind of does through. The older you get the more ridged you become. You buckle down in your ways and become resistant to change.
I’ve yet to meet an older person who has not been able to change their opinion. In fact I reckon the belief that you can’t change is a very, very dangerous one.
Broadly speaking, as you get older, you tend to become more rigid in your core beliefs. But not always. And not in everything. It doesn’t mean you can’t change, but people become less likely to change. As you get older, you have more inertia to overcome, and more years of sunk-costs.
Your core values are unlikely to change though. It isn’t impossible but when you are a young adult everything is new and you are basically a sponge. What happens when you are young profoundly influences who you become.
I’m an anarchist, tankies don’t like me because I like my freedom of speech and right to bear arms, not a kid tho
One of the same, dude
Both are bad
“BoTh SiDeS”?
Yes radicals are bad. Big shock
I grew up in a generation when ‘radical’ meant ‘cool’, so forgive me if I’m confused by that generality
You need to take the same advice as is in this image. Don’t forget to touch grass.
Grass is always worth touching!
prefer clover tho, softer, better for the environment, bees love it
fuck grass
There’s the problem with being a reactionary. Grass is normal and good. Open fields of grass are native and healthy to much of the world. Maintaining a lawn of non-native grass is what should be discouraged. Please learn what the real issues are, beyond the surface level.
we are all reactionaries on this blessed day
