Skip Navigation
60 comments

  • the infosec concerns are legit and extend to any journalposting about people in our personal lives who aren't us, if the site has to have that conversation more formally then that's fine. i think people here (me included) have maybe gotten too comfortable treating hexbear like an actual IRL community/friend group/safe space, when it's really not: it's a social media site.

    we're not really each other's friends or each other's comrades - i'm sure plenty of us have plenty of both in real life, and those of us who do know how radically different those relationships are vs semi-anonymous shitposting acquaintances. if the site needs to enact a policy that any kind of posting that might involve other people in our lives be relegated to DM only, then OK - the megathread might kind of slowly die out and i'm not sure how clear the line would be in terms of moderator enforcement, but i can see the logic there.

    privacy concerns aside though, you don't actually know the people involved or their relationships to each other - people develop complicated bonds & feelings toward one another in literally every single social context and have done so since we have had to get together as a species to survive, it's weirder to expect otherwise & imo is a symptom of atomization. i think there are a lot of assumptions based on vague Icks around these posts that everyone is an incel stalker until proven otherwise...but maybe more often than not the people involved actually do have genuine, meaningful-but-complicated friendships? again, that doesn't necessarily mean it's appropriate to talk about on a semi-anonymous forum in detail, but that doesn't seem to be your main gripe (it's way less bad privacy-wise than say a dating call-in show, or the whole host of weird dating advice subreddits)

    you just really don't know, and literally everyone i have ever gotten remotely close to in real life is vastly more normal about people developing these kinds of feelings/the messy complications of dating and romance than chapo chat users. any discussion beyond whether this type of conversation is appropriate for an internet forum reads to me as attempting to police people's feelings & expressions of vulnerability in a way that's unrealistic at best & weirdly repressed at worst.

    and honestly, if you have to post a meme like this you are definitely not as emotionally normal as you think, and you also need to reevaluate your relationship to your online life. you could probably also afford to practice sharing potential concerns with people about blind spots, privilege, and potentially problematic behavior in a less bullying way. like it's obvious you on some level want to have a sincere effortpost sesh about this....so why a weeaboo meme putting people down and joking about beating them to death?

    • i don't think it's normal to post about crushes regularly. i would personally be very alarmed that someone i thought was a friend was regularly publishing details of our time together and how they're developing feelings for me on a public forum that is easily readable by literally anyone, even people with malicious intent. as a woman, it is genuinely scary that an audience could be reading about my life and i would have literally zero clue about it

    • if the site needs to enact a policy that any kind of posting that might involve other people in our lives be relegated to DM only, then OK

      Yeah, no. This is such a convenient ultimatum that benefits you, it just sounds like you’ll just use this as an excuse to slide into direct messages or make “feeling lonely please dm” posts.

      This is not a serious issue and yet you’re being extremely defensive about something the majority of the website is against whilst playing the smol bean role for sympathy points. Stop posting about crushes, it’s creepy.

      • One user responds to inflammatory, kinda witch-hunty, and somewhat ableist post with level-headed, inclusive reasoning.

        1-day-old user responds within minutes, making accusations toward that user, being more hostile, and claiming that the whole site is on their side.

        God I love the culture of this site sometimes.

  • DONT SHIT WHERE YOU EAT.

    To elaborate for those who are going to "but ackshwally," yes there's some nuance.

    If you're in a very large org with different departments, that's different as long as there's not power dynamics. So if you're sales and they're part of quality assurance, ok, fine. Be normal ask them out and move on. Don't carry a torch, that's the one way to really make what could otherwise be a very normal interaction weird.

    Don't date your boss, don't date your subordinate, don't date your peers in your part of the office. If you absolutely have to, then BE NORMAL and just ask them out to get over it quickly and remember that the longer and weirder you make it the more likely you could lose your job in a worst case.

    You're not Jim and Pam in some slow burn romance. Crushes are for people under the age of 18 (in which case, all the not having sex with coworkers goes out the window if it's not a real job. The amount of kids who hooked up at the pizza place I worked at... It was high).

    To spell it out: you're going to have to maintain a professional relationship with this person if they're not interested OR if you break up. Is it worth it? There are probably many people out there you're compatible with. Work crushes are inappropriate, especially since they can't just leave (like, say, some person you hit on in a bar or something). They aren't there for romance either, they're there to work.

    P.S. I speak from the fact that I'm at least somewhat socially awkward and the very thought of having to see someone who rejected me or dumped me daily was so crushing I fully embraced don't shit where you eat mindset. There have been a few coworkers I found attractive, but I never carried a torch or crushed on them since I would never be able to act on it.

  • Back in the early days of this site the general megathread contained some of the most off-putting terminally online shit I have ever seen in my life. Fuckin weird ass cuddle threads and all kinds of baby speak. This place has grown for the better but I dont know that we'll ever be able to fully break away from our creepy ass roots. Sometimes that mega can still hit ya with some full force shit that just makes you close the tab and walk away.

60 comments