Totally sympathetic, I think we mostly agree and I feel very similarly about hexbear now how it affects me and how I relate to it. I’m glad you feel more at home here than elsewhere, and improving that is maybe a goal we should have for the site. Have you thought of making a bigger post for this? I think maybe you’ll get the conversation started and maybe result in some changes, there are at least a good amount of hexbear users that would definitely support it. I’d even argue for it with you, despite my points against it named here. That because I don’t think we really have any influence on many people outside of hexbear, so the positive effect I name below is lessened.

But I do know that for me, a cis-white-neurotypical-man, the dunking was part of the reason that I started searching on my own for “what the fuck do these ignorant people believe to be so convinced of their dunks?”. And that led to me researching with a very different goal than just “looking for arguments”. Arguments were something I understood as only for the goal of winning a debate and nothing to do with truth, so the dunks got me to start thinking about what the truth was and looking on my own. That comes from my history growing up in a very reactionary environment, where any argument didn’t have to be correct as long as you got to hold you position at the end. It felt like a game. Meanwhile, dunking seemed to be like “you’re not just gonna lose an argument, you’re wrong and we don’t care to argue it”, which is interested me because it felt like a truth claim.