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.