Vote Brigading is the practice of mobilizing a campaign within an online community to promote or undermine a targeted page, user or belief en masse through the user-voting system. On Reddit, brigading is often employed as a silencing tactic by those who wish to undermine the presence of competing political agendas or opinions.
Want to describe exactly what their approach is? Hard to gather what you're getting at.
I'll give an example though, /r/gamingcirclejerk, where we regularly intentionally go out of our way to rile up various groups because it's both funny and effective at manipulating the wider gaming media. Our approach is explicitly not to lock threads (cowards lock) and instead to allow the fuckwits to post. They are then banned. It takes some time for those bans to process but the community explicitly knows we will get around to every single one of them. The community is grateful and approves of this, they want them banned, they know it makes the community cleaner because alt accounts for ban evasion are a pain in the ass and getting caught by the system doing ban evasion gets all of your accounts permabanned. Trans people in particular don't want the threads locked that rile up the transphobes, even if it means they have to see some transphobic shit, because they actually want to know that the community is properly cleared out of transphobes. Doing these proper clearouts gets you to an eventual stage where you can have a community with 1million+ subscribers and pro trans content will have tens of thousands of upvotes.
There is absolutely no benefit to NOT putting this kind of work in. It attracts and fosters a better crowd.
And when the ""brigades"" are absolutely massive because you've caused the entire gaming world to go crazy like when we caused that whole Harry Potter shit earlier in the year, it just ended up helping us to clear out even larger quantities of problem users. Gaming journalism, all the streamers, etc etc. We had fucking millions pour into the sub through all that shit. No problem though, just gotta work through it.
/r/gamingcirclejerk is massive context switch from something like /r/anarchism. GCJ has self-selected for people who are confrontational in the first place and have a culture set up to handle it. What works for one community doesn't work for every other. However if GCJ the community of millions you speak of, then it's understandable you believe this is the only approach that works. Given that hexbear is GCJ writ large it does it's also understandable why you think the mere term "bridaging" is problematic.
Want to describe exactly what their approach is? Hard to gather what you’re getting at.
I am getting at the fact that /r/anarchism often talks about the brigades against them and the mods there frequently use the term to communicate what is happening.
Sure, but if we're after a completely direct contrast I've also been a mod at /r/socialism, and a number of other spaces. If we get into naming them all we start to enter territory that endangers existing accounts with mod positions though and as I've been banned dozens of times in the past and would be banned again and again we're going to have to avoid going into too much detail. Let's just say I've been prolific in the 10 years i've been on that site.
My position on brigading has never changed. I was there promoting it when we totally weren't doing it as ShitRedditSays , I was there even before srs when we totally weren't doing it as hailcorporate where we pioneered the subreddits as hashtags approach to advertising a subreddit. If notable reddit drama that pissed off the majority of redditors occurred I probably tried to have some hand in it, that's how prolific. I take some pride in the fact that reddit is at least less shitty today than it was back then and that is directly the result of "brigading" and harassing the shit out of liberals until they start repeating the things that they've been harassed with countless times. Bullying works and calling it "brigading" is bullshit to try and prevent it because the shitbags that receive it know it works and don't want that social change to happen.
I was there promoting it when we totally weren’t doing it as ShitRedditSays
Did you know that I was the one that started the initial revival of SRS from the dead before it brought fear in the hears of redditors everywhere? :D I've been at this game long enough myself. Don't get me wrong, I am not against the kind of bullying you're doing here in principle (even though I have my criticisms of the hexbear modus operanti). I am also in GCJ and a lot of other communities like it. But this sort of action requires a special kind of person and a special kind of community. Not everyone can be in that type of community or that kind of person, and that is fine as well.
If you think "brigading" is a worse term than "bullying" that's fine. I think it's just semantics at this point. For me the term "brigading" refers to the event, and is meant to communicate the information of "A community is sending their members into another to disrupt in some fashion". "Bullying" as you define it, could then be defined as "brigading for good cause" in that sense.
I am perfectly aware of typical redditor shitlord gnashing of teeth about "brigading", but I have also witnessed the flipside of the effects of brigading from a massively bigger reactionary community to a smaller and more vulnerable one and the need for the moderators of the latter to effectively communicate what is going on between each other and their community.
I think we ultimately don't disagree particularly much. I think it's a semantical difference where you define "brigading" as always bad (i.e. the redditor definition), where I define "brigading" as a neutral praxis, which can be used for good purposes, or evil ones. Of course, the positivity of a brigade is always in the eye of the beholder, where few communities would see an external force as "good" while the external community will all see themselves as "good" which complicates things, but this further reinforces the idea that "brigading" by itself is a neutral tool.
Brigading IS a worse term than bullying because it functionally gets used to prevent the action.
If the libs had to say "we feel bullied because the mean fempire criticises us for being virulent misogynists" they eventually have moments of clarity among themselves where they can't help but realise they're the fucking ones with a problem. But instead they do "brigading is bad and not allowed" which has no requirement to assess what the brigaders are actually saying, doing or criticising. This in turn results in a reduced amount of self reflection.
There's a reason it caught on in the first place. Because it is USEFUL to the people that recognise it benefitted them. It is useful because it hides the purpose of the moderation behind layers of linguistic bullshit.
If we destroy the term through a campaign of calling it bullshit we functionally force both users and moderators to return to actually analysing what the "bullies" are saying and whether what they're saying actually breaks any rules. If it does break rules they can be moderated (the fascists) and if it doesn't break rules other than being an act of rightfully criticising racist, chauvinist, sexist, capitalist bullshit, then they will have to dance with that fact. If they moderate it anyway it outs the mods who are fans of all of those things and helps to cause agitation.
It is completely to our benefit to destroy this concept. Think strategically. If you game this out with enough things you'll see that there's very little to no downside for the left (or whatever you want to call those of us that aren't anarchists) while it is actually very difficult for the right.
I think if "bullying" had become the chosen term instead of "brigading", we would be here having the same discussion flipped around. I stand by my position that this is mere semantics and it's not worth spending energy to argue about.
If we destroy the term through a campaign of calling it bullshit we functionally force both users and moderators to return to actually analysing what the “bullies” are saying and whether what they’re saying actually breaks any rules.
In my experience, reactionaries are really good at following "the letter of the law" when they're doing the "bullying".
And because it works, we should be doing everything to facilitate making it happen more and eliminating barriers to it. I don't give a shit what it's called as long as we take away the methods of preventing it, because it benefits us and not the right.
In my experience, reactionaries are really good at following "the letter of the law" when they're doing the "bullying".
Nah they're dogshit at it. This just amounts to concern trolling, which is extremely easily moderated for what it is.
Honestly don't know why you spend so long arguing against this. Feels very stubborn. Waste of time. Like... Ffs just feels like everything drags out way longer than necessary with you when just "yep that's right" would've got us here much much faster. Feels really... Reddity. Debate for the sake of time wasting debate. Devil's advocate bullshit. I know you want leftist shit so get out of the way and help instead. Choo choo
Sorry if I knew that the only way this discussion can end in good terms is for me to agree with your on everything, I wouldn't have engaged.
You have your methods that fit you as a person. I have my methods that fit me and how I see the world. There's a reason I'm not a hexbear. It's OK to be different. It's OK to disagree on praxis so long as it's complementary. I won't try to stop you from bullying, but I also can't be bullied into adopting your praxis.
The guy's a wrecker. I'm glad I don't share an office with him because I suspect being his colleague every single discussion would be exactly like this where he takes up a contrarian position on literally everything to just be a fucking contrarian.
There is precisely zero benefit to the left with being against ""brigading"". It solely harms us. Provides zero benefits. And empowers the right.
This is not difficult to understand, absolutely zero argument against it in terms of strategic benefits to the left has been presented. Whether this fool realises it or not he is a textbook example of this 1944 guide written by the CIA on how to sabotage meetings in organisations:
Show
Wrecker is too soft a word for this shit. I'm absolutely done with tolerating him.
That's a very kind perspective, but naive to the struggle we face. The world needs to be liberated and db0 is practicing the ancient tradition of an anarchist having absolutely none of the scientific and social basis that makes leftists powerful. Every day wasted is another in which billions suffer; handwringing etc shows that it's not about any real praxis but instead personal "liberal" values which always fail to bring positive change. Db0 means well in the same way a politician does when they vote to support Israel.
In the interaction I had earlier, the issue raised with the KKE was because they had used their security to stop people from storming parliament in one of their protests against austerity in 2011 (link) sounds a lot like they stopped 'brigading'. (TBH I would also be in support of storming parliament at this point)
Want to describe exactly what their approach is? Hard to gather what you're getting at.
I'll give an example though, /r/gamingcirclejerk, where we regularly intentionally go out of our way to rile up various groups because it's both funny and effective at manipulating the wider gaming media. Our approach is explicitly not to lock threads (cowards lock) and instead to allow the fuckwits to post. They are then banned. It takes some time for those bans to process but the community explicitly knows we will get around to every single one of them. The community is grateful and approves of this, they want them banned, they know it makes the community cleaner because alt accounts for ban evasion are a pain in the ass and getting caught by the system doing ban evasion gets all of your accounts permabanned. Trans people in particular don't want the threads locked that rile up the transphobes, even if it means they have to see some transphobic shit, because they actually want to know that the community is properly cleared out of transphobes. Doing these proper clearouts gets you to an eventual stage where you can have a community with 1million+ subscribers and pro trans content will have tens of thousands of upvotes.
There is absolutely no benefit to NOT putting this kind of work in. It attracts and fosters a better crowd.
And when the ""brigades"" are absolutely massive because you've caused the entire gaming world to go crazy like when we caused that whole Harry Potter shit earlier in the year, it just ended up helping us to clear out even larger quantities of problem users. Gaming journalism, all the streamers, etc etc. We had fucking millions pour into the sub through all that shit. No problem though, just gotta work through it.
there really is a transgender cabal that controls the media
/r/gamingcirclejerk is massive context switch from something like /r/anarchism. GCJ has self-selected for people who are confrontational in the first place and have a culture set up to handle it. What works for one community doesn't work for every other. However if GCJ the community of millions you speak of, then it's understandable you believe this is the only approach that works. Given that hexbear is GCJ writ large it does it's also understandable why you think the mere term "bridaging" is problematic.
I am getting at the fact that /r/anarchism often talks about the brigades against them and the mods there frequently use the term to communicate what is happening.
Sure, but if we're after a completely direct contrast I've also been a mod at /r/socialism, and a number of other spaces. If we get into naming them all we start to enter territory that endangers existing accounts with mod positions though and as I've been banned dozens of times in the past and would be banned again and again we're going to have to avoid going into too much detail. Let's just say I've been prolific in the 10 years i've been on that site.
My position on brigading has never changed. I was there promoting it when we totally weren't doing it as ShitRedditSays
, I was there even before srs when we totally weren't doing it as hailcorporate where we pioneered the subreddits as hashtags approach to advertising a subreddit. If notable reddit drama that pissed off the majority of redditors occurred I probably tried to have some hand in it, that's how prolific. I take some pride in the fact that reddit is at least less shitty today than it was back then and that is directly the result of "brigading" and harassing the shit out of liberals until they start repeating the things that they've been harassed with countless times. Bullying works and calling it "brigading" is bullshit to try and prevent it because the shitbags that receive it know it works and don't want that social change to happen.
Did you know that I was the one that started the initial revival of SRS from the dead before it brought fear in the hears of redditors everywhere? :D I've been at this game long enough myself. Don't get me wrong, I am not against the kind of bullying you're doing here in principle (even though I have my criticisms of the hexbear modus operanti). I am also in GCJ and a lot of other communities like it. But this sort of action requires a special kind of person and a special kind of community. Not everyone can be in that type of community or that kind of person, and that is fine as well.
If you think "brigading" is a worse term than "bullying" that's fine. I think it's just semantics at this point. For me the term "brigading" refers to the event, and is meant to communicate the information of "A community is sending their members into another to disrupt in some fashion". "Bullying" as you define it, could then be defined as "brigading for good cause" in that sense.
I am perfectly aware of typical redditor shitlord gnashing of teeth about "brigading", but I have also witnessed the flipside of the effects of brigading from a massively bigger reactionary community to a smaller and more vulnerable one and the need for the moderators of the latter to effectively communicate what is going on between each other and their community.
I think we ultimately don't disagree particularly much. I think it's a semantical difference where you define "brigading" as always bad (i.e. the redditor definition), where I define "brigading" as a neutral praxis, which can be used for good purposes, or evil ones. Of course, the positivity of a brigade is always in the eye of the beholder, where few communities would see an external force as "good" while the external community will all see themselves as "good" which complicates things, but this further reinforces the idea that "brigading" by itself is a neutral tool.
Brigading IS a worse term than bullying because it functionally gets used to prevent the action.
If the libs had to say "we feel bullied because the mean fempire criticises us for being virulent misogynists" they eventually have moments of clarity among themselves where they can't help but realise they're the fucking ones with a problem. But instead they do "brigading is bad and not allowed" which has no requirement to assess what the brigaders are actually saying, doing or criticising. This in turn results in a reduced amount of self reflection.
There's a reason it caught on in the first place. Because it is USEFUL to the people that recognise it benefitted them. It is useful because it hides the purpose of the moderation behind layers of linguistic bullshit.
If we destroy the term through a campaign of calling it bullshit we functionally force both users and moderators to return to actually analysing what the "bullies" are saying and whether what they're saying actually breaks any rules. If it does break rules they can be moderated (the fascists) and if it doesn't break rules other than being an act of rightfully criticising racist, chauvinist, sexist, capitalist bullshit, then they will have to dance with that fact. If they moderate it anyway it outs the mods who are fans of all of those things and helps to cause agitation.
It is completely to our benefit to destroy this concept. Think strategically. If you game this out with enough things you'll see that there's very little to no downside for the left (or whatever you want to call those of us that aren't anarchists) while it is actually very difficult for the right.
I think if "bullying" had become the chosen term instead of "brigading", we would be here having the same discussion flipped around. I stand by my position that this is mere semantics and it's not worth spending energy to argue about.
In my experience, reactionaries are really good at following "the letter of the law" when they're doing the "bullying".
It doesn't matter. The point is that it works.
And because it works, we should be doing everything to facilitate making it happen more and eliminating barriers to it. I don't give a shit what it's called as long as we take away the methods of preventing it, because it benefits us and not the right.
Nah they're dogshit at it. This just amounts to concern trolling, which is extremely easily moderated for what it is.
Honestly don't know why you spend so long arguing against this. Feels very stubborn. Waste of time. Like... Ffs just feels like everything drags out way longer than necessary with you when just "yep that's right" would've got us here much much faster. Feels really... Reddity. Debate for the sake of time wasting debate. Devil's advocate bullshit. I know you want leftist shit so get out of the way and help instead. Choo choo
Sorry if I knew that the only way this discussion can end in good terms is for me to agree with your on everything, I wouldn't have engaged.
You have your methods that fit you as a person. I have my methods that fit me and how I see the world. There's a reason I'm not a hexbear. It's OK to be different. It's OK to disagree on praxis so long as it's complementary. I won't try to stop you from bullying, but I also can't be bullied into adopting your praxis.
What is this picture supposed to mean? I think /u/db0 has a good point. Both methods are valid for different cases. There is nothing wrong with it.
The guy's a wrecker. I'm glad I don't share an office with him because I suspect being his colleague every single discussion would be exactly like this where he takes up a contrarian position on literally everything to just be a fucking contrarian.
There is precisely zero benefit to the left with being against ""brigading"". It solely harms us. Provides zero benefits. And empowers the right.
This is not difficult to understand, absolutely zero argument against it in terms of strategic benefits to the left has been presented. Whether this fool realises it or not he is a textbook example of this 1944 guide written by the CIA on how to sabotage meetings in organisations:
Wrecker is too soft a word for this shit. I'm absolutely done with tolerating him.
I might sound really stupid, but what does it means. I feel it is not meant literally.
Anyway, my personal moto is
peace between us, war to the lords. I think you and /u/db0 are valuable people in spreading the word against capitalism.That's a very kind perspective, but naive to the struggle we face. The world needs to be liberated and db0 is practicing the ancient tradition of an anarchist having absolutely none of the scientific and social basis that makes leftists powerful. Every day wasted is another in which billions suffer; handwringing etc shows that it's not about any real praxis but instead personal "liberal" values which always fail to bring positive change. Db0 means well in the same way a politician does when they vote to support Israel.
In the interaction I had earlier, the issue raised with the KKE was because they had used their security to stop people from storming parliament in one of their protests against austerity in 2011 (link) sounds a lot like they stopped 'brigading'. (TBH I would also be in support of storming parliament at this point)
It's from a meme, in which in that panel, he usually says "Jesse, what the fuck are you talking about?"
Thanks!
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