I dunno what it is, maybe the ban on sectarianism but y'all ain't half as divisive / no true Scot as some of the communism subs on Reddit. I'm here for a good time and brief alleviation from the overwhelming nonsense of the liberalism of the world with some like-minded comrades.
Good work to the admins and mods for keeping the culture popping :fidel-salute-big:
Yeah, that took a while to do, but the site is a lot more enjoyable now.
Debatebroing is so baked into reddit culture too. People will bring out their list of fallacies as though you're in an actual debate club.
The recent chapo episode where they made the joke that CIA agents are all reddit guys is so accurate. The type of nerds that will perpetuate a genocide in SE Asia while making office references at the spook water cooler
One thing we should be looking at along these lines is creating some space that's free of terminally-online owning/dunking/otherwise being huge assholes to each other. Maybe it's a comm, maybe it's a tag you can attach to posts, maybe it's a tag you can attach to comments. But there should be some place you can post an honest opinion and get good-faith discussion. A "talk to people like you would in the real world" area, if you will.
I agree, if for tangentially related reasons. To be blunt, I think some people here are way too eager to shit on left-adjacent folks to a worrying degree.
I remember several months back, and especially around the election, the sheer dedication to "dunking" on Ellis, Wynn, and Evans in particular far surpassed the collective hatred for prominent reactionaries. I have no problem with dissecting or dunking on bad takes, but it was getting fucking vile. I'd rather not see that sort of thing happen again.
The way I see it, we're going to have to get tens of millions of people who aren't currently leftists to become leftists. Shitting on people who we hope to work with in the near future is not a recipe for success.
That's an excellent point. I'm definitely not advocating for some kind of conflict-free style of discussion, but there's a definite leftist tendency to absolutely shit on the smallest deviations.
Something like that, yeah. There's a chapo diaspora/cushvlog sub called r/acidmarxism that sums up the approach in its top rule:
Please avoid being extremely 'online.' Trolling, owning, banal shit-posting, gawking at libs/reactionaries, and staying up until 3am to wage a scorched-earth argument deep in the replies of another user in the sub are all strongly discouraged. Discourse in good-faith.
All that stuff has its place, but we need somewhere without it, too.
Yeah I say this as an ML, but I felt like all the Tankie subs were 50-75% just bitching about anarchists. It got tiring.
I regret pretty much any comment I make on reddit 'cus I'm swarmed with dweebs in the replies trying to one up debate me or whatever.
I feel the exact opposite here, even when someone disagrees with me it is usually really a pleasant interaction.
Its not perfect here, but its much nicer :comfy-cool:
Just getting away from the libosphere news and seeing people be actually critical about media is nice.
Saw a thread on Reddit with a picture of a ton of trash being washed up on shore in Mumbai, and everyone was uncritically Doing Racism by saying the indians deserved it, were innately filthy, etc. Poop streets etc. Just trash takes. Like what do they think happens when Br*tain steals all the wealth for 200 years and then dips out
Or when the "developed" world "recycles" its waste by shipping it to poor countries and dumping it in massive land fills so "workers" can sort through it for starvation wages, and whatever isn't of value gets dumped into the rivers thanks to a lack of equivalent environmental enforcement/laws.
It's because we can unironically say that all oil executives and other egregious contributors to the vast array of modern problems, like Monsanto executives and Dow chemical executives, should be executed immediately for crimes against humanity.
True. On reddit you have to watch what you say for the mods but also because you're trying to help seem more approachable to the libs who want to learn more. Here it's a true lefty space with no bothersome lib mods.
A lot of Reddit socialist subs are extremely lib. Even supposedly ML-ish ones that will ban you for not wholeheartedly rejecting every aspect of electoralism. They are less interested in building and more in feeling correct about (a misunderstanding of) the organizing strategies relevant to quasi-feudal states in the early-mid 1900s.
That said, I think a full quarter of posts here are just r/genzedong and r/shitliberalssay reposts, so we should reflect on the fact that we're not exactly divorced from Reddit.
Frankly, we shouldn't be divorced from reddit. Cesspool that it is, you can reach a lot more people there than here, and putting leftist ideas in front of people is maybe the only "real" thing you can do online. We do some brigading already, but we should be doing a lot more.
Hell yeah brigading is praxis. Plus, coordinated brigading could be a nice way to balance time spent on social media, since Reddit is a toxic place. If we promote only coordinated raids and being careful about investing time there outside of them, maybe we can keep our comrades from getting sucked into an unhealthy social media relationship.
Good point. Brigading is also a great way to take the urge to shitpost and dunk and own people and direct it to a place where it might move someone left. If that stuff stays here, we end up doing struggle sessions about about whether the future world of Demolition Man is socialist.
Here we won't get banned for saying we want to unironically run over crowds of Nazis with an accordion bus, execute our landlord with a guillotine, hose down a Klan meeting with automatic gunfire to avenge John Brown, etc.
Ehhhh, idk if that is a bad thing in a way. Subs can be as broad or as niche as they want to be. Maybe since almost all the other lefty subs are more diverse in opinions it can feel a bit much if you don't consider yourself a tankie, maoist, whatever you wanna call GenZedong posters but I think it's good for some subs can just do their own thing. It sucks in a way that there is no good catch-all left sub anymore that is actually popular besides a couple. But those ones have their own problems.
lmao prbly not i wz riffin on th "i can change her/him" thing ppl do som @tims.
Eeeeehh I wouldn't call it SWERFY. They're not against sex workers they're against sex work. This is a necessary distinction because they understand why sex workers exist (capitalism necessitates selling one's body), but they also believe sex work shouldn't exist because no one really wants to use their body for monetary gain. Personally I disagree with this. A vast portion of sex workers as is don't want to be in the business, but a good chunk also do. Some people just like showing their tits, why not make some money in the process.
I have a few criticisms of that subreddit aside from the obvious sectarianism. Firstly, they conflate all sex work to prostitution. It's incredibly reductive and whenever it's pointed out, they just make derogatory claims about OnlyFans and such.
Plus, a lot of them have really weird views about what "productive labor/industry" is. It just reminds me of the old-school socialists who would argue LGBTQ+ issues aren't relevant because they're "bourgeois" somehow.
And there are plenty of people on that subreddit who just hate sex work and consider it "immoral". I remember when we'd had a struggle session over this issue on Hexbear a few months(?) ago and the r/genzedong thread had so many upvoted comments on those lines.
I'd say the vast majority of people here post in good faith and simple disagreements can be easily discussed. Ofc there is always going to be infighting about inconsequential shit, but it helps that "karma" is even more meaningless here and less of a reason to do the things you see more on reddit. Or having people scour your post history in other subs to try and drag you over something irrelevant.
It is more community-like because it's not quite the same as having drive-by posters trying to stir the pot in subs they don't even use or like. Ofc there is trolls who come here to do that but mods are solid in removing people only here to fuck shit up.
Most of the big name ones have I think been intentionally wrecked, like /r/socialism and /r/communism.
Honestly, i think the vibe here is more laid back because you can't just skip from subreddit to subreddit, and the mods are quick to ban annoying people.
It's way better. So much so that I forget how to interact in normie spaces and find it jarring dealing with all the lib shit
