Sorry not sure which community to really post in since I'm not that active but I think labour would probably be most appropriate. But if you check out that thread the comment that made me think of hexbear was 8baked17's. That user is acknowledging the need to mitigate their community off of reddit to avoid repression/ counter narrative work that reddit deploys.
"This movement needs to get off of social media ASAP and organized on an independent, transparent AND MOST IMPORTANTLY A NON-PROFIT PLATFORM, be it online or offline, before the collective voices get drowned out by garbage content spam and bots."
I wonder if it might be productive for the mod team here to reach out to their mod team and discuss this possibility or if the community here/ the wider community here has any thoughts to share about such a possibility. I know this is a much smaller space and I admittedly don't know if this would even be feasible from a technological standpoint but I have not floated this on reddit and have only put this here since this is much smaller community and should have primacy in deciding whether this would be a workable option or if it would have too many detrimental effects here.
For my part, I think these people are radicalizing HARD in real time and this might be a golden opportunity to channel some of this into forward-thinking channels and possibly put them onto some other related shit that needs to be addressed as well.
Pulling some of the more left-wing members on here is a good idea, but we shouldn't try to be an ark for the whole subreddit. We've had problems doing that in the past.
What you think you’ll get:
:sicko-crowd:
What you actually get:
:le-pol-face:
We’ve had problems doing that in the past.
My favorite part of that whole shitstorm was when a mod that hadn't been active for like six months suddenly showed up and started banning regular users left and right.
Probably not something we want to try again.
Please, please, please do not put this site on the radar of a subreddit that has gotten national press attention and has a target on their back. Remember that Reddit is an intelligence-community owned platform. Probably better to help push them towards either real orgs, or find ways to do like regular "check ins" where people can talk strategy, bring in speakers, etc.
This is right - we don't want backflow, it'll fuck us up. We just need to go there and have fun doing good work.
Remember that Reddit is an intelligence-community owned platform.
Could you tell me where I can find out more about that? I mean, I know the Newhouse family owns a big portion of reddit, but is there more to it?
This is who shut the sub down
Dr. Jessica Ashooh is a former nonresident senior fellow at the Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East. She is based in San Francisco, where she is Director of Policy for Reddit, the online discussion platform. In this capacity, she addresses a range of online and technology policy issues, from fake news to online terrorist recruiting. Previously, from 2015 to 2017, Ashooh served as Deputy Director for Madeleine Albright and Stephen Hadley’s bipartisan Middle East Strategy Task Force at the Atlantic Council. In this position, she focused on long-term strategy to more comprehensively address state failure and violent extremism in the Middle East and set the region on a more positive trajectory.
And an article
https://mronline.org/2021/06/14/jessica-ashooh-the-taming-of-reddit-and-the-national-security-state-plant-tabbed-to-do-it/
I still think other subreddits under the umbrella of antiwork, tying that amorphous idea to theory and materialism without the r/antiwork mods, is going to be the best path at the moment. When it first came on the radar of the site subreddits like r/leftantiwork were created. Eventually reddit might ratfuck or ban everything under the banner of antiwork even if there aren't the same mods in control of the different subreddits, but that would be a new level of escalation for the website. It would be more of a propaganda win than banning one specific subreddit for some arbitrary rule violation if they say "this idea in general is banned" while allowing COVID denialism and fascism as long as they keep hopping subreddits. It would also inflame users enough that they'd be more on board with leaving the website altogether. As it stands, if you mention hexbear in an explicitly socialist subreddit like r/trueanon there's a flood of r/redscarepod and r/cumtown regulars who jump on the comment like harpies to ramble about what they think Hexbear is like. Each new episode of drama reinforces their narrative while undermining our streak of stability so a sudden influx of users is a sudden influx of chances for shit to kick off.
If we all made some specialized antiwork subreddits, Reddit would probably autoban them because our accounts used to post on /r/chapotraphouse. We could use that drama lol
r/antiwork is a place without much in the way of ideology right? Its just a loosely aligned group of people/posters/accounts shit posting about terrible bosses and such.
Agitate there, educate there, drop some dope memes with the hexbear.net water mark there but trying to be a bunker for for such an ideological mixed bag is not going to end well for the mods here.
I view it less in terms of a "community" and more in terms of a newspaper's "letter to the editor" section. But this is just my opinion.
Yeah, their mod team is like 50% feds and 50% western chauvinist "anarchists".
Any lifeboat boating we do will have to be through the slog of shadowbans and agressive removal at some point.
r/antiwork is a place without much in the way of ideology right?
Barely any, but there's a bit of a baby syndicalist bent to it. They really eat up the general strike and cross-industry solidarity stuff. A lot iffier on understanding that unions are key to doing that effectively. Completely oblivious to the fact that AES and the global south are allies in the struggle, and that the shape of the struggle in each of those is very different from what it is here.
Most of those nerds are far from radical. Lots of anti communist and wannabe anarkiddie types. No ideology, no theory, they just know they hate their job. Which is a good first step I guess.
We all start somewhere, and those of us born within the walls of Babylon have trouble understanding a whole other world is out there. Some of them might not grow further, but I wouldn’t give up on them just yet.
Glad you posted!
We're actually using /c/agitprop and to some extent /c/labor for radicalizing the Antiwork crowd!
- Union-oriented /r/Antiwork content is welcome in /c/Labour. Like if someone on Reddit is asking how to organize, this comm will be happy to go talk to them
- All other Antiwork & /r/Antiwork content is welcome in /c/Agitprop
- You can really go ham in /c/Agitprop, don't be shy about making that comm entirely about radicalizing /r/Antiwork. In the distant future we could always spin off a separate antiwork comm but for now we're just using the existing Agitprop comm for this purpose.
- /c/Agitprop can serve as a Dunk Tank or a Un-Dunk Tank but for /r/Antiwork posts and comments. We encourage you to browse the /new section of that subreddit looking for recent threads to get the first word, and then post your beautiful work in the comm.
- All other agitprop is still of course welcome there and always will be
So everyone subscribe to /c/Labour and /c/Agitprop and post away!
We've decided against doing a Lifeboat style community transfer, because that is a huge subreddit and we'll just get thousands of CHUDs who happen to hate their bosses, because hey, the H does stand for "humanoid"
There's still people pushing hard for UBI on there, so it kinda sucks. I don't think UBI in itself is bad, but lots of it's proponents think it's a magic bullet that can fix things without any real change.
