I got in on reddit super early. Every few weeks I get a message from someone referencing a comment a decade old, now either featured in some youtube video or coming up in their google search. It's unnerving shit and I check my politics there a lot more than I do here. Just as a matter of user safety it's good that our posts disappear after a month or whatever. Maybe it's eventually a few months or a year, but if we ever return to the normal model of forums preserving everything forever it's a big infosec risk.
Me too, I like to go over my posts and remind myself that I'm a genius comedian and have the intellect of....I don't know, a famous smart person or something
its actually a really useful resource for seeing if anybody has mentioned anything about a specific topic especially if its something i am talking to somebody about currently
There is literally no point in the site existing if the site does not attempt to make itself visible, to grow, and to turn more people into leftists.
If the site is not attempting to grow, educate and influence others then it is literally just a timesink for the amusement of communists and rather than actually benefit the pursuit of socialism by helping fight the online ideological battle it instead would just be taking people's time and energy away from less hidden places.
If this becomes the future of the site I will leave it and support other projects that aren't closing themselves off from literally everything in some bizarre attempt to be as niche and pointless as possible.
Turning people into leftist via the internet is perhaps the worst method of recruitment. Even when successful, it creates leftists that are geographically separated and uncoordinated. This undermines the one structural advantage the working class has; namely that there's more of us and nothing functions without our collective say-so. We are left with the task of building communities - real world communities - out of people floundering in a world of market relations. As such, the ability to convince people should come from an understanding and familiarity with Marxist analysis and ideas, not from links to a server.
This website has its use, but that use is mainly as a place to vent frustrations and refine rhetoric. The news bulletins are exceptionally useful and appreciated, too.
Turning people into leftist via the internet is perhaps the worst method of recruitment.
Bollocks. This is just objectively false. I have created more actually educated marxists via work online by myself than the offline work of my local vanguard party branch, the local unions, and the local labour party, etc etc, few of which are really trying to create new marxists tbh. The speed with which people can be transitioned from liberal to marxist is absolutely fucking unreal in this space compared to offline. When the pipelines are right they work and they happen fast as fuck. I've watched weird liberals go from liberal arguing with me to "tankies bad" to joining their local ML party in I am not shitting you 3 weeks. One single dedicated marxist with a few platforms and the willingness to roll around in the muck without getting deterred/discouraged by the bombardment of hate from neoliberals and anticommunists trying to deter you can educate thousands of people per month.
Even when successful, it creates leftists that are geographically separated and uncoordinated.
Yes. It does. This will become less of a problem over time. Much like it did for the fascists.
:kim-salute: This com right here. People who claim internet organising is pointless have no idea how the info-war works and how ideology and culture spreads like a meme.
A marxist with an internet connection can create absolute fucking havok if they're dedicated enough. The movement rises and recedes like the crash of a wave
I agree that online spaces are good at convincing people who are already primed for a Marxist analysis, such as well-meaning liberals. I'm not saying we should abandon 'The Net' as a recruitment tool, just that we must be realistic to its potential. There are only so many well-meaning liberals online, it cannot be our primary means of growth. Certainly, it could be our primary means of growing. But if there's one thing I've learned growing up alongside the internet, it's that groups that grow quickly online are just as quick to fall apart. Any successful project needs people with common material circumstances who can coordinate amongst themselves. We have to give the fresh faced, well-meaning Marxist an honest appraisal of the work ahead of them.
Better, I agree. But I think fear of growth is unhealthier than pursuing it and simply seeing what happens. The best we can do is try. Forge onwards and keep moving forwards or some shit I don't know that's what the old socialist propaganda would say.
The internet is the sole means by which I got information and turned leftist. The means by which I got involved with local groups, :vote: d slightly better, went to protests, argued for fair pay in my workplaces, made more effort to stand up for people who get fucked over, and came to convince a couple meat-space friends to genuinely support communism. My turning point was hearing how it's all great, learning how easily I could get the commie manifesto for a quick read, I read it and went "well shit that seems all kinds of reasonable" and that did it for me.
Anecdotal evidence, I'm but one person, but online spaces with genuine talk and information helped teach me how to make the world better, I fail to see why that wouldn't be the case for many more people.
Even when successful, it creates leftists that are geographically separated and uncoordinated.
this is a good thing imo. a thousand small wildfires are harder to put out. if even a small percentage of those leftists go on to do real-world work then it's an important step in building a diverse net of leftist projects.
How much of that value is in active discussion versus archived? When we didn't wipe I don't think I ever went back into one of the threads that are like a year old, and actively participating in them a year later is a forum crime elsewhere.
Almost all the things I have favourited on this site has been some extremely niche comment that would not be archived in whatever system we come up with. They have been specific comments that are useful for me to reference, to use in argument with others, or to reword again and again in propaganda.
The entire value of /r/genzhou was similar, being able to search it with pushshift search and type in any subject topic and get back incredibly high value comment responses.
The personal value isn't even the major issue here. The value in the historic archive of content comes from search results, a massive amount of traffic comes from weird old threads on various internet forums that end up showing up in weird searches that people do. Narrowing down the amount of content that could get seen or found via the search engine results completely compromises the site's ability to reach potential new users. For better or worse all websites must build themselves around the understanding that the vast majority of their traffic is going to come from search engine results pages and failure to do so just guarantees being niche and unfindable. Unexposed to anyone.
Yes it's an infosec risk. But the site existing at all is one. Anyone can scrape and mirror the entire site if they want to, people already do just that for reddit (unddit.com) where you can see content deleted by mods and users, pushshift also keeps an archive of all your reddit content and probably has many comments that you've deleted from your various reddit accounts, assuming you use reddit of course. We're kidding ourselves if we think that this site isn't already being archived by intelligence services given that the subreddit was literally in an ASPI paper which is a thinktank literally founded by the Australian gov.
We’re kidding ourselves if we think that this site isn’t already being archived by intelligence services
If they did I'd appreciate if they could send me a copy of all the c/Marxism infoposts I did
HINT HINT, FEDS. DO ME A SOLID!
Your experience isn’t universal. It would be a great crime to delete all the useful information that we as a community have shared with each other. I’m not talking just about theory effort-posts but all kinds of small side discussions that we can rediscover through the search function. Links to free ebooks, reading recommendations, geopolitical musings, random organic discussions on topics ranging from Marx’s theory of value to the post-Stalin struggle for power. All of this content from genuine comrades that I can trust is highly valuable and it would be a shame to destroy all of the knowledge that has been built up over the last two years.
It is right now because its growth vs user churn is flat, it's sustaining itself but nothing more.
The thing is though, a bunch of people are here because they think it can be more than that. The balance preventing it from falling into decline would be shifted if people started giving up on it being anything more. And once you go into that decline while also creating a user-culture against measures that produce growth then the future death of the community is essentially guaranteed. If they see it as a treat and want to keep it that way they also need to support a culture of aiming to grow the site or user churn will fuck over their treat eventually.
I suspect those same people will also say any online work performed on twitter or reddit or any social media is just pretend and not real and not beneficial though. I disagree with that position. I have seen far too many people become communists specifically because of the work of very online communists on social media to buy into the idea that only offline matters. Half this site were probably radicalised online to begin with.
Hard pass. If you don't want your old posts being dredged up then do some spring cleaning every now and then and delete your old comments that you don't want people to see any more.
I lost count of the number of times I thought of a cool post or insightful comment/discussion I semi-recently saw on this site and UH OH SPAGHETTIOS it's poof gone, lost to the ages (except the frustrating thing is that *I KNOW IT'S STILL IN THE DATABASE but I just can't see it).
I trust the developers/volunteers that work hard to make this site possible nerfed the site for good reason, but I don't know of any other website that I have ever used where this has been necessary. I'm no dev, so who am I to judge, but I gotta be honest it's super frustrating.
c/effort would be pretty useless if any essay you write is going to be deleted in a month. There's a lot of useful resources that I had saved for long term purposes, and I'd like to be able to access them
I really miss the old stuff. Lotta posts I'm waiting to see again.
As always though, I think there's room for options. Maybe just give users a 'auto-delete my posts after x months' option?
Just autodelete all accounts after they’re created.
Edit: I meant to say autodelete after a month lol.
Bad take, tons of very useful and informative posts that I can't find anymore, stuff that is relevant or stuff that I wish I could have saved but didn't etc, this is one if not the worst downside of this site right now imo.
i do not think this will do much, its not difficult to scrape the site.
There will always be some individual or government archive, but those cost money to maintain. The two things which result in me being messaged are people searching on reddit or google. It's security through being a pain in the ass.
Make a checkbox for posts, you can choose wither it's permanent or gets deleted after a month or however long
There will only be one alaskaball and that alaskaball has to live in alaska
I came into this wanting to disagree with you but you’re actually right. A method of preserving worthwhile effort posts, really good discussions or historically bad/good shitposts should be established, but it probably is worthwhile to keep wiping stuff regularly.
Tagging posts for preservation is a good idea. I intentionally want my dog's subreddit to last and don't care if my modernism posts get archived.
I have no idea about programming but perhaps a week before the wipe we could have an announcement post for folks to nominate threads to be preserved from that round of deletion. No idea how much work that is to implement though.
I think you're right and we should wipe old posts - and the method for saving posts should be separate from upvotes. Maybe if enough people star a post it gets archived, so informative effort posts get saved - but I'm thinking we should tweak it so that at most 10% of posts actually get saved in this way, since most of the rest of the content of this site (and I include my own comments in this assessment!) is pretty disposable.
Plus, we could say that it's a safety feature in order to attract privacy-conscious users. There's no reason we should have to archive every single inane thing in order to attract new people - what does that even do, increase our SEO by some tiny amount?
