Hi. I wanted to talk about an issue that has been bothering me for a long time and that is the quality of the publications that are being made lately in the Leftsthetics community.
I have a specific problem with the user “Роძэя ΟЬяэяо” who I think has not understood the purpose of that community very well. The description of the community reads as follows:
For propaganda posters, art, influential photos, and anything else that promotes the aesthetics of revolution and the Left.
The problem is that this user does not upload anything that has to do with socialist or Marxist aesthetics. With so many artistic and aesthetic expressions of this movement, I don't understand how they can use the community to upload memes, which are also in Spanish. They also share famous quotes from great thinkers but again, is out of place in this community. In fact, this user currently moderates the Latino Marxist community and they have not even oriented it towards anything concrete, it is an accumulation of his publications that are completely decontextualised. And always, in all publications, it says "Latino Marxist", without descriptions or anything, as if it were some kind of branding or an automated bot. It gives a very bad image and worsens the impression of Lemmygrad.
I don't want to promote hatred towards this user because I doubt their intentions are evil, but I think this community has a lot of potential and right now it is full of out-of-context posts and memes. For that we already have other communities with more varied subject matter.
I attach examples where you can see what I am talking about. Having said that, I hope that the moderators will do something to improve the quality of the publications. Thank you.
Edit v1.01: Change pronouns (he/him -> they/them)
I think a lot of people also see this board as another social media that isn't filled to the brim with liberal shit or the usual Western pushed narrative in every single community. I agree that the amount of actual quality content has declined, I may be even partly to blame for that. But on the other hand, it's refreshing to have a social media like board with like minded people.
And you can always block people that bother you, of course.
Edit: unless you're talking about other instances, because I don't see them and have therefore no opinion
To be honest I had a look at your posts and I find them quite interesting. I think you're right about the algorithm as I can't remember seeing them on my feed.
Maybe the mods/admins should pin posts ike yours more often so people can see it more easily and so we can have a pinned place of theory discussion.
Setting up your Lemmygrad account settings to see just the local instance posts might help! This is what I've done personally to be clear out of the extra noise from the fediverse!
Go to Settings and Set the Type option to Local
Your posts aren't bad, there's just a lot of posts in /c/shitreactionariessay (which is the reason why we decided to create that community to replace the many older ones; you can just block that community instead of twenty different communities). Comments by anticommunists are going to increase engagement for a post because (I believe) the sorting for "Hot" and/or "Active" is based on the number of comments
I agree to an extent. There has been an increase in shitposting and SRS posting and a decline in good discussion and information. However, I’ve been liking the thorough argumentation and liberal appealing done in big meme post that happen to be seen by other instances. At least the hexbearers have improved the quality of shitposts. I definitely need to search out the theory Thursday posts in the future though, as they get lost in my feed.
I agree with you. I used to be on Lemmygrad a lot too until Reddit's self destruction happened. The problem is that many people expected to port the same dynamics of Reddit to Lemmygrad, ignoring the potential there was to create something custom-made from scratch, without the need to be just another Reddit. It's a shame, but the quality has declined partly because of that, because the conversations are much less deep and the posts are less and less interesting overall…
Are you sure you’re sorted by local? I havent noticed that really, but idk i only ever lurked off and on again from 2022 and only became an active user a few weeks before the reddit invasion so idk if I just wasn’t paying close enough attention.
Also I dont really like vaugue posting like this, either call specific users out or dont mention it, anything else can just lead to baseless speculation
no need to claim he has poor reading comprehension, it comes across as needlessly hostile
mods/admins will pin good posts on hexbear specifically so they don't get drowned out by the algorithm. maybe mods/admins here could do the same.
I will solve this by simply posting cool art to the leftsthetics community. No need to thank me. 😌
!leftsthetics@lemmygrad.ml moderator here (though rather inactive lately). I agree, this is not how the community is supposed to be used. No-one said anything about it for a long time, so I figured everyone else was okay with it and kept it up.
So, how exactly to proceed now? It would be good to message the user and ask them to direct their posts to a more fitting community like !latino_marxista@lemmygrad.ml which they already moderate. Problem is, I don't speak Spanish. Does anyone on here speak Spanish and could write such message?
I can. I will try to get in contact with them.
Update: they have posted again on c/leftsthetics around 20 minutes ago and they did not reply to my message, so I wouldn't expect anything.
Well, it took a while but I got an answer.
"Hello, thank you for your comments. Cheers."
Agreed. When I think of that community name, I don't want memes (in Spanish or otherwise but sadly as someone who can't speak Spanish they're especially useless to me), I expect like propaganda posters, either official of AES states past/present or new ones people have mocked up in that same vibe. Or maybe like photos of the Soviet Union or China, Cuba, DPRK, etc that emphasize some sort of left aesthetic, hammer and sickles visible, red flags, public housing, something.
Exactly! And as for publications in Spanish, I'll be honest. I'm Spanish, I speak Spanish and all that stuff, but, knowing that most of you here speak English, it seems to me to be exclusionary to use Spanish, especially in images and without even putting a translation in the description of the publication. This makes the content inaccessible to many users and confusing for those who only speak English.
I think Spanish posts are fine in a community like !latino_marxista@lemmygrad.ml, just like Polish posts are fine in !poland@lemmygrad.ml.
Even being able to read Spanish though, !leftsthetics@lemmygrad.ml isn’t the right place for all the Spanish-language content.
For example, this one is out of place (even if it weren’t for the typos): https://lemmygrad.ml/post/1023478
This one might be okay: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/1077937
HAHA POLISH PEOPLE ARE NOTICED HAHAHAHA
😎😎😎🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱💪💪💪
But no really, the Spanish stuff should have it's own community like we do, and even then we permit English and sometimes provide both English and Polish in the same posts.
They also post Spaniard stuff on Latino Marxista which also doesn't make sense at all, I get it if you maybe post some Soviet stuff for the sake of it okay but Spaniard communism?
I agree, it is out of place, no matter how interesting it is.
How is Spaniard stuff on Latino Marxista out of place?
Spain is across the ocean from LatAm. If it’s also for Spanish stuff then it might as well be called hispano marxista or something like that. That would then exclude Portuguese or indigenous languages which are common in LatAm.
As an outsider, it looks like the board is just one person doing a shitpost a day, and never engaging with the broader community. Well, other than to occasionally post ✊ every few months.
Tell them to use c/memes, c/genzedonges, or c/latino_marxista instead.
That's a good idea, but I also wanted the moderators to agree on new guidelines for that community.
