YOU are speaking!
As many are aware, there has been a lot of site drama in the past week or so. This is NOT a post to discuss that, and I ask that you keep all serious discussion about it on the pinned posts it belongs in. What I am looking to do here is ask the community what they would like to see from c/agitprop going forward.
There have been ongoing discussions on Hexbear regarding making more serious posts, having a place for effortposting to get noticed (and thus incentivizing more to be made, nobody likes spending hours working on en effortpost for 5 upbears), and having a more focused place for less casual/more academic discussion. The nature of this comm, or at least what the intended purpose was supposed to be upon its inception, was to give Hexbear users a place to produce and find agitprop for use in everyday discussions. Given these two statements, last week I made an impromptu U.S. Election response/commentary resource Megathread here on c/agitprop. I figured that perhaps this was the place to open up to users for less casual/more serious analysis and discussion regarding the U.S. election, like… for actual traditional agitprop purposes.
The post was a huge success, and the community received tons of high-effort posting from individuals into the Megathread posting their own takes on the U.S. election, many references and direct links to highlight other Hexbear user’s great effortposts elsewhere on this site, and good resources from outside of Hexbear. In my opinion, this post/style of post could be a useful and engaging format for effortpost generation/congregation of larger news events in the future.
Now finally for the purpose of this post: What would you like to see from c/agitprop going forward? Feedback on the U.S. Election response/commentary resource Megathread is of course appreciated, and I’d love to hear any ideas regarding how it went/if you (dis)liked it/holding a similar thread in the future, but please do not limit your input based only on what you have seen so far from this comm. This community is, of course, only what we make it, so any and all feedback is greatly appreciated and goes a long way towards improving everybody’s user experience.
Below I will list a few ideas I have seen floated by the community for c/agitprop in the past. Additionally, I will try to keep this list updated with any ideas that are provided in the comments of this post as well in order to highlight them for discussion.
•Effortpost Megathread for larger news events (frequency/guidelines for “larger” TBD here)
•Agitprop Megathread running parallel to the Weekly News Megathread for more nuanced discussion/analysis to be used both on Hexbear and elsewhere
•Ongoing Agitprop workshop/resource thread to organize the Hexbear community’s many skills and have relevant, ready-to-go agitprop for current events ready for dissemination outside of this site
•Reference guide for left/left-adjacent spaces to crosspost agitprop material to
•Agitprop field report for returning to Hexbear (potentially contest style) and seeing where agitprop is reaching the widest audience and receiving the most engagement
•”Quick Draw” style + up to date archive of good agitprop in order to quickly debunk common talking points
•Keeping a calendar of known upcoming events to help prepare agitprop ahead of time
•Highlighting past major events or public figures to conduct a postmortem effortpost analysis
I really like the first half of this post and have thought a lot about it in the past. Because of our wealth of amazing users on this site we really do have all of the tools at our disposal to actually produce high quality agitprop for dissemination. My initial thoughts on this are that it’s something that could be run alongside the News Megathread in order to have ready-made agitprop for stories currently in the spotlight (both on Hexbear but also elsewhere)
Regarding AI, I’ll leave that up for community discussion and would like to see things remain civil. It can be a very divisive topic and I tend to find myself on the side of we have real people to produce real intelligence, while AI steals from others doing the same for the benefit of large companies who own the tech.
Capitalists use AI to steal from the commons, my point is we should be using AI to take it back.
The problem I have with AI is that it feels like why should I care to spend my time reading or learning from something that you couldn’t bother to spend your time creating?
Yes capitalists use it. That just highlights how hollow everything about them actually is
I fail to see how that's relevant to my point that we are massively out-numbered, out-gunned, and out-financed.
Also, implying AI as hollow ignores the true nature of The Commons and our relationship with it. We do not create things, we discover them by providing context to an endless sea of information. Under capitalism AI is like an oil well stealing intellectual resources out from under our feet. Under socialism, it has the potential to be the people's custodian to the infinite.