Pretty ironic how her and the other host's take on the sub is basically the exact same as the average le epic redditor.
Yeah an episode a couple weeks ago Will said something about the sub being full deranged antisocial sociopaths, and I'm like cool, it's good to parrot talking points from Neera Tanden and Tom Watson about leftists in America, that's really useful.
Wills take on the sub is 100% brain dead bullshit. I really think the only reason he hated it is because he posted there a few times and he got completely owned one time. Too bad we don’t have an archive to find it but I remember him getting terminally mad and basically logging off
I have spent some time on a website inhabited by sociopaths, and ho boy, chapo is not that.
But you see it's hard for me to see any value in things that are not specifically tailored to my current personal needs.
Idk if I lack some Brooklyn cultural context, but I found them unfunny and was a bit uncomfortable with them. I like to think of myself as being quite adept at just ignoring jokes that are not my type of humor, but they felt out of place and without purpose
I honestly don't remember there being much bad in the form of antisocial behavior being on the Chapo subreddit though. Like you'd have the occasional embarrassing post being upvoted like the one about how you shouldn't make fun of virgins but even then that's just cringe and not really antisocial. Like I dunno what the hosts or anybody else is talking about here.
It's just hard to tell when someone's doing a bit, like when we had a lot of weird antinatalism posts after it got mentioned on the podcast
I remember most of those posts coming from the view that we should reduce suffering by not having as many kids that will experience the ongoing climate catastrophe and all that, which seems like the opposite of antisocial to me. And if shitposting is antisocial then I don't wanna be social.
in her defense, it’s very obvious her knowledge on the subreddit was minimal at best, you think she knows we had a lively and welcoming community and solidarity amongst trans comrades?
I like amber.
But a bunch of failchildren that have never had actual jobs and met each other posting on social media should be a little less judgmental of people finding a community online to develop ideas.
All of the hosts have delusions of grandeur and think that they should really be on a Majority Report type show or have columns in a respectable publication by now
Its kind of amazing watching them turn into the NYT op-ed writers they criticize. Like they are just as hostile and dismissive of criticism now as a David Brooks.
All of the other podcasts with dedicated fan communities (Q-Anon Anonymous, Street Fight, Trashfuture, etc.) generally have a very positive relationship with their fans. Importantly they take criticism and suggestions from fans seriously and work to address it, thus making the show better. They would definitely get more patreon bucks if they didn't actively express disgust at their own fan base.
You either die a Chapo, or live long enough to see yourself become an op-ed writer
I think True Anon holds some contempt for its fans.....but I can’t tell if it’s a bit or not
Part of me finds it difficult to find the line between edgy bit and honest feelings towards fan, but them calling the fans pain piggies felt like a joke the vast majority of the time
Yep. But IMO she's right here. And when someone has a good take, "you don't have the right to judge me" is not a good counter-argument at all, especially when you judge them right before.
Never listened to the podcast and don't know shit about what they say, so they may totally be how you described them. But it doesn't matter. All I know is that "Virgil is back on twitter" and that "Amber". And to some extent, this is an example proving her point.
Imagine her replying "they should be less judgmental" to critics made against her here (which is not what the dumpster line is about for me). People would just say it's yet another bad take from Amber.
It's the hypocrisy of Chapo hosts meeting on Twitter and becoming satisfied with their success due to that, and then turning around and saying that meeting other like minded people online is garbage.
No, you know, it's not the hypocrisy, it's that they don't even see the comparison because they have such contempt for anyone else online, when that's where they came from. Maybe the correct takeaway from this is that Chapo is garbage too, but I'm sure that wasn't Amber's point.
Matt and Amber definitely. No one knows where the fuck Virgil came from.
Wait, they’re failsons? I dunno their personal history, just kind of stumbled into the sub and listened to some more recent episodes.
No, they are not, that is a brand. They are immensely successful now and mostly had media careers before the pod. Amber is a professor (not a huge deal ik but impressive to me)
more incessant whining about the hosts' disdain for the subreddit
Nope
Subreddits are like commune cults without the sex.
Amber acknowledging the work of the volcel police
Because Will's the least funny of them. He can be good at structuring the show, sometimes, but always he uses that role to make sure his jokes are heard when it'd be better off if more of them were dropped.
They said on the post AOC win ep that the campaign told them many volunteers came from the sub.
3rd most active subreddit, 60th largest number of users? something like that
Which also made it really shitty when AOC decided she wanted brownie points with Dem ghouls by denouncing Bernie Bros, when those are the people that helped her get elected when she was being ratfucked.
It's still important that she's right about reddit being a dumpster, but I'm not at all surprised that she doesn't quite get it. AFAIK, it has it's appeals for someone who the internet was always around. Like there is a generational gap still, of users who jumped onto platforms at their infancy and kept at it, and those who casually use it for a week or two and then just bounce off forever. I have been on twitter and reddit and facebook forever, and changes here and there have bounced me off their services.
AFAIK, we can say she's terminally OFFline. But there are many of us who've been at this from the start, or who started from these online services, so she's either completely correct in her assessment or horribly misinformed, but I'm of the mind that it has to be a combination of offline, and online work in order to get ANYWHERE. And it's not hard, the online right does it rather simply, the only problem is that it's always on some sort of privately owned website and admins often time dont want that kind of trouble showing up (and it's always trouble from the left, funny that..).
I dont find a lot of left online activism that effective because i'm older and i expect the work to come from offline INTO online, not the other way around. I dont know what a breakaway site like this can accomplish just yet, i just know I'm likely not going to lead it. It will have my support though.
The most I've ever seen the sub as was like an employee breakroom where it was safe to trash talk the bosses, and sometimes it's really nice to have that spot to vent and not be horribly misjudged for it.
I agree, and I don't think many of the users there thought of it as activism as well; that was never the purpose of the sub, most people were aware of that. It was still important in many unique ways because it was a massive media hub/news aggregate that filtered everything through a big-tent leftist lens, stayed perpetually relevant, and fostered and cultivated a very unique emergent culture. No other community on the internet was like that, nothing ticked all of those boxes. You either had to grit your teeth through chuds, or deal with a small and selective group of one particular tendency. The closest thing in terms of a media hub with a leftist filter was maybe r/latestagecapitalism, but it wasn't that far left, and the attitude was what was most important - LSC's culture is just angry and depressed, moral outrage, and is mostly surface-level anticapitalists. r/CTH did have an undergirding of outrage but with solidarity, or sharing something funny to cope, and an irreverent culture that you saw nowhere else which allowed leftists to feel like they had a space they could let loose and know they won't get chud backlash. And this website so far is inheriting that unique culture, so I'm glad to see it didn't die.
"Fighting over the right to be heard on Reddit is like fighting over the right to live in a dumpster."
You wouldn't be doing it if you had a better option.
Here's the thing about the chapos.
No one cares what amber thinks
Amber: I’d end by saying that the first priority of American socialists should be building our own political institutions based on the political interests of the broadest working class possible. Without that labor base, any online activist strategy we attempt to employ will be at the mercy of a hostile capitalist media.
Or you do the incredibly obvious thing that Lenin advocated for but translate it to the modern day, create our own newspaper free of the influence of the capitalists, or in the case of the modern day media landscape -- create our own social media.
even if she's not a twitter leftist, literally everyone she interacts with is
Idk how you can base your whole schtick around being the irreverent, post-ironic, pandering leftist in the room and yell at people who don't like you that they're too online
New York deserves the same fate as the UK, push that nonsense into the sea never to be seen again.
Honestly once you get past her first response where she talks about the subreddit she never visited, most of the rest of her takes on the issue were pretty sound.
I don’t think anything about the Internet is fair. Why would it be? It’s capitalist media. It’s naive to expect otherwise. I literally don’t care about reddit, nor do I believe that the internet can be relied upon as any medium for left movement-building. It’s not a democratically controlled industry; it’s barely subject to law. You might as well be talking about Exxon mobile not being “fair.”
I don't disagree with this entirely, but the right is spreading a mind disease of bigoted nihilism and self worship, combined with aggressively pushing traditions everyone knows, so their internet outreach is fundamentally compatible with online culture to begin with.
It is much more difficult to pull people left because we have actually have expectations, are trying to build a movement, and are trying to teach people things that run completely counter to everything they've ever learned.
It literally is the difference between education and indoctrination.
Plus, they're mainly trying to do stochastic terrorism, which is the main thing internet radicalization actually accomplishes. I'm not completely against that if people start picking the right targets. But left wing radicalization is based on the idea that things don't have to be this way, which is a personal, rational appeal that's hard to pivot into a desire to martyr yourself for a better future, let alone join an organized movement that currently doesn't exist.
She's not wrong about that. What infuriated me about the last premium episode (Amber wasn't on it and I have to assume she would have had similar objections), they're going on about how censoring the NYP story or entrapment of the fash that tried to kidnap Whitmer are bad things and we shouldn't enjoy them because they'll use that precedence against us. It's like, motherfucker you're bringing up the Panama Papers as an example of something they might censor in the future, while the vast majority of Americans have no idea what that is and they planted a fucking bomb in one of the researcher's car. While they're saying this the nyt is publishing that piece admitting the cops committed a hit on that antifa guy and Trump is bragging about it. PRECEDENCE WILL ALWAYS BE CREATED TO STOP LEFTIST ADVANCEMENT, THAT'S WHY THE FUCKING APPARATUSES OF STATE WERE BUILT IN THE FIRST FUCKING PLACE.
Absolutely silly. It's like chastising a bear for enjoying watching a hunter get stuck in a bear trap, because then you might get caught. Like the fucking iron ore was pulled from the earth and smelted into the shape of a bear trap SOLELY to catch me, there's no alternative reality where that's not explicitly the reason for doing this. But I can find it amusing when the wrong dumbass gets stuck in a trap that was laid for me.
