can i remind you all what this place is? it's a website that spawned from a subreddit about a podcast. that is it. and we still have so many people in the streets!!! im ready to bet that this 10k niche community has more people organizing and shit than most fucking subreddits 20 times bigger than us. cos that's wha we are, at the end of the day, a fucking subreddit. dont get me wrong, i love this place, but really, is this where you are expecting some great movement to start? we dont have offices, we dont have any type of local unity, we barely pay the mods of this place 400 dollars a month, we are just a bunch of dumbasses sharing memes and newspaper articles on a website.
and the thing is, there is a fuckton of people here in comparison to other places; now, im talking about the subreddit that had 12 times more people at the time of the ban, but we had a huge fucking part of our community volounteer and donate for Bernie, which ok, pretty cringe in retrospect, but we still mobilized quite a lot. but we still have people daily talking about helping the homeless, organizing communities, joining RAs, and all the jazz, something you just dont see anywhere else.
and also, jesus, some people simply cant or wont organize. that's it. you cant force those. so just let them have a place to post, talk about topics, get informed and chill out. i personally have way too much anxiety and i am not even sure of what to do in my own country that counts as organizing, so i use this place to rant about my life sometimes, something i wouldnt be able to do if this place was, idk, the DSA or something. idk what the DSA is actually. uh. will this bring any leftist project into actuation? no, and we are all painfully aware of that, and we tell off anyone who thinks otherwise. but so far, we have loads of people who organize, to the point where it is actually commendable, instead of shaming the empty half of the bottle.
Agreed. Encouraging people to organize and do praxis is good. Incessantly bitching, complaining, and shaming about how there are 10,000 people on the site and not all of them are actually doing real-world activism is not.
I'm a Socialist. Yes, I probably should be putting more effort into radicalizing people I know IRL, unionizing my workplace, going to more protests. But also, I'm a lazy piece of shit and I'm not going to do any of that, for the foreseeable future at least.
Any energy spent browbeating people for sitting in front of a computer wasting their life would be better spent building a path to activism. It's easy to say "You should be doing more", but while it might make you feel better, it doesn't actually result in people doing more. It's harder to put in the work of convincing people to do more, and removing barriers to people doing more.
A moderator team that generates a feeling of superiority over their userbase because they're doing more "praxis" than average can only really devolve into said moderator team eventually dissolving the community and telling everyone to "go outside", as if the actual result of such an action wouldn't just be the unmotivated userbase moving onto other websites where they can be lazy fuckers, while destroying a centralized left-wing community that could have been used as a pool for radicalization and recruitment.
Not only that but online organizing in this space is a surefire way to wind up with a CIA honeypot or get doxxed
We should have a thread to discuss implementing measures to mitigate this. Definitely a huge concern, as much as I would love to use a place like this to organize.
It's not gonna happen. If that is a goal, it needs to be completely locked down and each user would need to go through extensive vetting, which is a ton of work.
From what little I know, it's best to not organize online at all because the amount of hoops you have to jump through to do it safely aren't worth it when that time could be spent in real life spaces.
I agree with your premise, but I think we're envisioning different things when referring to organizing online.
I'm not talking about "hey comrades, I'm hosting a communism at X location on Wednesday", but rather online organization that can possibly be done pseudo-anonymously. While I definitely don't consider posting to be praxis, I'd consider the creation of this forum (more specifically Lemmy) to be along those lines.
I realize the most effective organization is going to be offline, but there's definitely a huge space for digital organization. There's a huge opportunity to dislodge capitalist tech companies by creating FOSS and decentralized alternatives to services like Uber/Airbnb.
But thinking ahead to the not-so-distant future, what are we going to do about the proliferation of facial recognition and the likes? Within the next decade, your location will be tied to your name and face just by walking about any moderately populated area. At some point not too long from now, organizing online may be the only way to do so without institutional surveillance (provided you have decent internet opsec). I'm reluctant to dismiss all digital organization outright for this reason.
ye i agrre with that. although i gotta say, this is more like poster valhalla, after being radicalized/radicalizing we finally rest here to post the communistest of the communist memes :mao-shining:
uwu absolutely, also great reference
(also sorry to grab your attention like mr site admin, but can we get block buttons already, like cmon.)
Chapo chat 2 when
ye i realize you arent an actual dev, lol. i thought block buttons are better than disabling downvotes but idk.
Reposting this comment again:
I really want to reopen the leftist pipeline. I will warn everyone on this site though that it means that to do this the tankie aspect of this site must be more moderated. If we want to reopen the pipeline, we need to become not alienating to libs. @Beatnik, as much as I love Parenti I never would have read him if r/chapotraphouse had been more tankie. What I liked on Reddit was that we had Chapo, Moretankiechapo, and Moremoretankiechapo. I would suggest for the future that we open c/ versions of these subs and contain tankie posting to those subs but allow commenting everywhere. That’s how I got bullied into reading Parenti.
The point is to pipeline libs.
Yeah and like, you gotta ask em to dinner first
Seriously though, how are we gonna funnel in new users? Image stamps once the backend rewrite is done?
Yeah, I really didn't like that half of the post. I mean cass was in the fucking trenches fighting transphobia every day and I respect her for that. o7 to a real one.
But being like "oh and also I made a post and not enough people commented on it, which just goes to show how much you all suck" was, uh not good
Evidently long enough to throw the entire website into struggle central lol
I think a big part of it is that a lot of people just skip over the pinned posts/megathreads.
yo, who's cass? is it like the real name of someone who was a poster here or something? im so lost rn
Lot of drama today. @the_river_cass is a prominent trans poster and mod who very publicly left the site today. Her post is pinned at the top of the sub rn
thank you for the context. i had seen confabulously's post but not any of the drama that happened before it bc i hadn't logged on in like a day or so. now things are starting to make more sense lol
Yeah, I'm not meeting anyone in this shit lol
I haven't been anywhere that wasn't a food shop in months.
Plenty of places are organizing in online spaces and looking for new members.
And plenty of places (like food not Bombs) sees a dip in people showing up around this time of year when people need help more now than ever.
I wouldn't trust a platform that gets so often raided by different flavours of chuds to seriously organize. If that makes me a lib then downvote me
Hello, I am a Real Communist and I would like for you to donate money, also do you know of any communists IRL and can I have their home address for my annual Christmas postcard? Thanks!
They're all in the white house now. Thank you, comrade, please send them a good gift o7
I think of "go outside" as more of a shorthand for " stop expending effort and attention on unimportant shit that doesn't affect material conditions"
Most of us are aware that organizing is much more difficult during a pandemic. Still is a waste of time to focus on disputes between Twitter/podcast personalities. Masturbating is a far more productive use of your time than getting caught up arguing over the Jimmy Dore shit.
Organize however much you can in these times, but even if you are inside doing nothing productive, focusing on stupid drama is still a waste of time.
My biggest criticism of this community is how dunk-centric we are. I don't give a fuck about shit views out in the wild, and I come here specifically not to see them. I want dank left-wing image macros, theory, and links to organizing opportunities, not an endless highlight reel on how stupid the libs are.
this post was in response to cass's.
i enjoy dunking on libs. after all we are all here cos we dislike the capitalists, so we cant really stop dunking those.
Idk who cass is, nor do I think I've seen the post, but I'm definitely not saying to never dunk on the libs. I enjoy it too.
My issue is that a huge proportion of our content is just twitter/reddit screenshots of bad takes.
I totally agree. It’s always the real annoying ones that are on here nonstop saying that too. Do they really thing if they scream “log off and go outside and organize1!!1!!” we’ll all go outside and bring about the second American Revolution? It’s a pandemic too, not a good time to organize as is. Quit taking this place so seriously. It’s Chapo Trap House, home of pigpoopballs and doing bits and listening to the pod. There’s no need for all the seriousness about organizing and logging off and what have you.
Yeah but how else could I brush off criticism with low effort clapbacks?
ye you gotta put your... seed into... this is a bad analogy man
ChapoChat should be a fun lefty online space, which, at best, could function as part of a leftward pipeline insofar as any community can be a pipeline. I don't think I would want to do any real life organizing via this space (too insecure opsec-wise), I'd probably try to do that in person with the local people I'm trying to engage and mobilize.
Are you telling me this isn’t the headquarters of Antifa Inc. like I thought this whole time
Also if you're in the cold part of the Northern Hemisphere it's Mid-Winter and we're in the middle of a virulent plague
I know multiple people that have joined the marxist branch of my local DSA because of this site and the subreddit. Getting 1/1000 users to organize on the ground is better than getting none with no website.
The correct form of the "Go Outside" reproach is when it is leveled out people who view a tinpot little message board as "srs business" and "revolutionary struggle" and go absolutely apoplectic when it doesn't go there way (i.e. the Kerry posters).
Posting here is fine, and organizing is fine, but they aren't all that related.
