Missing those days of the old subreddit when I was just getting engaged in lefty politics. That sub was so uplifting. So many detailed analyses that I wish I saved. So many hilarious posts that always filled me with joy. Before I found the old sub I thought leftists were humorless assholes but r/cth really brought me along and cemented myself as a leftist.
I can’t exactly pin what’s different here but the whole vibe is off. I really wish it could capture the spirit of the old place but I’m not so sure. I know I’m not the most prolific poster but I’ve given this place 6-7 months and I’m not certain whether I want to continue or not. I’ll admit, I got caught up in the GME hype. Maybe because I seriously thought my life would materially improve at least slightly. I’m done with that stocks shit for right now. The split that happened on the site as a result of it was pretty bad. I really hope we can all do better, especially at lashing out at each other.
If you’re from the old sub who’s been along for the ride I thank you from the bottom of my heart. My life is much richer thanks to you all of you.
the whole vibe is off.
pretty much how I've felt about everything in life since last March
Yeah, looking through the memes I had saved from the sub, I can say that the current bits are higher quality on average. The sub was mostly just bernie posting at the end.
Bernie posting with some "Where did this bring you, back to me :lenin-pensive:" posting every time Bernie got ratfucked or did something liberal. I think that the sub was starting to get better after Corbyn lost but then again we might have just been seeing electoralists become doomers (and doomerism is liberalism). I don't think we should write this project off just because it will never be like the old sub, that was probably never an option.
With the vibe off, the good posters leave, and that filters for the worst posters, then the admins listen to the worst posters, then it throws the vibe off more.
A terrible cycle that only makes the site less attractive to normal people.
It's because half the site is scold posts and the other half is the same few jokes repeated over and over again
Shit sucks
The scold posting here is fucking out of control. That’s the main difference between this place and the main sub. We didn’t have 40 threads every day mocking people for eating things differently.
It's because this site has the most on-edge admins possible for a board with like 300 posters.
Any infringement gets a ban here, when the users just used to bully the shitty people off the sub on cth.
The scoldposts are all you get left when they foster a culture like that.
our admins are absolute angels compared to the moderators of any given leftbook group, and i would lay down my life for them
You see the bias in being self-selected as one of the few remaining users here, then saying you love the moderation style?
Tell me I'm wrong that the administration here kicks off a lot of active users over petty grievances.
oh yea they're fuckin nutty with it. love those guys
If you wanna hang out on reddit, hang out on reddit. This isn’t reddit. It’s something different. It’s trying to be a welcoming place on the internet. That means banning a LOT of assholes.
I'm not sure about what you've been seeing, but I've seen a LOT of comrades getting banned in threads for nothing. I'll stumble across multiple banned flaired accounts every day and read through what they post, not understanding why they've been kicked off the site.
You're literally a moderator here, which would make sense as to why you 're caping for the moderators, but to call this site welcoming is a bit misleading considering the militant style of 'welcoming' to a very select few within the left we do.
I mean welcoming to victimised people like trans, neurodiverse, etc.
Who cares about being welcoming to assholes and reactionaries.
If people think this site is too stringent with bans, try joining your local communist party while espousing the views that get you banned from this site. The lines of demarcation between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour are pretty similar. Why should our online gathering places be held to a lesser standard than the ones we use irl?
(Also fwiw I mod very quiet comms and have never banned anyone from the site, I don’t even have sitemod powers)
Why should our online gathering places be held to a lesser standard than the ones we use irl?
Because we're trying to grow the community, not prune it down to the most terminally online users who post multiple struggle sessions a day over the most infantile shit that doesn't matter.
If you wanna hang out on reddit, hang out on reddit
about that...
but when will you be post posting post posts? i posit that youll have gone postal by then. ill see myself out.
for the record im referencing that post... am i now post posting? the world may never know
I like it, it's small. I know everyone. I can share things I like and get into good discussions about them without being called a dirty commie or harassed. I can't even go on Reddit anymore, just makes me to upset. Here is perfect.
I literally never look at usernames unless I see a big shiny icon next to them
People are pointing to primaries and yes the sub got very very dark after Bernie lost (I pretty much stopped posting and moved to twitter), but the sub was fucking amazing once the protests started. The daily megathreads, the shitposts, the collective fascination at police cars being smashed. It became such a positive good vibe place.
I've said this since the beggining, but I think having comms was a mistake. What was great about the sub was that it was a huge mishmash of shitposts and effort posts. There was no such thing as off topic.
Ultimately though this place is great, I'm thankful for the admins and mods keeping the community going. I think the closer we get to the original userbase of the subreddit the better it's gonna be
Yes, how is a site with at most 1000 users online at a time justified in splitting into 50 different communities and then expecting that to function like the entirety of Reddit.
From the beginning I advised against that, all the way back on the initial Discord.
All it does is factionalize even further and promote tribalism on a site that would not even be considered a small subreddit.
The way to fix it now would to return to one board with a lot of posts, just one main site with no smaller communities because that achieves nothing right now besides emphasizing how empty this place is.
I like the coms having c/fitness or c/food let's us discuss shit that has little to nothing to do leftisum while still not having to deal with all the bullshit that comes with reddit.
We could just use the main page as we did the subreddit for those things. A flairing system would go a long way towards the function you're talking about, not a split community system on a subscription basis.
If you just read your feed then the comms are essentially a tagging system, except you can choose to not view certain tags
comms
Leftists : secure own space
Also Leftists : immediately factionalize
Again, Leftists : :shocked-pikachu:I was an advocate of streamlining the channels to make things easier on that end when I was modding there, but I left shortly after that. Fewer channels definitely makes things easier to follow
did nobody consider a tag structure+filter (I don't need to see gardening posts, not looking for direct action stuff today) instead of subdirectories?
I mean, I'm always a slut for that sort of structure literally anywhere in literally anything, but I do think it's the best idea here.
I think we should have more comms personally. There is literally no difference if you sort by all. I usually don't even look at what comm stuff is posted in
Both philosophies have points, but it's gotta be one or the other. A federated platform was supposed to assists with this sort of thing too, cause people would be able to split off and do their own thing without fully segregating themselves
If we didn't have comms, the front page would be entirely made up of twitter screenshots (like the old sub) and everything else would get buried in new.
It takes 2 seconds to look at a shitpost and upvote it whereas it takes 5 minutes to read through an effortpost and engage in discussion. That's why having multiple comms is good, it gives effortposts a chance.
Yeah, a brand new site with 13k users is going to have a different meta than an established forum with 300k. The people who came here were the ones that really cared about having a space for leftist discussion and we lost a lot of the shitposters that were just passing through.
I never really expected this to be the same as the sub and I'm cool with that, it's an entirely different thing. Plus the sub didn't have emoji :sankara-salute:
We had hope that electoralism could work and there was a golden path that led to president sanders and a better world.
We aren't the same people and twitter isn't the same river.
do you view the sanders campaign as "being the last off-ramp to fascism" now in retrospect?
I've only been a member of the community after the sub was banned so I'm asking out of curiosity. most comrades here/now see Bernie as being a lib who is to be respected, but I saw him as something much more back then. now with all the AOC good/bad posts, idk how you people see lib politicians anymore.
I think I've certainly gotten more aware of the cons of reforming a corrupt system since then. like it might iron out the insane contradictions, but it also might give more life to an empire that's a net negative for the world.
shit does look bleak tho.
I think my own perception is that the highway itself is fascist, and Bernie was the last off-ramp in sight, and now we're in the car trapped going in a direction that we all know will end in disaster but we can't turn around.
call it coping, but the 'off-ramp' was just a more illusory road. like the same shit as now but with a more content population.
I'm convinced now that the only way things change for the better is if something radical and internationalist starts in europe or the middle east. nothing good will come out of this country. too many chuds and too weak/self-centered a leftist movement.
Fingers crossed for the Middle East cos I feel about the same about Europe lol
at least diem25 and yiannis varoufakis are a thing. I hardly know a thing about the mid east beyond turkey, which I would say is worse off than here. we just have to hope for an america too weak to give support to reactionaries worldwide.
save us xi?
Remember when people tried to argue that voting for WARREN was decent position (before the :warren-snake-green: moment). The sub was also majority pro-HK protest for a little bit, good times. This site is still very lib, but I won't say there hasn't been progress.
We lost the wierd twitter contingent. No one posts stuff like "Spinning my dick in a poop bucket like a cement mixer" anymore.
The people here now would have never thought of asking a chud to post a pic of his dick and then harrassed him until he did it.
You would actually be banned immediately if you did it, with no given reason except "harassment" buried in the modlogs.
If you try to, people just call you weird, then refuse to change your diaper.
Its because every once in a while you're looking at posts and then the autorefresh jumps all the content and you lose where you are and can't find it again. This leads to everyone being angry and confused all the time
I'm on the fence about disabling downvotes at the moment too, while I miss it and it doesn't feel like chapo if you can't downvote a bad post, I also do like the effect it has on negativity as a whole, though it does seem to bolster the scold posts even further because they think everyone agrees with them and we actually need more of it.
Hiding is an individualized downvote anyway. I do wish we could hide posts too.
I'm here mostly because I cant use reddit anymore. cant tell if it's because Ive gone further left or if the platforms gotten worse.
At least the arguments here don't have people debating if genocide is bad.
Someone I think on bunkerchan rightfully pointed out that the r/cth ban had more to do with advertisers finding our shit raunchy and distasteful than our political position, and that the kind of stuff advertisers want to see on the frontpage is the blandest, most uncontroversial shit imaginable. It's not just you, reddit has gotten deliberately worse post-ban in order to capture the most advertising revenue possible. The whole internet has.
you could undo the redesign by selecting an option in settings or using the old subdomain(old.reddit.com).
the userbase has gotten worse imo...the redesign has nothing to do with
I think it managed to retain the megathread essence (specifically the last megathreads) but yeah like to get the kind of feel the board used to have where you could sort by new and get like 2 or 3 posts that were genuinely funny and/or posts that were extremely riffable you need lots of people that are posting stuff all the time, like that's pretty much it. We just don't have enough very online people. Having few regulars makes things personal and that sometimes can get a bit too intense.
I dunno, chapo.chat is good for what it is, but I had already long made peace with the fact that nobody will be able to recreate the old sub feel again.
I recognized this problem, myself. I have been posting furiously in an effort to mitigate it. I call upon all of you to do the same.
:chavez-salute:
Thanks for your service o7
I'll probably start browsing by new again too
Internet communities have a pretty short lifecycle. They seem to grow and fall apart in pretty consistent ways, too. Someone could probably write a paper about it.
r/cth is different though, that board got prematurely killed off, forever immortalizing it in our minds and living as an unattainable ideal that's probably more rose-tinted than we care to admit.
Under different circumstances, yeah it would have died off. People were already getting tired of it and reminiscing about the good old days.
I think a lot of the culture shift has been because you can very safely assume everyone here is far-left, while on reddit we had a large frequent influx of curious/angry/lost non-leftists. We're no longer a lib-to-left pipeline, we're just leftists.
So instead of feeling a desire to explain misconceptions in order to radicalize any given post, the assumption is that the other person is "as radicalized as they'll get" and treat bad takes and/or disagreements as irreconcilable sectarian lines and obviously proof that their faction is bad. It's no longer radicalizing, just policing.
Oh, a second thing is that /r/CTH being banned was a very inorganic artificial change to the community, so everyone intuitively knows that there was a sharp sudden change in the community and changes in the feel or vibe can therefore be perceived as caused by that artificial change and resented instead of chalked up to the way communities always change over time.
I feel like chacha doesn't have the same kind of accessibility as r/cth did. Obviously part of that is because we aren't on reddit, but I think it's also because this is place is much more sectarian. People here are mostly ML, some anarchists. With the old sub it felt like a bunch of anti-capitalists of different forms, with Bernie as the unifying element towards the end. Anyone who hadn't read theory didn't feel out of place. Here, I think it's expected that you're informed on all the latest leftist developments and know all the people there is to know
Here, I think it’s expected that you’re informed on all the latest leftist developments and know all the people there is to know
It's not about theory though. It's about twitter or whatever. I don't think people now know more theory or something, they're just more online. The old sub was more informative.
I think at least part of the reason why it's become less cool is because of covid and how it's "forced" people to be way more online, isolated and tense.
Anyone who hadn’t read theory didn’t feel out of place.
Lies. I love it here and never touched a single book
I come back here every once in a while, but it's always offputting just how much of the discussion is either about how everything is fucked forever and there's nothing we can do about it, or about how there's only one pure and right way for people to be a part of this community and we need to seriously evaluate who is allowed in.
Uuuhh. Show me one struggle session of "who's allowed in" that isn't some obvious thing like no terfs, no jimmydores
Not OP but I feel like there is a lot of "you are not a real Leftist if...", "you are doing Leftism wrong if...", "I'm leaving because leftists here did x and I think that's cringe". It's not most people but it happens enough. Every time something gets a bit popular on here all the contrarians come out of the woodwork in a way that didn't used to happen on the the subreddit. I think it mainly has to do with the size of the community, but still. And sometimes it's the most petty shit. And not in a funny way, we often saw on the sub, but in a really pesimistic angry way.
Yup. This fits in with my theory I posted above (or below, depending of vote scores)
Gotta say I don’t really think the anti-Dore sentiment is good. Is it really so universal here? I mean, he was one of the first of Left media on YouTube to be full-throatedly calling out directly the corruption and cheating of the DNC in 2016. Since then he’s regularly had on Hedges, Greenwald, Taibbi, Richard Wolf, Cornel West, Aaron Mate, Max Blumenthal, and always brings up Assange. He’s speaking to disaffected Democrats, Berniecrats and RWers who also sense the whole thing is rigged.
Thank god for this place. After Michael Brooks’s sudden death and the Reddit purge I was spinning in despair this summer (despite the amazing and inspiring BLM Uprising that injected some hope). I was losing my mind. Especially that the daily MegaThread was my main source for what was going on.
Was very active at other online Left spots. But had become too despairing to participate much anymore. This is the only place I’ve sought now. Love to you all, comrades.
Uuuhh. I don't keep a list of bookmarks to threads that annoyed me. I'm not that maladjusted.
But the last one I saw before making this comment was a long thread of people arguing about whether talking about the gamestop shorts was appropriate behavior for true leftists, some shit like that.
The only good mods are the ones that don't spend all their fucking time modding.
I started browsing r/CTH around late 2016. At its peak, it was great....but I would say we are building something even better here. There were some faults to r/CTH, namely people taking advantage of the light moderation, astroturfing, stupidpol folks running around, etc. I think as this site continues to mature and grow, we''ll have a similar vibe, just without all the nonsense. The GME/WSB craze is probably a bit overbearing for a lot of people, especially for those who think it is just capitalism operating as normal (like me). It's fun to watch but you don't need to see it everywhere. Stick around and enjoy the ride.
It’s a little better when there is more activity, but yeah. I feel this. Something died in me, like, midway through the primaries when it finally hit me that the world is a much darker, more evil place than I originally thought. I’m starting to feel like I’m outgrowing this place and will spend more time doing real things that can make a material difference in people’s lives. But, of course, I’m beyond grateful that I found this community.
