the rachel drama/hack, the pronoun struggle sessions, and now this (most likely) false accusation against beatnik show that there's a lot of asshats with no morality willing to use anything against the site, and we need to get a lot smarter and stop falling for it
To suggest purposely convincing yourself that posts here -- from real life people, with real emotions and lives -- are not real people as a coping mechanism is honestly pretty fucked. I certainly don't want to be viewed as a disconnected string of words. I'm a person. Care about websites or not, this website is full of people and made by people. As communists, we are for the people.
Please reconsider how this viewpoint alienates your fellow comrades.
I don't know if you are a communist, I assume like I assume with most (excluding the anarchists) here you are someone who labels themself thus because they like the sound of it and maybe surrounds themself with paraphenalia. Being unable to verify the rest because of the anonymous character inherent to this site, I have to be extremely charitable (which I often am) to grant you the rest of your 'communism', which is to say, dues-paying membership to a democratic socialist or anarchist mutual-aid organization. Assuming all that is true, I still find it very fucking condescending and dopey that you make an appeal to our presumed shared 'communism' and being 'for the people' to defend the poor posters on this, I say again with emphasis, banned-comedy-podcast-fandom-subreddit spinoff reddit clone.
If people are feeling alienated by this website or by the internet, there is a very effective solution that ends with off and begins with log. The alienating thing is not the style of the other website posters, it is the fact of seeking out a sense of community on this website in the first place.
If they cannot go outside and find friends in real life, which I get, then there are ways you can build a digital connection with individuals you meet on a public forum, I'm sure friendships have grown out of this site, but those have hopefully grown privately, where it is safer to intimately expose yourself (joke not intended). Becoming invested in a digital relationship with a person is fine. Investment in a digital relationship with 30k anonymous people is not fine
I'm struggling to see how advocating for a sense of community rather than alienation is condescending.
I dunno, I'm starting to question whether this is in good faith or not anymore. I'm not going to engage in a discussion about how valid a communist I personally am.
I don't know how else to convince you that a forum for people with a shared ideology, which engages - or has known to engage - in earnest discourse is a good thing, and that considering it a community is not harmful. To address your claim that it is "not fine."
Good! You are learning. You have no assurance either way, so you have to accept either as a possibility at least. Thats part of posting on a forum.
But you are also not learning. You've take personally as some sort of attack something that, if you had emotional detachment and uncare for posts on website, you would have understood as a generic statement about a generic poster on this website (which is how it was intended). I don't know you! As far as I know, you fit that description, and I can't know any more than that. That's why the appeal to our shared communism is dopey; you don't know me or what I believe, and I don't know you, and this website is by all evidence mostly people who like that who just like to be called communists. Maybe not even mostly, since there are anarchists and people who don't buy stickers and pins at all here, too. So it is dopey to me when people pretend they are doing revolution when they post here, it reads as play-acting. The condescending part is more a matter of tone: "Surely you must agree with me, we are both marxist-leninist-maoists and love the workers, so you are wrong and I am right!"
E: as for earnest discussion, that doesn't require and can actually be hindered by community. We are doing it now and I don't consider myself in any community with you.
And I guess my other point is that if you're doing things that are alienating and make people "log off," you should reconsider whether it's right to alienate people such that it pushes them out
What I am saying is, I (and the rest of the people posting on the website) am not doing anything to anybody, they are doing it to themselves by having an expectation that does not match reality.