Well thatās very encouraging and Iām glad! Hopefully your sub keeps growing! I only reserve banning and muting for racists and xenophobes.
I cannot empathize with any team that bans and mutes posters who try to participate in good faith. Socialism should be a 1m+ subreddit but itās being held backā¦ it grows despite its mod team, not because of it. If a user like me can be cannedā¦ I seriously wonder how many quality users have been turned away from there.
I'm still relatively new to moderating on reddit, but I think I've gotten the hang of it, although it's definitely easier on smaller subreddits than big ones.
I think one of the challenges with moderating leftist communities is the clash of ideological tendencies and sectarianism... I imagine it's hard to grow a sub like r/socialism, there's probably no end to the mod queue lol
I'm still relatively new to moderating on reddit, but I think I've gotten the hang of it, although it's definitely easier on smaller subreddits than big ones.
Hey we all gotta start somewhere! Itās not all that difficult and Iām sure you will catch on fast!
I think one of the challenges with moderating leftist communities is the clash of ideological tendencies and sectarianism... I imagine it's hard to grow a sub like Socialism, there's probably no end to the mod queue lol
Depends on the users and the mods. I donāt see that sub as a very intense sub to mod outside of a couple of posts every month. Comments are where mods should devote most of their time but comment modding isnāt glamorous and seems to be beneath many mods. Iām willing to bet r/MarchagainstNazis is harder to mod even though itās smaller in size.
The top post on Socialism this month is 3k points or soā¦ which is an embarrassment for a sub that size. That sub has lost the plot and isnāt understanding that to educate socialists you need to keep them engaged and active in discussionā¦ there isnāt any viral discussions happening there and no one outside of their immediate circle are participating.
I hope you walk a different path than them. Most leftist subreddits are an immense disappointment to folks like me.
Funny you should mention r/MarchAgainstNazis... I got perma-banned for saying "scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds" on a video celebrating people in NYC chanting "Azov! Azov! Azov!" back in March last year... I guess they didn't appreciate the irony of supporting a group whose logo less than a decade ago had a literal black sun and wolfsengel on it (now it's just a wolfsengel)... but I appreciate that it's more of an American-centric, anti-Republican & pro-Democrat sub than a socialist or anti-fascist sub, per se.
I think part of the problem with leftist / socialist discourse on Reddit (in particular) is that a lot of people are very steeped in American propaganda... the Red Scare and McCarthyism aren't that far in the past.
In fact, Second Thought (one of the Deprogram co-hosts) got a visit from DHS agents asking about his "anti-American sentiments" in one of his more controversial videos. (Which is some real HOUAC shit.)
So as soon as you say the S-word, everyone has a very strong opinion (one way or another) which makes discourse super loaded and divisive... it's hard to go viral in that kind of environment, I think... but that's also by design. As Lenin said:
āFreedom of the pressā in bourgeois society means freedom for the rich systematically, unremittingly, daily, in millions of copies, to deceive, corrupt and fool the exploited and oppressed mass of the people, the poor.
So I doubt we'll see an obvious, big-tent, socialist community grow (esp. in the anglosphere) and get along with itself for a long while, if ever, due to all the anti-Communist propagandizing from mainstream sources...
Anyways... I'll keep doing my part, but it's definitely an uphill struggle.
The silver lining is that Capitalists keep giving us rhetorical ammunition in the form of non-stop crises and atrocities for the sake of profits... they just can't help themselves. That's why r/antiwork exploded in popularity during the pandemic, but it lacked direction and clarity of purpose and mostly revolved around screenshots of managers being shitty over text messages.
Anyhow, this is turning into a TEDx talk lol...
EDIT: Looks like I pissed of the spam filter and/or automod... oops!
Users who get banned for mentioning the Azov battalion usually get banned for conflating the whole Ukrainian army or their government with the militant group. Many of these users paint arguments legitimizing the war on Ukraine by implying the Russians are denazifying the Ukrainiansā¦ a bad-faith argument serving to intellectualize war and conquest. There are more effective and legitimate ways of critiquing American global hegemony without supporting the corruption of Russiaās oligarch class. Anyone taking a distinct side in the conflictā¦ especially the Russian side is someone to be approached with skepticism.
This is a humanist subreddit so any nation promoting and disseminating misinformation to perpetuate and legitimize conflict is likely to receive a cold reception here.
I don't think I was doing that, but perhaps that's the way it came across at the time? (Jingoism was at a fever pitch early on in the conflict and nuance was in short supply...) I tried finding the comment, but failed... it was around 9 months ago.
This was the ban message:
Note from the moderators:
No tankies. Liberals aren't allies but they could be- and they definitely aren't fascists.
Not that I identify as a "tankie" (whatever that is supposed to mean), and I do not fundamentally disagree that liberals could be allies, but the point I was trying to make by saying "scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds" was that Liberalism is an explicitly pro-capitalist ideology and that when capitalists (or capitalism in general) finds itself on the backfoot (in decline or in decay) it will always reach for anything it can grab onto rather than collapse, and fascism is essentially the final tool in the belt to preserve or restore capitalism through extreme means.
I thought that the video of generally liberal New Yorkers out in the street chanting their support for a literal neo-Nazi battalion was pretty compelling evidence of that exact phenomenon in action. (Although I can't even find that post now... this was the video, although maybe it's not the exact same url submitted, or maybe the post was removed later.)
Of course, most socialists (and almost every single socialist in the West) was raised a liberal first, before they were exposed to Socialism and radicalized, so of course I recognize that there is a liberal-to-socialist pipeline (I should know, I went down it personally) but in general most liberals, and especially most Americans, seem primed to support fascism before socialism. RadLibs are an especially troublesome lot, because they will defend American imperialism quite aggressively and unironically.
not that I identify with a "tankie" (whatever that means)
Tankie refers to communists broadly but more specifically it originated as a slang term for communists after the soviet union crushed an uprising in (I think) Budapest by running over student protesters with tanks and shooting them (basically a Tiananmen square style massacare) and said "tankies" took to the streets with the "it didn't happen, if it happened they deserved it" despite ample evidence that it did indeed happen.
Tankies also generally refer to people like Noam Chomsky who believes that by default anything the west does is inherently and always evil and anyone who is anti-west, no matter what they do, they are inherently good and virtuous and all word of them doing terrible things is just western propaganda. Like people who say Idi Amin was a great leader and a hero of Uganda and that Pol Pot had the right idea on how to run a country or, like in the reason I mentioned Noam Chomsky before. People who deny the Bosnian genocide purely because the Serbs are anti-west and their genocide was only stopped by NATO intervention (again, all because west = bad and anti-west = good)
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u/_Foy Jan 23 '23
I'm a mod on r/TheDeprogram so I can personally promise you a degree of transparency, at the very least. :)
I've had my fair share of run-ins with the ban&mute style of moderation so I know just how frustrating it can be.