One was it got a reputation among reactionaries (and liberals) as a “shithole” in the vein of 4chan or something full of deranged, radical people who would in addition to downvoting and chiding you for posting reactionary thought would comb through your post history and make fun of you and/or demand you post pictures of your penis (hog) to be allowed to continue to post or receive interaction back from the community. Of course it was never a shithole, it just treated reactionaries, racists, etc like shit and harassed them. I think the demands for penis pictures were deeply unsettling as among other things reactionaries have all kinds of psycho-sexual hang-ups and probably either have an inferiority complex about their penis or are made to feel uncomfortable like they’re being objectified by gay/bi men in the same way they’re used to objectifying women. In fact I think the idea for that came from the old misogynist chan demand that women “post tits”.
The mods also weren’t totally inactive. They would let more amusing reactionaries post but those who just spammed the same “commies killed trillions” comments on threads would get banned.
Many would try and come for a debate and very often they just wouldn’t be given it or any satisfaction in that regard, instead people would comb through their post history, make fun of them for inadequacies in their lives, or just kind of insult them and ignore the subject matter of their debate attempts which probably frustrated them.
One problem you’re going to have on any educational sub is to some degree you want to assume people are coming in good faith even if from a place of incredible anti-communist propaganda indoctrination. So some of these tactics may not be ideal. Then again if you can look through their post history and see what type of person they are you can often see some of the worst bad faith ones but not always.
CTH had a kind of ironic uncaring detachment you’re never going to get in an educational sub, they legitimately did not care if a reactionary of liberal learned, they just were happy to silence or bully them if they got out of line and started spewing “muh millions” type nonsense.
And they just had a very active community. On any given time of day on the sub even after quarantine you had probably 3k people online and browsing the sub. That’s a lot of instant downvotes even on larger and older threads for posting reactionary-thought.
I’ll also say CTH had this rep of being this vicious brigade and harassment sub. The rest of reddit was convinced by this myth that they would follow you to other subs you posted in and continue harassing you if you came in and annoyed them. And well there was some user pinging stuff before the quarantine so the harassment stuff did exist to a degree and the sub was full of people who were very active on the rest of reddit. And well people probably would follow reactionaries back to the subs they posted in after they came into our sub and annoy them there and they got upset about being “brigaded” and of course in the reactionary mind the forces of persecution against them are always larger than they are so they built us up into this monster that would downvote their threads to single digits and argue with them in their own spaces when in fact a lot of the people doing that were liberals with no affiliation with the sub.
It also had a lot of memes. I will say it definitely creates a lot of meme communists but one good thing about meme communists is they will help keep your spaces clear of reactionaries and liberals by memeing on them. They should never be given an ounce of power of course but they’ll help keep spaces clean and police them. Many of them can also be given basic educations with effort posts and replies that emphasize theory. You won’t get them to memorize or deeply understand theory but you can often get them to avoid repeating common ignorant tropes and some of them, maybe many of them with enough time can get the interest of actually picking up theory and moving past meme communism. In a learning space you might not want to permit so many memes, it kind of distracts from the purpose of the sub.
CTH was not a communist learning sub, it was a sub of many things and contrasts which created a unique environmental mix of memes, support for people, and theory and effort posting which drew in and engaged a large audience beyond that which might typically be interested in these things.
Ah that hit the spot! I was beginning to miss the good ol’ CTH tankie long reply (even though it’s only been what, 3 days?) and you came through with one just like that.
I guess the question I really wanted to get at was that if people are insinuating that supposedly meme subs like CTH are effective at teaching (the job of the learner sub) while being somewhat less heavy handed (the primary criticism of the learner sub) and able to police more effectively, why even bother with the learner subs? Why not dispense with the learner subs and instead meme and mock your way into teaching communism?
Because in my experience it’s often only effective up to a point. They can disabuse people of anti-communist propaganda and even get them to have an interest in communism or self-declare themselves communists. And this is let me be clear, uh a good thing, unambiguously a good thing. Some people like myself would be the types who would at a certain point begin reading theory but a large number of people there are quite frankly uninterested in that and quite content to continue posting memes and remain somewhat uninvolved and uninterested. Call them whatever you’d like, meme communists, aesthetic driven, whatever.
Also frankly some people are going to be repulsed or off-put by the culture of a place like CTH and memes in general to say nothing of edgy ones. Some people are just not going to be receptive to that. Now a lot of younger people are but you definitely risk alienating people who want that more serious discussion and who want a place where they can mostly get straight answers in a relatively short period of time instead of people memeing and occasionally giving an answer. A lot of how CTH worked I think was osmosis, just stewing in it long enough to pick up enough good bits. Just as capitalist hegemony reinforces itself in a million invisible ways in our lives on TV, outside, in music, video games, etc so too does stewing a sub that is broadly anti-capitalist begin to work on a person in ways that we might call subtle.
I would say CTH could never replace a communism101 sub but that has more to do with it being broadly friendly to everyone from demsocs to anarchists and the mods having nothing resembling a party line or stated ideology. A lot of people over time learned in that sub thanks to effort posting and people kind enough to actually engage with others when they have questions. However a lot of other people probably gave up having their questions answered and have been kind of coerced into silence or conformity without understanding why and that’s not ideal. But that’s just perhaps a trade-off you have to make.
MTC back before the past two months or so certainly was closer to this mythical sub that isn’t strictly a leaning sub but uses things like memes while having plenty of theory-read comrades in the replies to answer questions. Of course it was stricter than CTH and as a self declared “tankie” sub it had certain lines drawn, against blatant imperialist apology, apology for the CIA, etc.
The truth is I don’t think I have a good answer to your question. I think certainly there are benefits to the mixture of content with memes model but also drawbacks. I think a lot of these drawbacks are eliminated if you have a strong moderation vanguard and learned posters willing to regularly reply and help new users and get a kind of turn-over process going over time where those new users once a bit more knowledgeable help even newer users with basic questions and subject matter they’re now familiar with.
Well several things probably.
One was it got a reputation among reactionaries (and liberals) as a “shithole” in the vein of 4chan or something full of deranged, radical people who would in addition to downvoting and chiding you for posting reactionary thought would comb through your post history and make fun of you and/or demand you post pictures of your penis (hog) to be allowed to continue to post or receive interaction back from the community. Of course it was never a shithole, it just treated reactionaries, racists, etc like shit and harassed them. I think the demands for penis pictures were deeply unsettling as among other things reactionaries have all kinds of psycho-sexual hang-ups and probably either have an inferiority complex about their penis or are made to feel uncomfortable like they’re being objectified by gay/bi men in the same way they’re used to objectifying women. In fact I think the idea for that came from the old misogynist chan demand that women “post tits”.
The mods also weren’t totally inactive. They would let more amusing reactionaries post but those who just spammed the same “commies killed trillions” comments on threads would get banned.
Many would try and come for a debate and very often they just wouldn’t be given it or any satisfaction in that regard, instead people would comb through their post history, make fun of them for inadequacies in their lives, or just kind of insult them and ignore the subject matter of their debate attempts which probably frustrated them.
One problem you’re going to have on any educational sub is to some degree you want to assume people are coming in good faith even if from a place of incredible anti-communist propaganda indoctrination. So some of these tactics may not be ideal. Then again if you can look through their post history and see what type of person they are you can often see some of the worst bad faith ones but not always.
CTH had a kind of ironic uncaring detachment you’re never going to get in an educational sub, they legitimately did not care if a reactionary of liberal learned, they just were happy to silence or bully them if they got out of line and started spewing “muh millions” type nonsense.
And they just had a very active community. On any given time of day on the sub even after quarantine you had probably 3k people online and browsing the sub. That’s a lot of instant downvotes even on larger and older threads for posting reactionary-thought.
I’ll also say CTH had this rep of being this vicious brigade and harassment sub. The rest of reddit was convinced by this myth that they would follow you to other subs you posted in and continue harassing you if you came in and annoyed them. And well there was some user pinging stuff before the quarantine so the harassment stuff did exist to a degree and the sub was full of people who were very active on the rest of reddit. And well people probably would follow reactionaries back to the subs they posted in after they came into our sub and annoy them there and they got upset about being “brigaded” and of course in the reactionary mind the forces of persecution against them are always larger than they are so they built us up into this monster that would downvote their threads to single digits and argue with them in their own spaces when in fact a lot of the people doing that were liberals with no affiliation with the sub.
It also had a lot of memes. I will say it definitely creates a lot of meme communists but one good thing about meme communists is they will help keep your spaces clear of reactionaries and liberals by memeing on them. They should never be given an ounce of power of course but they’ll help keep spaces clean and police them. Many of them can also be given basic educations with effort posts and replies that emphasize theory. You won’t get them to memorize or deeply understand theory but you can often get them to avoid repeating common ignorant tropes and some of them, maybe many of them with enough time can get the interest of actually picking up theory and moving past meme communism. In a learning space you might not want to permit so many memes, it kind of distracts from the purpose of the sub.
CTH was not a communist learning sub, it was a sub of many things and contrasts which created a unique environmental mix of memes, support for people, and theory and effort posting which drew in and engaged a large audience beyond that which might typically be interested in these things.
Ah that hit the spot! I was beginning to miss the good ol’ CTH tankie long reply (even though it’s only been what, 3 days?) and you came through with one just like that.
I guess the question I really wanted to get at was that if people are insinuating that supposedly meme subs like CTH are effective at teaching (the job of the learner sub) while being somewhat less heavy handed (the primary criticism of the learner sub) and able to police more effectively, why even bother with the learner subs? Why not dispense with the learner subs and instead meme and mock your way into teaching communism?
Because in my experience it’s often only effective up to a point. They can disabuse people of anti-communist propaganda and even get them to have an interest in communism or self-declare themselves communists. And this is let me be clear, uh a good thing, unambiguously a good thing. Some people like myself would be the types who would at a certain point begin reading theory but a large number of people there are quite frankly uninterested in that and quite content to continue posting memes and remain somewhat uninvolved and uninterested. Call them whatever you’d like, meme communists, aesthetic driven, whatever.
Also frankly some people are going to be repulsed or off-put by the culture of a place like CTH and memes in general to say nothing of edgy ones. Some people are just not going to be receptive to that. Now a lot of younger people are but you definitely risk alienating people who want that more serious discussion and who want a place where they can mostly get straight answers in a relatively short period of time instead of people memeing and occasionally giving an answer. A lot of how CTH worked I think was osmosis, just stewing in it long enough to pick up enough good bits. Just as capitalist hegemony reinforces itself in a million invisible ways in our lives on TV, outside, in music, video games, etc so too does stewing a sub that is broadly anti-capitalist begin to work on a person in ways that we might call subtle.
I would say CTH could never replace a communism101 sub but that has more to do with it being broadly friendly to everyone from demsocs to anarchists and the mods having nothing resembling a party line or stated ideology. A lot of people over time learned in that sub thanks to effort posting and people kind enough to actually engage with others when they have questions. However a lot of other people probably gave up having their questions answered and have been kind of coerced into silence or conformity without understanding why and that’s not ideal. But that’s just perhaps a trade-off you have to make.
MTC back before the past two months or so certainly was closer to this mythical sub that isn’t strictly a leaning sub but uses things like memes while having plenty of theory-read comrades in the replies to answer questions. Of course it was stricter than CTH and as a self declared “tankie” sub it had certain lines drawn, against blatant imperialist apology, apology for the CIA, etc.
The truth is I don’t think I have a good answer to your question. I think certainly there are benefits to the mixture of content with memes model but also drawbacks. I think a lot of these drawbacks are eliminated if you have a strong moderation vanguard and learned posters willing to regularly reply and help new users and get a kind of turn-over process going over time where those new users once a bit more knowledgeable help even newer users with basic questions and subject matter they’re now familiar with.