These repeated posts about how “the mod pools is tainted, don’t trust the mods, look they wouldn’t even let me smear shit on the walls on my way out” are designed to do one thing only and that’s spread Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.
The exact same shit happened with hexbear after chapo, and all their struggle sessions, etc etc. The tactic is literally to take small instances of things someone disagrees with and paint them as some kind of egregious systematic failing, engage in bad faith, etc. to attempt to build some kind of critical self sustaining mass of “just asking questions bro” bullshit.
It’s also incredibly common for the tactic to involve trying to appeal to “in” groups by pretending to be part of them and paint the target as part of whatever “out group”. For instance, the way libs use LGBT folk when you don’t vote for Biden, or the way they pretend to be non white on twitter, etc. to lend credibility to their “claims”. On hexbear there was a large amount of (both sides) of every struggle trying to paint the argument as divided along white westerner vs international AES lines, etc.
It was largely organized by fash on KiwiFarms for hexbear (or chapochat), and is probably also being done so now, or by the neolib chucklefucks from reddit.
The key part is not to ever actually “prove a point” it’s to strike while uncertainty is high while ‘changing leadership’ so to speak and take advantage of those elevated tensions to attempt to build a self sustaining argument that isn’t designed to be resolved, just to implode the refugees into smaller and smaller splinter groups and discredit anyone trying to keep the ship afloat.
It’s been used by intelligence agencies in the west against non western and especially communist/anti-imperialist countries so much that IT’S LITERALLY SO MUCH OF A TROPE THAT IT’S THE FUCKING PLOT OF BLACK PANTHER.
Pull your heads out of your asses and don’t have any passionate hot takes about whether “it’s safe here” or whatever until the dust clears and reddit bans us and we sort out this community into one that is fairly immune to outside influence.
Until then form opinions slowly, require more evidence than usual, practice basic privacy and opsec on account creation/try not to carry shit over from reddit, and just focus on shitting on libs for the things we were pre-quarantine. This shit takes time, don’t make yourselves open and vulnerable to marvel movie plot level of creativity “attacks”.
Be smart use your heads and protect yourself and those around you, and log off for a bit if you need to, or focus on something else. Don’t feed the fear until it self sustains.
We’re not at the stage where government agents are coming for our lives. Whether a place is safe or not just depends on whether they will allow you to voice dissent against the powers. Right now, lemmygrad does do that. Reddit’s r/genzedong, with the admission of admins of the sub themselves, no longer does that. They specifically instruct you to not voice dissent in regards to current Ukraine war. So it is clearly no longer a safe place for voicing dissent.
Now people are saying that they have to do this so the sub can act as a “gateway” to this place but it does not seem like they’re doing that to me at all. For starters, I would get rid of “weekly discussion” sticky and replace it with a giant “MOVE TO LEMMYGRAD NOW” sticky, in the post itself explain exactly what lemmygrad is, how to sign up, how to use lemmygrad etc. and limit the posts to questions about how to migrate to lemmygrad. Like, that would be a good gateway.
Instead we got the sticky saying “don’t dissent, dissent is bad” and the only thing that can act as a gateway to here is a tiny one line mention:
I don’t think r/genzedong is currently acting as a robust gateway to lemmygrad, instead it is being used as controlled opposition to get people to talk about things reddit deems currently permissible. I myself didn’t start spending a lot of time here until my account on reddit got banned, let’s not kid ourselves most people will just not bother to come to lemmygrad unless they really had to. Reddit knows this, so by controlling what gets to be said on r/genzedong they can control dissent.
Given that right before the new mod sticky several sub mods and admin accounts were closed and the new sticky is in complete contrast with the previous one, I think it’s pretty obvious at this point that reddit’s r/genzedong is being controlled by reddit, and as such that user was right, the mods on r/genzedong can not be trusted anymore. This is not some crazy conspiracy theory, it’s obvious this is the case. I don’t know why you guys are making these types of posts and while I get that that user was being annoying and maybe he got banned for being annoying, I don’t think the gist of his points were incorrect and most people here in fact agreed with him until he started being a bit too repetitive and annoying.
As a final note, “Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt” or FUD is very frequently used in cryptocurrency and NFT communities to silence any criticism so I strongly urge you to not use this term as a blanket term to justify banning users. I think users should be allowed to have doubt. It’s normal. Criticisms are normal. Let it go through the motions instead of trying to shut it down if you ask me.
I will read and respond more wholly to your post in a bit because I’m programming, but FUD is a term much older than those communities and much more aligned with propaganda and cult activities etc, it’s a perfectly fine term to use. In fact, by the sounds of it, it’s perfect for Crypto communities, just likely not the way they’re used :P
I’m not saying to ban people based on it, and engage in whatever crackdowns it seems you might be inferring. I am instead implying we as users make the mods lives easy and don’t buy into and participate in petty and silly drama,and especially not in propagating drama and keep an eye out for patterns of ridiculous claims and so forth.
I do not think government agents are watching us, or at least not to the extent it would seem you think I mean, I do however know for a fact that fash are, because I spend a good deal of my time on fash sites and boards poisoning their wells of “information gathering” and keeping an eye on what they’re keeping an eye on with various alt accounts and connection methods.
Not as clandestine as it sounds reading it back, I just like knowing what the nazis are thinking when the communities I hang out in’s name pops up. It helps me avoid the unexpected like someone collating my weird ADHD fueled rants to comb for doxxing info. They do this actively. They have boards specifically for raiding, collecting data on, and reporting groups they hate or harassing/threatening them IRL. Neolibs also engage in this behavior because they’re essentially fash with better PR, but places like KiwiFarms are much more openly and actively about looking for opportunities to raid and fuck with and possible harm Commies.
Just practice mindful opinion forming is all I’m saying. Know that if it looks like someone has an axe to grind with other people on here, or the same patterns of arguments pop up, or drama pops up around certain events especially at “convenient timing” etc that there’s likely more going on than “Why is this site weird compared to reddit”.
We have less rules, but they also have free reign to raid and harass us too. Be sensible.
Oh yeah, I agree we shouldn’t do stuff like propagating petty drama. I just think the user that was banned was not doing that, it seems to me they were just alerted by what’s going on on reddit, but maybe I’m wrong. I try to see the good in people but it sometimes backfires.
The user, in my opinion, was clearly being bad faith and infiltrating lemmygrad.
Their only participation as soon as they got their account approved was to spread doubt about the mod team and nothing else. They did not participate anywhere else but in their three threads they made questioning the mods of GZD. All of their comments were not adding anything new but saying “can we really trust the mod team here? Can we really trust the mod team here?”… that’s not natural behaviour for new users; if you check any other new account here you will see that they participate in different threads with different comments entirely.
In those fringe cases (so far their behaviour is fringe on this platform), you would also expect that users would do something to prove they are actually engaging in good faith, but that user did not do anything to reinforce their reputation and instead dug their hole deeper… not natural behaviour from a good faith account.
ok fair enough.
They literally contributed nothing but wrecker posts. They were either complaining about mods constantly or asking leading ‘questions’ designed to undermine support for left causes. And they were honestly shitting up the entire place with the sheer volume of dogshit posts drowning out everything else since there’s still pretty low volume here. I’m quite frankly glad they’re banned, as a user, and I blocked them before they were because they were so obnoxious.
It’s definitely ok to assume the good in people too. I just mean that before you let yourself get upset at the mods we should assume the good in them too, and investigate what actually happened or form no hard opinions on it. The user in question was just spamming drama bait both on here and on reddit, and offering little else. Always remember to check the users profile, check the modlog (bottom of the page) and just in general if you don’t know all the facts try not to worry too much about it, or develop a healthy personal opinion that isn’t a public one. Publicly contributing to the drama just reignites it and if it turns out that was in fact their purpose then it keeps working whether they’re banned or not.
It’s entirely possible there was more to the story, that’s always the case, I just generally don’t think it’s worth getting too in our own/each others heads about it without taking a step back for a bit, having a look at the information we CAN look at, and at the end of the day deciding on if it’s worth fanning the flames that will one day burn us too, or realizing that the people who want to see us fail delight in bad faith as a modus operandi.
In this case, however, I think it was nothing more than someone having a severely online moment and being dismissed for it, and I think that’s a good thing. Whether they were some kind of troll or just needed a break, the mods made the right choice. The important takeaway is just try and not let the spooky fear and witch-hunting of either mods or each other become normalized.
This is true. I do assume the good in mods as well, I don’t think they were acting in bad faith. I just thought it might’ve been some sort of misunderstanding.
All good points and I hadn’t consider this.