Hi there,
I’m sure you’ve seen me around, as I’ve been here for quite while. I enjoyed and saw how this site grew, etc, but what I enjoyed was the genuine topics and conversation of discussions about this site. Perhaps it is the reintegration of life and routine, away from Covid, but I’ve noticed a decline in quality that makes me reminiscent and nostalgic for the past and even for members like LiberalSocialist.
You used to have something to say, regularly.
Chapochat/Hexbear wasn’t just recycled memes and images from r/thedeprogram or r/trueanon.
There are still interesting things and conversations that are posted but they’ve been drowned out by pages of mediocre images that substitute picture and image for discussion and introspection; as another poster once typed, paraphrasing, we’re all just trying to create site taglines and phrases and substituting quips for insight and catharsis.
Fair enough that catharsis, solidarity, and revelation can only be achieved through living your life and not through quiet meditation and discussion on reddit or psuedo-reddits. But there was at least more frequency of effort posts, venting, and exegesis of history, current and social events, and understanding of the world or at least an effort to do so.
To my observation, such that I lurk here, Such effort is only spared on video games. On media. On the dunk_tank. On getting upset about wrong opinion.
Despite the federation, this site seems to have only become isolated and divorced of what made it unique: effortposting.
Maybe it’s not just Hexbear. Maybe that is why UlyssesT left; the catharsis is exhausted and online space is dominated by a a tendency for performative and justified outrage and yearning for solidarity and emotional validation. But rather than copium, as anyone afflicted with a disease would prefer, some small part of me wanted prognoses rather than diagnoses.
I don’t know. I reflect on things like /moretankiechapo or /genzedong and see how things have declined in qualityposts. Perhaps it is for the better, as UlyssesT had discovered, to have the impetus to go outside and not only live life but to evangalize socialism and recapture purpose and community.
I’ll see you tomorrow.
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Might be nostalgia glasses + the new sorting algorithm. I’ve been here a while and things haven’t changed that much.
What I have noticed:
- Discussions have mostly moved from posts to megathreads, honestly this is kinda weird to me but w/e. Its still happening tho, just maybe not in the expected format
- less trolling, due to the efforts of the admins/mods
- less reactionary shit in general, chuds & terfs & stupidpol types get utterly decimated when trying to post here, there were definitely people that used to slip past the radar and would poison the well of discussion here
- People here are a little less liberal (me included) after having to kill the Bernie in their hearts and minds + forced integration with lemmygrad
I do wish we’d get the old alg back 😔
wasn’t just recycled memes and images from r/thedeprogram or r/trueanon
One of my favorite parts of Hexbear is being able to see memes from reddit without having to go to Reddit myself
I appreciate all of the posters who go into that jungle to bring back the slop
This place is barely alive thanks to the low effort memes, otherwise it would already be dead
I’m sure he’s not talking about your quality posts RNAi. ;) and i thank you for your service
In my experience, spending half a day writing and editing a post on and off is typically rewarded with less than a dozen comments. I used to write for its own sake, but there was no incentive to continue for me when life got busy.
Maybe it’s the new sorting algorithm? We had our own custom one prior to abandoning the ancient lemmy fork.
I stopped before the switch so idk maybe my posts just weren’t good
Idk then :(
Anyone who cares enough to be writing effortposts is probably writing good effortposts
I think people get this idea that they have to write long replies to effortposts. I always liked when people would shitpost under them.
The algorithm is supposed to be better in Lemmy v0.19.0, so things should improve whenever Hexbear is upgraded to it.
I thought UlyssesT was coming back
Sorry that my posts suck. If I see you make some effort posts I promise to engage in them seriously.
Your posts don’t suck they’re the highlight of my day. Keep the good vibes up
I’ve commented on your sincereposts and appreciate your candor and humor; I’ve just kind of been surprised at having 1.5k comments so I looked back on them and noticed and recalled that the culture, trend, and site effortpost culture had a different sort of robust and insightful in comparison to 2023’s year.
I’m still grateful to this site, I only lament decline. I suppose if I were to make an analogue, it’d be the energy of a 17 year old to a 35 year old.
If I could be half as cool as you…
Be the change you wish to see in the world
I dunno, im getting a lot from this place. I haven’t been here very long but it’s just a treat to have people around who think like me. I go over to one of the more reddit-like instances to check the barometer of the MSMians and it’s all nasty and low like i remember, with insults standing in for discussion.
While this place might get some recycled memes at least i know i can speak freely here to thoughtful people, and it might not seem like much but it’s been… necessary.
Yeahh agreed, tbh my engagement with and enjoyment of this place has never been higher.
I think it’s a function of the content aggregator model for forums. Comment chains favour quips and bickering over group discussion, upvotes favour low effort and high engagement posts over more involved posts about niche interests, the structure of posts directs people to react to the “content” instead of providing broader topics of discussion and sorting and hiding of posts means most peoples input is buried almost immediately.
I mean, what’s the point of effort posting if only 10 or 15 people will even see your post and maybe 2 will comment. While a reddit thread or news article that makes people mad will get hundreds of upvotes and dozens of comments. We’re using a site structure designed to create a self perpetuating content farm and it’s working.
It does make me sad how the only time there’s a great number of comments about art or philosophy is in the monthly struggle session about whether all Western culture is just a tool of the CIA. I’m still holding out hope that we could get some genuine discussions going, especially because all other Internet venues for discussing literature are extremely fucked in terms of politics, but it doesn’t seem likely.
That’s how hobby discussion usually works on boards that already have a niche, people find overlaps between their interests??
That’s only the tip of the iceberg. Philosophy going back to 1848 is contaminated with Hitler particles.
All you Adorno Guattari Deleuze Morton Bennett Latour Debord Baudrillard Zizek Lacan mfs are seething with them
This comes off as needlessly insulting. Declaring a bunch of philosophers as Hitlerites (Adorno had to flee from the Nazis, you know, and psychoanalysis didn’t have such a good standing with them either) without elaborating and then saying someone is seething with Hitler particles (whatever that means) because they expressed a genuine interest in discussing philosophy is some weak ass shit.
Although that was a joke, it alludes to something I’ve experienced and surely many of you have as well.
These writers, these irrationalist philosophers, Mark Fisher, and a few other Verso books authors like The People’s Republic of Walmart make up the canon of online western leftist theory.
You will legitimately be browbeaten with them by people who declare that your thoughts and actions or beliefs are guided by “the spectacle” and “capitalist realism” as they vaguely remember them from these books.
This is very irritating when you’ve been banned from reddit and are just trying to figure out what a dang communist is. You run into a wall of Twitch fans! They’re downright awful!
I know people who are younger than me, stuck doing doordash, in debt, they come to me after talking to folks on social media and I have to explain to them that a 19 year old just tried to get them into Heidegger because they said Maduro is okay.
No, I don’t think people who have a “genuine interest in philosophy” are bad. But I do think that children who use books they hardly remember that other people told them were important as a substitute for real history reading, nay, as CUDGELS against those who do, are setting themselves up for failure.
EDIT: I think when I finish my RetroSpective™️ you will all like it a lot. When you go back and compare people to Caleb Maupin, who used Occupy Wall St. to try to push his Heideggerian idealist online cult where he reposts pre-1940s communist theory just in case Marxists dot org goes down, it’s clear these groups aren’t as different from each other as they’d like you to think. Naomi Klein and Leigh Phillips bad takes should surprise nobody.
Like, sorry that we don’t want to read about how CAPITALISM HAS BEGUILED THE MASSES. UNLIMITED CRITICISM ON WESTERN POP CULTURE 100 times in a row and wanted to read about how capitaism actually formed and what it is. You know, instead of just navel gazing about the late 20th century? Lol??? @G_Bookner@hexbear.net
Yes I literally resent having to wade through people who recommended Chapo and Adam Curtis. Not extremely it’s just like man, “why did that property leave their sprinklers blsting all over the sidewalk.” resentment. I think you’re caterwauling ne’er-do-wells first and book understanders maybe third or fourth. Second is shitposting so thank heavens you are good at that
Idk why but everyone has been relitigating Occupy and 2016 and also 2020 recently so it’s been on my mind.
Have you tried reading the article appended to the post? I hope this helps.
Yes. I don’t really know where to start criticizing it and I’m also not really interested in doing so. But for one, having read some works of most of the philosophers the author names, I don’t see the big difference between the historical view he solely assigns to Lukács and that of other philosophers like Adorno or Derrida, who repeatedly argued for recognizing the continuity of fascism in human societies. Also, the connection between the so called post-structuralists tradition and Nietzsche or Heidegger is a critical one. When Derrida draws on Heidegger or Nietzsche, this is to be understood as an engagement with the negative at work in the tradition of Western philosophy. What seems kind of strange here is that the author dismisses any dialectic at work in the philosophy he’s out to criticize, especially when he is drawing so heavily on Lukács and Hegel.
Well feel free to come back with better criticism
Didn’t adorno or some of his cohort basically leave one of their coworkers to die at the border of Spain and occupied France because he was friends with Berthold brecht after they themselves fled from germany and had the funds secured to help more flee or something along those lines?
This is not accurate. It is possible to say that Adorno and Horkheimer could have done more to get Benjamin into the US (Horkheimer did get Benjamin a visa at some point), but they didn’t leave him to die because he was friends witch Brecht (?). I also don’t really know how easy it was to get someone out of Europe during that time. Also Benjamin stayed far too long in France due to his depression and his suicide in Spain was a result of a very unfortunate miscommunication.
Oh his name was Benjamin
Theodor Adorno, one of the dominant theorists of the Frankfurt School, attacked Lukács in 1958 when the latter was still under house arrest for supporting the 1956 revolution in Hungary. Writing in Der Monat, a journal created by the occupying U.S. Army and funded by the CIA, Adorno charged Lukács with being “reductive” and “undialectical,” writing like a “Cultural Commissar,”
I aspire to be called a Cultural Commissar by some ultra dweeb like Lukács
You may want to read that again no offense
I stand by my statement. Being called a stalinist or some variant of Bolshevik, or something as silly as “cultural commissar” as an insult by western “leftists” is something I wear with pride.
Also rereading that entire article still made my eyes glaze over in the exact way trying to read 19th century to modern philosophy does.
It hits different for me since I will scrutinize almost any internet cult & I see people assembling this stuff into reading lists alongside basic marxists texts with zero african or latin american writers. They play their word games and come out swinging against the periphery because they focus on media criticism.
They’ll confidently post some British Hong Kong-based paper writing about how China paid the clouds not to rain on the Mekong river & we need to defend colonial era Filipino / Guyanese claims pushed by the US from Chinese/Venezuelan imperialism
I used to love doing Citations Needed type stuff but you really see the shortcomings of this practice after a few major events happen and people are left stranded, biting into Ukrainian nationalist and Zionist narratives
Like people are still comparing the start of Putler’s illegal invazzion/the SMO to Palestine rn. Abby Martin and Mark Ames were doing this bizarre “im so sorry i didn’t believe you glowies, but people should be talking about Palestine instead” trick and all it seems to have done is cemented the connection in people’s minds.
It hits different for me since I will scrutinize almost any internet cult & I see people assembling this stuff into reading lists alongside basic marxists texts with zero african or latin american writers. They play their word games and come out swinging against the periphery because they focus on media criticism
Are you talking about including the writers of the Oscar Meyer wieners school, the irrationalist philosophers, or the ethno-nationalist philosophers mentioned in your article?
I used to love doing Citations Needed type stuff but you really see the shortcomings of this practice after a few major events happen and people are left stranded, biting into Ukrainian nationalist and Zionist narratives
I feel this one. I’ve just gotten exhausted over major events happening every other week.
Here’s an example reading list:
The Society of the Spectacle (1967) by Guy Debord
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936) by Walter Benjamin
The Culture Industry from Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) by Theodore Adorno & Max Horkheimer
Discipline and Punish (1975) by Michel Foucault
Simulacra and Simulation (1981) by Jean Baudrillard
Manufacturing Consent (1988) by Edward S. Herman & Noam Chomsky
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989) by Slavoj Zizek
Postscript on the Societies of Control (1990) by Gilles Deleuze
Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) by Fredric Jameson
Spectres of Marx (1993) by Jacques Derrida
Capitalist Realism (2009) by Mark Fisher
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rent free
I hereby lift my disengagement debuff from you, have at me! I read your post an RSS, I could have listed 20 more different philosophers I fucking hate I listed them not by order of relevance, but my order in which they occurred to me based on other people telling me to read them for no fucking reason
Read Barthes
Thanks I forgot to mention Foucault in my fuckin screed
It does make me sad how the only time there’s a great number of comments about art or philosophy is in the monthly struggle session about whether all Western culture is just a tool of the CIA.
I would say that it’s generally true, which is why you should seek out art and philosophy that doesn’t come from the Western tradition. The West has been ideologically cooked for a long time. This shouldn’t be unexpected since capitalism and liberalism was birthed in the West and thus, had much more time to completely seep into the social and cultural life of the West. This is really obvious in the Global South where there’s an almost one-to-one correlation between how liberal someone is and how Westernphilic someone is.
Shut up nerd and go to the news mega, we have stoves and like 50 effort posts
yeah I came here to say this. The megas and the rest of the site are like parallel realities
All the effortposts are in the news megathread. I’ve also noticed that my posts get more attention as a comment in the mega than in /c/news, even when they’re completely identical.
I’ve noticed that too. Just had to vent though.
I’m gay
My dick is small
Bummmmm bum bumm bumm bum bummmmmm bummmmm
Idk if you were referencing this but it made me thing of it (CW: Cum Town)
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
We used to have frequent struggle sessions that came out of those effort posts too. For better or worse these days every struggle session no matter how mild ends in a bunch of bannings. Every struggle session I see less and less of the people I saw before. Eventually all the people who have something to say are banned and now it’s just us shit posters left.
Not really being critical of the moderation policy or anything but this is the natural end conclusion of “you can’t disagree”. A bunch of folks who only perfectly agree with each other don’t have much to say outside commentary on current events and sharing jokes and memes. That’s how it is.
If you want to try to start some discussions around things that you think won’t end up with half the site banned go for it. I’d participate. I’m trying to start regular discussions on polyamory on that new comm for that exact reason; I think its a set of topics I haven’t seen much discussion on here and might also not end up with anyone being banned. We’ll see how it goes. Worth a try.
I actually feel pretty safe disagreeing with the majority opinion or users on here without it turning into a whole thing. Usually people stay respectful. I get that it can be different for things that touches on people’s core values, like veganism, but for most smaller stuff it’s fine.
It’s much better than mainstream sites where disagreeing with the popular opinion will just get you a bunch of downvotes and the same snarky non-reply from 10 different people.
It’s kinda mixed bag. Sometimes you get some small disagreements that don’t turn into much of a discussion but are rather a small moment of learning, and there’s nothing wrong with that…in fact I think that sort of thing should be encouraged. It’s just not very engaging for the rest of the site. It’s kind of that struggle between engaging content (which is often bad content) and good content which is often not that engaging in a “post lots” kinda way.
Yeah, it’s definitely not perfect. I just avoid the bigger discussion that brings in hundreds of comments over multiple threads because of how negative it gets, which is a shame, because I’m sure there’s something to learn there. There’s some users who get needlessly combative over smaller stuff as well, so I try to remember I can just disengage if things get uncomfortable.
That is completely fair. I suppose “let’s see how it goes” has to be combined with a genuine effort about commenting- rather, analyzing and prognosticating the world around us.
Im just here for the memes and the vibes in the mega
Oh yeah to take OP seriously, no, we didn’t. The sub had some of the worst threads of all time & mostly had reposted memes or twitter screenshots. The lemmy site is less filled with pointless shitstorms now because people nearly ran out of pet peeves to argue about.
You aren’t the first person to complain about the vibes being off. I’m not sure if I feel it or not (maybe cuz it happened so slowly or just my usual bad memory). It does seem like there is a lot more churn in the feed with lower effort stuff (especially from the federated servers lol).
Maybe it could be the new sorting algorithm? Algorithms affect what people see but also what they post eventually. Maybe we could try reimplementing the old Hexbear sort to see if it helps?
Yeah the new active algorithm is awful. I see a lot of good posts that never get any traction when I browse /new (which I do a lot these days because Active is full of old, stale posts).
Maybe I’ll go to the trouble of getting my dev env set up so I can reinstate the old algorithm (someone else was going to do that, but I haven’t heard anything about it in quite some time).
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