Love seeing spez get downvoted to hell for defending slaveowners.
What a shitty fucking website, imagine getting banned for saying slaveowners should die.
Don’t get me wrong, r/cth was mostly a shit sub filled with radlibs that drowned out the Leninists and the edgy humor really wasn’t funny or productive in any form for propagandizing the class struggle, but the reasoning is awful. Hopefully this will get more people off that awful website and doing actual praxis, or at least moving to another online area for actual discussions (like here). Well, at least the people who are serious about Marxism.
After Bernie dropped out I saw increasing receptivity to Marxism-Leninism. I don’t want to say we were winning but I felt a definite shift towards communism, towards ML thought at a certain point, although I’m sure some of that was just meme-communists and brocialists who would have immediately gone all in on AOC 2024 the moment that happened. But I’m also sure we were winning over people and encouraging them to move beyond imperialist dogma.
I would say ML’s had pretty good success there in the last six months in that when we presented our arguments clearly we were increasingly more often upvoted than not. Of course you had your share of opportunists upvoted as well so it was a battlefield to be sure, anarchists, succdems, even Trots trying to claim the destruction of police stations as acts of their party.
I think keeping a light mood can be helpful but I can’t say I liked every bit of CTH’s humor. Certainly humor is a powerful weapon for counter-propaganda against liberal indoctrination. Certainly I think many more radical liberals feel more comfortable if there is humor instead of just straight up discussion of theory and people thumping against the latest state dept propaganda, it makes spaces more inviting. I do agree there is a necessity for ML spaces that do not really tolerate liberalism but I also think we should be open to spaces that are less strict to try and grow. That I think is the real tragedy of the loss of CTH. Not that an ML space was lost but that an outreach space was lost, that a place for Marxists to reach into the rest of reddit and interact with liberals and reactionaries and push back and win minds was lost.
Yep. You just wrote out all my feelings about CTH for the past few months. I definitely had that feeling when posters like you and fatpollo (holy shit, this person is flat out the best poster on that sub) were eating chauvinists and radlibs for breakfast.
I was a fairly new ML leaning leftist (was a lib/socdem not too long before) just last year, the Hong Kong discourse was insufferable as you well know. But the tankie struggle sessions on there really pulled the sub back IMO and basically solidified my belief in ML.
Memes for sure help people radicalize in some ways, but the biggest problem was lack of professionalism. It’s a semi-anonymous internet forum so of course that would not be possible, but the lack of any sort of push for education meant people get stuck in a cycle of edgy memes and shitposting.
It was an easy access to “leftist” ideas, which is something sorely lacking online. The problem with subs like communism101 is the heavy handed modding. I get wanting to keep a clean line if thinking, but subs aren’t parties. There is no party line. They’re open forums for discussion and as such the learning subs need to be more welcoming to new communists. It’s a bit intimidating to potential comrades when you get banned or looked down on for asking a question; it just pushes them away to stay liberal or towards anarchism as they have no substantial theory and makes the barrier of entry to liberals easier
I agree with your first paragraph strongly.
The second one I think it’s more a matter of striking the right balance. I certainly think some of them the mods perhaps have grown weary and trigger happy but you also don’t want the other end where the mods let the users run the sub until it turns into a hole of liberalism and then you’re faced with having to try and purge most of your userbase. It’s a delicate act of being open but not letting certain liberal sentiments or ideas take root and for that you also need users who downvote/upvote/engage with people to keep the liberal sentiments out and the unrepentant and unreformable liberals outside the sub.
There’s a question that’s been nagging at me for a good while now and it’s why wasn’t CTH utterly infested with reactionaries? Why didn’t we regularly see threads where out of 20 answers given, 10 of which were fascists answering in place of socialists? Was it because they didn’t use the word ‘communist’ and as such avoided painting such a huge target on their backs? Was it due to the quarantine?
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.
Fascists and chuds were scared off in its early stages because people would regularly harass them by doing stuff like “summoning” them (by pinging their username) and demand they explain their support for pedophelia if they were a libertarian or demanding they post a pic of their hog if they made there way into the sub (in a humorous mirror of the old misogynist “tits or gtfo”). cth users would also take over other subreddits. By its end it was a scary place if you were fashy or neolib.
Fascists are cowards, always have been. cth was simply too scary a place for them and there was no joy in trolling.
Would you recommend this as a tactic for all the strict learner subs then, since the endless wave of reactionaries seem to be their biggest problem and is, according to the subs’ moderators, the reason they are as ban-happy as they are?
Not the person you asked but I guess the question is what learner subs want. I agree with stricter moderation practices on subs like that.
I guess you could try and make fun of some of these people but unless you really have a lot of people keyed in on this stuff you’re going to make fun of and abuse some people who were legitimately open to communist thought and well you may or may not turn them off. I will mention many people did regard CTH as toxic because of this unwillingness to suffer people spouting the most generic anti-communist crap and it probably drove people away, but people who stuck around a little and were more open to considering they had been lied to or at least just listening to our side of things seemed to come out of it alright for the most part. Maybe that’s a better acceptable compromise than letting reactionaries run rampant in replies or just banning everyone who deviates from the ML line. You don’t have to do much in that vein, the old “shut up/shut the fuck up liberal” standby and some downvotes conveys the message that they’re engaging in liberalism, that their silence in these matters as a consequence is desired and it brings to mind those hilarious memes of Stalin, Lenin, Mao with laser eyes. But it isn’t particularly nice and I would never say it is the ideal. I would suggest having macros that spam a few resources to debunk common propaganda and if they continue without reading them or in bad faith otherwise then time to pull out the old “shut the fuck up liberal” and/or ban-hammer. Because those most amenable to learning will in most cases read links you give them. They might have more questions, they might be unwilling to give up the propaganda so easily but they will noticeably engage with it.
The ideal on a learning sub is really just having a lot of moderators in the same way the science subs do and just being ruthless in removing bad stuff and if needed issuing temp bans to try and dissuade people from doing again exactly what they did without totally excluding them and giving them another chance. Of course in practice having enough people to do that who don’t suffer from burn-out is a challenge.
This almost sounds like seeing live accelerationism. It’s so weird. I’m gutted too but that’s what losing something feels like.
Def agree. There are some genuine MLs in there, but they often do get drowned out by the brocialist socdems. Either way we’d welcome their marxist members here, and we’re offering to help them set up their own instance they can moderate however they like.
They were banned because they have to both sides everything, even banning a proto-fash and transphobic hate subs they still feel the need to ban some lefty shit just to seem neutral. Liberals are going to get us all killed.
I got linked here after the ban, seems like a cool place
Welcome :waving hand:
Oh shit your the person behind the atrocities master list! That thing’s so useful to casually drop in conversation.
I’m honestly a little bit star struck.
Hehe yep that me. Good to have you here :vulcan salute:
Same here, hope ex-chapos are welcome
I feel welcome. This is a nice place. Wish I would’ve found it earlier
Me too
What a shame. Although there were many liberals there a good amount of them were open to theory and Marxism-Leninism when explained properly. I know a fair amount of the comrades I know on reddit who posted there and many had their journey in part thanks to that sub.
I also lost a good deal of effort posts and explainers for liberals with this purge so that is sad I suppose.
On your latter point comrade, for what it’s worth, I thought you were one of the best posters on that sub especially when it came to the PRC.
Well thank you comrade. I tried to help where I could in combating liberalism and imperialist apology. Of course I am but one person, I hope somehow many of the posters I looked to for help and explainers, who like me took the time to effort-comment can find a place again for all of us soon to continue discussing and to continue learning with others and educating those on the road but needing a helping hand.
Yea a good deal of transitional writing is gone, thankfully for the right as well with the ban hammer going to darkhumorandmemes and thedonald, less people going down the fascism rabbit hole
The truth is banning thedonald at this point is a meaningless PR gesture. The mods locked it months ago to force users to migrate to their .win website replacement and most of the users either moved to that or simply moved to the /r/conservative sub or any number of other large and long-existing reactionary communities where they continue to spew fascism and reactionary thought freely without worry. The unfortunate fact is the problems with reddit go deep, any given meme sub is often easily infiltrated and subverted by them, they walk freely among the young in subs such as the teenager sub, and so on.
Look no further than how huge the pewdiepie memes sub is and he’s pretty much a nazi with a mask half on as are many of his fans.
Yup. Which makes this just an excuse to ban CTH, the only really popular sub still in use in that list.
Reddit sits firmly in the silicon valley coastal elite democratic party camp, so while you might not see neo-nazi stuff on the front page as much since TD self-migrated, we’ll still see rampant xenophobia and racism, particularly against the US’s current enemies, China and Russia.
The state of the ramp-up of anti-China propaganda for the new cold war is truly nauseating on the rest of Reddit. It’s enabling and drumming up more and more open (and state dept sanctioned) racism from your Democratic party affiliated liberals. That’s another tragedy because CTH and the mod team (well at least one active mod) were active in pushing back against the anti-China circle-jerk and pointing out the manipulation and invention of this evolving reality. And they never really tolerated people spouting the Russia-gate hysteria.
I think the founder of reddit and current CEO is a reactionary in the libertarian vein and the site reflects that. He obviously and publicly doesn’t like Trump but well the biggest sub on reddit for years was the jailbait sub and if you look at all the hate that is permitted and how they only really take actions against violent fascists when their activities get them on the news (or are very likely to) it is clear he either has some sort of warped semi-absolutist* view of free speech (which excludes violence or strenuous and “uncivil” speech of course in favor of a false peace that favors fascists and capital, the current established structure of power) or is genuinely just playing politics and trying to encourage a site with mildly reactionary, pro-capitalist tendencies and only acts to prune his garden when the vines start getting too close to choking his ad money off or killing the site or its ability to grow.
That’s what’s so bad about reddit, the insidiousness of it, just beneath the outcroppings of violent white supremacy that are intermittently pruned and beneath the liberals who hold sway over the biggest subs lies this wild forest of racism, misogyny, white privilege, and reactionary tendencies that comes out on command for China or around BLM when they make demands for more than token action.
I didnt think of it that way, thank you for telling me as I didnt know the whole story. I was more looking on the bright side but now I see it really is a thinly vailed mask to silence the leftist community on their site.
Best to have saved a copy of good posts on your own devices
Try various reddit copying or archive sites if you kept the links somewhere
reddit comrades need to get it thru their heads that the website doesn’t want us around. doing what I can to redirect our friends here
Thx comrade. o7
On the one hand, I do love seeing all the white supremacist subs getting smacked down hard, but I am worried(very worried) about the socialist subs being next on the chopping block. I’m glad that nobody here is under the impression that the Silicon Valley libs are our friends.
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Dead on I think, comrade. A lot of these “centrists” would have done what they’re doing now about Trump “Oh, I don’t support everything he’s said but I do support what he’s done for the country” if they had been Germans in the late 30s. I’ve noticed that a lot of my more liberal friends and coworkers have taken to immediately shutting down even the concept of social-democratic alternatives to the absolute shithole that is America right now. Case in point:
I don’t really “use” Facebook as it is intended to be used, but occasionally I will comment on a status update if someone relatively politically inexperienced asks a question and I feel that I can answer. A former teacher of mine made a long, eloquent post about how she feels uncomfortable voting for Joe Biden because he’s a creep and included a request for alternatives. I’m not a big fan of voting, generally, however, I suggested that she look into Howie Hawkins. I felt that if I had mentioned someone without ballot access in my area of America she would have totally ignored me. My former teacher was really interested in Hawkins. Another former teacher responded, stating that if we were planning on voting for Hawkins over Biden “we may as well just vote for Trump”. The two of them got into a pretty lengthy argument. The second former teacher? A former congressional staffer for an ex-congressman who now runs a healthcare business and a bigwig in the county Democratic party. The first teacher talked about how Democrats are just as interested in union busting as Republicans, they just smile and stab you in the back, and a whole host of other valid points. The second just kept babbling about Obama, Clinton, and “spoiler” candidates.
The first teacher, my former debate coach, is from an impoverished working class background. The second is from a more affluent suburb and of a bourgeois background. Eventually, my former debate coach was blocked by the second teacher. My hope is that I might turn my formerly rather conservative former debate coach into a comrade in time, but Jesus Christ. Liberals drive me nuts.
listening to two libs argue about Joe Biden is enough to make me want to pull my hair out
Fucking rubes
Yeah, it’s frustrating as hell.
That’s just it, TD was dead for 7 months. Granted being sacrificed for GenderCritical is a worthy trade, but saying this is tit for tat against TD is incorrect.
Liberalism really is unarmed to deal with destructive ideologies. Took ten minutes for people to expose the holes in their new rules because they have to play both sides, they have to adapt the language so as not to alienate their users so much, that it’s lost all purposes. With these new rules, it’s possible to hate on poor people as they form the majority of the US population. It’s not clear whether Indian users can fight back against Hindu nationalist users, as we’re not sure whether the rules take geography into account (probably don’t, Reddit admins have lived their whole lives in Silicon Valley).
And in doing this they’ve angered all of their userbase instead of picking a part they want to side with and please them.
Without a revolutionary ideology, it’s impossible to fight against the rise of reactionaries and fascists. What’s happening right now in that reddit thread has happened before in history. They tried to do something but since they didn’t want to be criticized for censorship or authoritarianism and so they decided to do nothing instead.
You want a clear rule, Reddit? No support for settler-colonial states and their privileged classes. IDGAF that conservative Americans won’t like this. Oh no, they can’t say the Iraq Invasion was a good thing anymore, where is the freedom of speech? Oh right, it’s right there in all the Iraqi civilians that will be allowed to live because these fucks can’t drum up support for imperialism any more.
I’m gutted about this, but that’s what losing feels like. It highlights what you said, and it also embodies the full symbolic violence: it’s ok as long as it’s ahistorical. Tech brogressiveness and spectacle wokeness. Policy of language. After today it made realise how much CTH was actually hated. I understand that: telling that the current system sucks and giving it names and reasons must not feel good for the majority of people who support it; but it also made me think: we were ever the baddies? Not in an evil way, I mean in a chaotic way. CTH used too much humour to the point of blurring the message, so it openly advocated for violence. Empty words, but violence nonetheless. I can’t help but think that policing the language would fare better, but also I realise it castrates movement.
I can thank left edginess for radicalising many people (and I have a lot to go in radicalisation) and even furthering my reading, left edginess was needed to balance out right-wing media domination, but I also think we needed to get past this type of humorous discourse. Even if we call the people who disliked leftiness as “libs” or “centrists”, they’re still a considerable chunk of the population, and so they may not see the oppression of the current system. Solidarity, even if late.
out of curiosity I checked if that bakchodi got banned and of course it didn’t
Its really just too bad to lose such a large left friendly community. We don’t really have a ton of those.
Trying to figure out if there’s any reason to even use Reddit after that one. CTH sucked but it was also the best thing on Reddit by far.
If you need a reddit fix still try the subs /r/sendinthetanks and /r/informedtankie. They’re kind of new but supposed to be ML oriented. There’s also places like /r/shitliberalssay and /r/genzedong. Unfortunately it looks like most of the main sub is hanging out in discord rather than coming here or finding another sub and I have no idea how long that will last. Sadly it looks like most people from the sub are reticent to venture off gaming platforms like discord (insecure, data harvester, awful) or reddit itself but maybe more time will push them to.
Yeah I’ve been around shitliberalssay and genzedong, they’re pretty ok. The first two I haven’t heard of before. But I think the reason CTH was kind of bearable is that it was just so active. You could stop by and hang out for a few and chat with people or read random shitposts or whatever. Even smaller subreddits, and especially sites like raddle.me or this one here are just dead.
It’s what I’m feeling too. The daily pinned threads were awesome to just chat about whatever. The discord is nearly unusable at the moment, but this site seems like a good alternative if it picks up.
Looking at raddle, I have mixed feelings about it. I’m glad our people are sticking together, but I wish they’d move here. Maybe I’m biased, but this site seems better
Isn’t Raddle very against Marxists? I thought they only allowed anarchists.
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I only use moviescirclejerk and moretankiechapo now
I used Reddit since 2007. Chapo was the last sub I could really vibe in. Kicking a few bucks your way!
Thx!
I am crying atm, I was a mod on a DPRK shitpost and circle jerk subreddit and it got hit with the ban hammer. So much Juche Gang gone :(
Fuuck they banning real korea subs too? Damn.
:( Was it /r/juchegang? (I haven’t been on Reddit for years, but I remember that one.)
Please consider re-creating it here, though. I’d love to see a circlejerk community about my favourite currently existing country, and the instance operator won’t ban you because he isn’t a far-right reactionary like some of the Reddit admins. At the moment, the rules of the community I created (/c/korea) allow circlejerking and jokes too, but I think it makes more sense to create a separate community for that and leave /c/korea for serious discussion. So, if you create that, I’ll update the rules.
No r/Juchegang is still up and running, it was r/chapotraphouse2_2_2 . I will look into making a community, i will message you if/when I get it all set up
Just thinking, now that CTH has been banned, we can organise actual brigades onto Reddit. Do you know much about how Reddit detects brigading?
Lots of platforms organize brigades against others, they can kinda detect it by referrers, but for the most part its too much work for admins. Reddit only cares that the tiny number of initial votes can get all the liberal posts they need on their front page to keep their investors happy.
Actually pretty gutted about this. Had been on that such for over 3 years and always found it to have a great atmosphere - especially when compared to most online leftist spaces
Pretty stupid how liberal the discourse is right now. ML here, thanks for the housing.
No probs comrade, welcome aboard.
lol, Reddit is “all sides” like the bad orange man
Reddit didn’t ban r/moretankiechapo
It’s a matter of time, let’s be honest… Fascists have already taken over power, the level of atrocities they will commit is just dependent on the amount of resistance they meet.
