There is no organization going on on leftypol. In truth, there is only an ongoing process of atomization. Every day our numbers dwindle and our site loses users. The fact that we are so unwilling to recognize leftypol, not as a silly hangout spot, but as a military base surrounded by enemies on all sides, is probably why glowies even keep this website from going offline completely. We're an utterly worthless leftist organization. What is all the philosophy for if all of it is stupid edrama bullshit and attempts to explain an outside world we never explore ourselves? How exactly can leftypol have any purpose in this world if we don't convert people, or seek out comrades to befriend in person, or find leftist communities we can ally ourselves with, not that there are many of those. Why can't we have raids into other online spaces, or form communities on other websites that represent our interests as online leftists? Even twitteroid leftists do more activism online. Not to mention that there's a decrepit atmosphere of paranoia and existential dread, as well as everyone on leftypol being a piece of shit fossil who denounces porn addiction and criticizes everyone who actually makes an attempt to post something interesting for once. We practically do the glowies' work for them. If 4chan can organize real life attempts to steal a flag from shia labeouf's private residence then why cant we, i dunno, form cliques and networks of people willing to actually do shit? I wanted comrades from this place and all ive ever gotten were parasocial relationships with people who only share philosophy and poke and prod at anybody who suggests doing anything at all without giving anything in return. Fuck the air of critique here. Why cant you people propose projects? What's wrong with a 5 year plan? This is why the third world is the only hope of progress in the world. You firsties all gave an internet connnection and pretend to be "socialists" but you are the most antisocial people that could have ever pretended to be "comrades". This place is designed to lull leftists into a false sense of security and community. Wake up. Start organizing on a regional basis and stop focusing on the internet. You wont find any cameraderie online and your online comrades are pure fiction. Go outside.
>>33052>focusing on the internet.Nobody here is doing that.
You are projecting your own lack of organization or action on to others.
>>33056You can always use fed…
And if you want a "unified organ whose sole purpose is to connect all these disperse organizations and fights" you can have some examples of that in >>>/leftypol/1811652
>>33057>You're what's wrong with leftypol."What is the purpose of leftypol.org ?
The mission of /leftypol/ at leftypol.org is to provide a fun and enjoyable space for the working masses around the world, as an anonymous community of non-sectarian leftists united in common cause against the forces of capitalism, fascism, and liberalism. Our goal is to act as a centre for serious political discourse and less serious informal discussions on various topics related to leftist thought."
>>33052this site isn't surrounded by enemies: it's too irrelevant for that. this site's failure isn't that it doesn't organize, but that nobody here is interesting. this site's doom comes from its failure to interact with the outside world - but that need not take the form of raiding. the real problem is that no new people come in while the old and the interesting leave. this site is no more than a place to have fun, perhaps at a push a place to discuss and learn things. this site's failure and death is that it is not fun and it does not teach you anything except to loathe what passes for the left these days.
organisational failure is endemic to the left, but this is not a place of organisation. it is downstream - here, the only problem is that posters are so arrogant you'd think they were speaking as someone who'd been on the CPSU central committee themselves while, in practice, have rarely done so much as sold a newspaper or had an original idea in their lives.
>>33056new technology is unnecessary, the basic flaw is social. so long as you can chuck links to leftypol.org on twitter there's no deep technical reason for the site's death. the social reason is that nobody's putting it out there - and in fairness to them now, there is nothing to put out there. in 2017 and even in 2020 there was original content and good posts worthy of sharing elsewhere to summarise a topic, now there is nothing of value.
>>33063>"Shitposting" should be strictly relegated to Siberia and the discussion boards treated like actual forums with an enforced code of conduct. People that insist on shitposting should be shown the door so they can take their unfunny wrecking bullshit elsewhere.To vague so as to be meaningless. Will be selectively and widely varied in its enforcement depending on enforcer.
Not a bad idea in principle but needs more refined language, exact examples of unacceptable behavior, etc.
This very thread is a shitpost thread anyways, i'd say these constant meta and low effort threads that are made every day and resemble social media posts with a simple question, some fringe historical autism about the USSR or just staking a contentious position to have an argument, get a few replies and sink are more damaging to most of what is actually posted within threads because it always has the front page looking very unappealing.
>>33070Is caballo still in charge of this dump? Because I made a similar argument to him years ago and the response was "leftypol will attract people through the principle of free speech," ie let people shit post as much as they want.
And here we are I guess.
>>33072>this site's problem isn't that shitposting crowds out good posters, it's that good posters are goneThey're gone because shitposters make posting here deeply unpleasant.
>it's perfectly permissible - even desirable - to have a thread where essays coexist with cheap one-liners. "quantity has a quality all of is own" is never truer than on an imageboard -Except they don't coexist because of the tendency to try and generate the most (you)s by being the biggest faggot possible. There's no engagement with the content, just people creating garbage to try and piss people off.
> a good joke playing off something you've said in your long essay may bring just as big a smile to your face as an interesting essay in return. the problem with the site today is that the essay writers are gone and the one-liners are crappy and unoriginal.I wonder why.
>>33076Things are constantly in motion and you have to adapt to that change or resign yourself to failure. Your retrograde mindset is part of what's killing this community. You can't let go of bullshit like "how leftypol has always been" or "what image boards are supposed to be," and we're sitting in the result.
If you're so in love with what leftypol used to be then go waste your time on archive.org. Circumstances have changed. The community has changed. And being unwilling to change with it is just an explicit endorsement of killing the board through ossification and irrelevance.
And what's more, having rules of conduct in place conducive to discussion and community building doesn't mean "no fucking fun allowed." There's plenty of space to be silly without being a wrecking piece of shit whose goal isn't to produce something that entertains the community but entertains themselves at the expense of the community.
>>33075shitposter is a floating signifier which is now the primary barrier to giving you any kind of meaningful reply or gleaning any kind of meaningful informaiton from your post. without knowing what you imagine when you see the word "shitpost" it's impossible to know what you mean: are shitpost and shit post synonymous for you, or are you bothered by casual
shitposting, to low effort posts that i might find perfectly enjoyable and in keeping with the site? i can't know - and equally, you can't know what i mean. we should find some way to agree about what it is we're talking about or we'll wind up talking past one another. i would say that shitposting has been with this board for as long as it existed, but the ratio of shit posts to good posts - even good shitposts - has become much worse in recent times.
my broad argument would be that people who try to get the maximum number of (you)s with terrible posts should be banned (if they haven't made a habit of it, perhaps only for half an hour or so) and have their post deleted. this doesn't need a specific rule about quality, it can be done subjectively - if the mods make a mistake then we can argue about it in /meta/ and they'll think twice next time. by creating slight annoyances as a deterrent to unwanted results, people will give up on them a lot faster than if you give them rigid rules which they can play lawyer with either way. fast action, fast feedback, and a mutual sense of what is and isn't acceptable developing over time.
>>33081Imageboards are for shitposting dude. If you want some decorum you should at least have usernames, if not post history, karma systems and all that. What does this format lend itself to besides shitposting?
>If you're so in love with what leftypol used to be then go waste your time on archive.org. Circumstances have changed. The community has changed. And being unwilling to change with it is just an explicit endorsement of killing the board through ossification and irrelevance.But nothing has changed, that's what you're all complaining about.
>And what's more, having rules of conduct in place conducive to discussion and community building doesn't mean "no fucking fun allowed." There's plenty of space to be silly without being a wrecking piece of shit whose goal isn't to produce something that entertains the community but entertains themselves at the expense of the community.Take OP for example half the board loves Shay's flamboyant persona they've developed here and then the other half would call him:
>a wrecking piece of shit whose goal isn't to produce something that entertains the community but entertains themselves at the expense of the community.The "community" doesn't have one set of tastes or sense of humor.
>>33084inane. imageboards are more than capable of being places of decorum. /leftypol/ shouldn't become such a place, but the idea that it's inimical to the format is the moronic runoff of western imageboard culture being yoked to 4chan. 1chan /rail/, for example, is not a shitposting board
though there are some dickheads who've made some bad posts on it. i blame /qa/. except by the standards of even-more-autistic Japanese-language railway imageboards. an imageboard is a format like any other: nobody would ever say you can't have shitposting on a traditional forum!
/leftypol/ should strive to be a fun imageboard independent of 4chan cultural influence. imageboards in general should be deployed to an audience of people who've never used them before. only then will the potential of the format be reached. most likely, this will never happen. /leftypol/ didn't seize the moment years back and is unlikely to do it in the future, and there's an inherent catch-22 in starting a new site: only the people who know about imageboards are in the position to do so, and such people are inherently likely to kill their own project with preconcieved notions from other western boards.
>>33087anonymity frees you of the need to come up with a name. it compounds, in theory, the advantage of ephemerality. nobody should be reading the discussion we are having right now in 10 years, and if they are it can bring no embarassment to me. ideas can be thrown up freely on a whim and toyed with, argued out, etc, without much fear that they'll become a millstone around your neck or that some mistake or malapropism or inadvertent insult will cause you problems forever: one person's accountability-through-post-history is anoher person's crippling social anxiety, and another person still's chance to ruin a thread by ignoring your point and throwing up something dumb you said on an unrelated topic. spam and bad posts are a moderation problem, not a registration problem. (something shii actually got right in his stupid essay!)
it also lends itself to a discussion style that i'm fond of: it cuts out small talk, it encourages posts about ideas, objects, events, and such rather than "identity-focused" discussion about how your day was, how the family is, did you get into that course, etc… even when people use a username, a tripcode or tripflag, they tend not to do this because they're the only identifiable party so such conversations can't really be reciprocal. even when people blogpost, it's structured more as a story than as small talk. even when people have names and flags, their identity is more like an author's pseudonym than an actual identity of the kind you'd find on twitter. (there are one or two instances where conventional identity-focused discussions happen, even here. i find it distasteful - though i'd endorse a site
entirely composed of such discussions if that was its purpose.)
>>33088the primary reason that imageboards keep posts only for a short period is because they are
image boards and image storage is expensive: look at textboards and you'll see that their archives go back to the very start in most instances, because simple text storage is cheap. that said: ephemerality has a beauty of its own. if a post is really, really good someone will screenshot it and share it elsewhere. on /leftypol/ good or important threads are sometimes archived, and in many cases there are full blown archives (i wish i could find a technical solution to make them unworkable, because truly ephemeral posting is far more interesting than anonymity… i save my best posts for dead sites where only one or two people will read them.).
>>33084>Imageboards are for shitposting dude. Retard.
>But nothing has changed, Mega retard.
>The "community" doesn't have one set of tastes or sense of humor.Ultra retard. The sense of humor is besides the point you stupid fuck. A troll wrecking the board and disrupting the community is detrimental to the operation of a forum, which is what this place is.
Actually kill yourself.
>There is no organization going on on leftypol
Why would you expect any? Go to /praxis/ or something if you want some kind of internet project. This is a shitposting forum split from 8/pol/.
>The fact that we are so unwilling to recognize leftypol, not as a silly hangout spot, but as a military base surrounded by enemies on all sides
What possible aspect of /leftypol/ do you consider similar to a military base. Holy mother of roleplay, you go outside.
>We're an utterly worthless leftist organization.
We're not a leftist organization.
>What is all the philosophy for if all of it is stupid edrama bullshit and attempts to explain an outside world we never explore ourselves?
Nice projection. I'm at rallies and direct actions, I've visited the encampments, I'm in socialist orgs, I supply insider information to my union. You assume everyone else here is some internet addict?
>How exactly can leftypol have any purpose in this world if we don't convert people
Well for the past four years staff have banned most of the people who don't fit the hivemind so, uh, take it up with them.
>Why can't we have raids into other online spaces, or form communities on other websites that represent our interests as online leftists?
Mods have a conflict of interest there, they don't want counterraids to have to deal with so they don't encourage raids. And that's fair enough. Go to leftychin /i/ for raids.
>as well as everyone on leftypol being a piece of shit fossil who denounces porn addiction
You know addictions are bad, right? Like, categorically. It's a part of the definition that it's harmful.
>If 4chan can organize real life attempts to steal a flag from shia labeouf's private residence then why cant we, i dunno, form cliques and networks of people willing to actually do shit?
Because we're 100 people spread far around the world, many of us anonymous on purpose.
>I wanted comrades from this place and all ive ever gotten were parasocial relationships with people
Yes, you idiot. Did you actually expect imageboard users (of all people) to fly over to Georgia just to meet you and hang up banners?
>Why cant you people propose projects?
Funnily enough I do, and they tend to end up basically being solo projects pretty quickly. Alas.
>You firsties
Southern states confirmed for third-world.
>Start organizing on a regional basis and stop focusing on the internet
Hypocrite that you are!
>>1849926>The detournement thread taking anime and resubbing it with communist dialogue produced some good content and helped educate users on video editing and the ideology of the situationists.I was not aware of this, pls share link or screenshot.
(attachments from >>>/games/18613 )
>>1849964 [not that comrade]
You say this, but I actually have tried making a new forum with blackjack and hookers.
https://nuclearchange.netCrit welcome. But unless you already have enough users to keep it active or are fine with just making your core base the anti-social people banned from all the other sites, it's an uphill struggle to get people interested, even with new ideas, even with OC. That's the first mover advantage at work, and it's part of why absolute shitholes like twitter, reddit and facebook are so dominant despite everything obviously wrong with them. New sites don't grow without a few people satisfied with feeding it while it's slow. Either that or manipulative bullshit like fake users and post copying.
>>33113Cool, thanks.
btw, not sure if you've used leftybooru before, and it's probably about to migrate to a new software soon which will make uploading easier, but its a great resource for sharing and tagging /leftypol/ images.
https://lefty.booru.org/ Unique IPs: 11