The mods are thinking there are too many generals and we should uncycle some. Thoughts?
>>35908the problem with generals is that good contributions get slided by the "contained" posts, so maybe a better approach would be enforcing quality standards, but that's too much to ask
second idea is to only move low effort threads to the generals, and let good threads be separate, even if the topic is technically overlaps with an existing general, but that too is too much to ask
the third position would be to remove generals but then you would have the same situation board-wise, this is, the low quality threads would slide the entire board rather than just the high quality posts in a general
generals should be cyclic because there is literally no good reason to archive them, and so far I have only seen bad faith actors try to do so
tl;dr cyclical threads, the status quo, is the local maximum considering how lazy mods are
Disagree. I don't want the catalog to be clogged up with dozens of /usa/, /ukr/, "anti-campist" threads
>>35915I'm in favor of this too.
>>35921Bad idea because it will end up creating containment boards for potentially politically relevant threads.
>/siberia/ but for usapolGood idea, alot of new threads are america related and creating a board for americans discussing relevant issues that only they would care aka coffee thread or the thousands of family politics or identity politics threads that only are relevant for americans.
>>35932For example, you didn't even re-cyclical the Anarchism General and the general already gets filled with so much shit
and tends to gets slid off because it's a slow thread and the pure amount of shit posted on the board daily. I am absolutely not going to bother re-making it most of the times. So all this means is really we are down a perfectly good general.
The logic holds for any kinda slow general, Africa would be another example.
>>35937Dead was originally for post-left, nihilist, stuff like that. Then one day some jannie who had a seething hatred for the board decided to use it as a dumping ground for random shit/slide-posts on /leftypol/.
It was better before, just slow, but i personally see no problem with slow what-so-ever.
Whilst we're on it, can you please cycle
>>>/leftypol/1541067it was cycle before the outage.
>>35932 (samefag)
this. The site needs to be more organized and less ephemeral imo.
>>35959Reasoning from an anon to me (not sure I 100% agree with the third paragraph but still)
"I really do think the generals are a ghettoisation of topics and serve as censorship, a new thread that gets people talking and thinking about a specific topic (and expressing heterodox views on China and Stalin) and is active, getting a good number of replies, gets deleted off the catalog and slotted into a cyclical slow-moving general and thereby effectively killed, no more posts, no more replies half an hour later, maybe some of the general's resident posters will take note of the merged posts eventually, but the organic board activity (and accompanying wrongthink), killed
Like imagine yourself an online leftist, visiting your favourite communist discussion space, leftypol.org, you check the top of the catalog for interesting threads to read and post in. You see:
a.) the palestine general, the ukraine general, the china general, the usa general, nazi CP spam thread, the internet general, german general, etc.
b.) a range of threads on individual topics, maybe there's a thread discussing the latest us debate, and a seperate thread about the longshoremen strike, maybe there's a separate thread about the latest israeli offensive, and one about the the PFLP and palestinian communism, a beautiful diverse panoply of topics that people can engage with and comment on, maybe comment seperately on all of them, all the better, more activity, more discussion
I would further suggest something I was thinking about the other day: if /leftypol/ had the energy and manpower to do so, I would create language boards, they have a hell of a lot more grounds to exist than various apolitical hobby boards. sure they might be slow or dead for a long time, maybe forever, but giving the germans, the spanish speakers, the chinese, the french, the italians, the brazillians (and portuguese) their own boards could actually make /leftypol/ an internationalist website that brings it out of the anglophone ghetto and creates an international left wing forum. The chinese and russians should be the first trials for this sort of thing because their rates of english bilingualism are lowest, so they should be the earliest targets to bring on board and give a space for left-wing discussion on /leftypol/"
>>35958Thank you, anon. Appreciated.
>>35960The reality of it as it is:
<Like imagine yourself an online leftist, visiting your favourite communist discussion space, leftypol.org, you check the top of the catalog for interesting threads to read and post in. You see:>a.) the palestine general, the ukraine general, the china general, the usa general, nazi CP spam thread, the internet general, german general, etc.>b.) a shit ton of low effort bait, slide threads and trash that are quickly forgotten.I'd argue that the general quality of the board
outside of Generals is often so poor it itself ghetoizes people into Generals because it's unironically painful to read some of that nonsense and it's almost always a waste of time.
From a personal perspective I find the site much easier to use when I have tabs of the General(s) i want to use and don't even bother with the brain aneurysm from the low effort stuff on /leftypol/ that could make perfectly good threads for /siberia/, or /b/ random equivalent. At least in the Generals, at least the one i'm thinking of, we have managed to kind of enforce our own level of quality and discourse as a user-base that's often higher than the average 3-or-4 new threads on the front-page on any given day.
>>35960Short on time, but skimming through this: wouldn't the solution there be to simply not move or delete a quality thread that touches on the same topic as a general, until it has run its course? Why do all this other, unrelated bullshit when the problem is with sliding "good" threads (according to poster)?
>>35963Honestly couldn't agree more with the second half of this post. That is exactly how I experience and use the board.
Come to think of it, there is little reason to lurk the first page on /leftypol/. Fun is relegated to /siberia/, /hobby/ and /games, reading to /edu/, and creativity to /draw/ (and /games/ for that brief but delightful window where the anon was posting maps in the doom general). Not one to sneer at too many boards, and in fact never have, but I am reconsidering that position now…
>>35950In our country, being left-wing is prohibited on all imageboards. Not only is it prohibited, it also always results in bans.
I thought it would be fair to have a little corner since we are very active, it doesn't hurt to try.
>>35974>Yeah, and the argument you're responding to is that this happens because any decent topic gets shunted immediately into one of those generals, meanwhile the lower quality threads are all that's left outside of them.Your easy solution is make more better threads be more millitant in removing bad ones and banning prolific shit OP makers. I imagine most OP's are made by a small minority of users, the really shitty ones even smaller.
>>35975> it doesn't hurt to try.This. Anyone moaning that it's a bad idea is dumb. Just fucking try it. If it works it works, if it doesn't it doesn't, literally nothing is lost.
>>35911how would i find the threads you archive?
>>35909i agree with this as a first step at the very least, and in any more maximalist implementation /isg/ should remain a cyclical cause its a containment thread & eceleb bs should continue to be merged into it. same goes for /usapol/ to a lesser extent. besides that, i agree that cyclicals artificially restrict discussion.
>>35978>>35979This the generals are each just camped by shitty little cliques that police dissent and circlejerk themselves, actively pushing away users. The chinlets in this thread advocating them for the sake of 'efficiency' and 'organisation' are braindead and actively killing the board.
We need more activity, more users, more posting, across more threads, and part of that is letting organic discussion take place.
>>35960>I really do think the generals are a ghettoisation of topics and serve as censorship, a new thread that gets people talking and thinking about a specific topic (and expressing heterodox views on China and Stalin) and is active, getting a good number of replies, gets deleted off the catalog and slotted into a cyclical slow-moving general and thereby effectively killed, no more posts, no more replies half an hour later, maybe some of the general's resident posters will take note of the merged posts eventually, but the organic board activity (and accompanying wrongthink), killedSounds good in most cases. Killing quantity to maintain quality is good policy, especially for a small imageboard that isn't winning anyone over on quantity.
Most posters who claim to have "heterodox opinions" are newfags who never even read Marx and come in fresh with "common sense" garbage they got from the hegemony. As much as I wanted to push back the blind glazing characteristic of the ukraine thread, the anti-campism thread was utter garbage that quickly settled on a loop of people who have nothing to say fighting over their garbage opinions. The China thread also sadly degraded into this loop of "leftists" coming in to express their "heterodox opinions". It wouldn't be a problem if they were actually making arguments and not lazily gesturing to the idea of socialism they have in their heads, but they are, sadly, and the people replying to them are not much better in most cases. Such "activity" should be purged, and thread merging sounds like a good way to do that.
>>35978Yeah, it does. But "organic activity" means utter garbage if not controlled properly, and I don't know if jannies can do that. We all know how other imageboards work: the same points are repeated until you feel physical pain hearing their shit and leave.
Also, cycled threads are a symptom. People create new threads when something actually happens and there is new discussion. Maybe uncycling all of them is the solution.
People like
>>35987 are the best argument for
uncycling these threads. If this just were about being pro vs critical towards AES states, it would not be that big of a problem, but currently there are some very silly orthodoxies you have to accept if you want to post in these threads. For example there is no point in engaging with the DPRK general, as long as it remains dominated by a clique, that will dog pile you, if you correctly identify Kim Jong-un as the head of state.
>>35978>Having everything go in a general thread is just not fun>and turns the board into a shitty chatroom, in my opinion.Neither of these are real complaints and nobody is here to entertain you.
Make a real argument or fuck off with this fagotry.
>>36002I'm strongly in favour of
>Generals stay as a reference point, but new threads with overlapping themes aren't merged.I don't feel so strongly about cycling, if the current cyclical threads were to remain that would be fine by me, but if they were uncycled I'd be fine with it too.
Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpers_and_splitters<Lumpers and splitters are opposing factions in any academic discipline that has to place individual examples into rigorously defined categories. The lumper–splitter problem occurs when there is the desire to create classifications and assign examples to them, for example, schools of literature, biological taxa, and so on. A "lumper" is a person who assigns examples broadly, judging that differences are not as important as signature similarities. A "splitter" makes precise definitions, and creates new categories to classify samples that differ in key ways.>The earliest known use of these terms was thought to be Charles DarwinMarx: lumper
Lenin: splitter
Mao: gooner
>>35936>what faggôt jannies decided to turn /dead/ into btw. pure cunts.The post-left's entire thing is being a rotting corpse decomposing into something new, shut up and let the mushrooms feast on your closed eyes, sleepy head
>>36006>The thing as i see it is just literally just be better and we'll have a better websitepart of the problem is that a catalog dominated by cyclical generals discourages a sense of user responsibility, because the same threads with the same regular posters and same standards of acceptable opinion are going to be there regardless of what you do. the nature of generals makes individual posts lower impact because at any one time the effect a single post has on site quality is noticeably diminshed: if its in a general itll at best get a lot of (you)s and then disappear as the busy thread churns on and any individual discussions are either lost in the thread or disparaged/deleted as off-topic. if its outside of a general, it feels oddly peripheral & is more likely to just be ignored because the "main" discussions are happening in generals. all of this contributes to a trend where OC/effortposts/constructive or simply FUN discussions are discouraged because users correctly feel like their own posts have minimal impact on the general state of discussion on the board, and the only way to breakout of that is to be inflammatory or otherwise intentionally retarded. when the popular threads change day to day you can more substantially influence the course a thread will take by intervening in discussion, and that has the opposite trends where if you dont want the catalogue to be full of shit threads you can get in shit threads and try to pivot them to be better
people keep saying the generals feel like reddit but to me it feels more like trying to have conversations in a busy fbi.gov channel, where youre discouraged from trying to give any substantive answer at all because itll just get lost in the churn
What posters ITT are missing is that generals became a thing from a topic being repeatedly discussed. It is an organic need. Cycling threads merely prevent new threads around the same topic being made, not generals existing (if not in name). All this blabla about cliques (that don't actually exist) and chatrooms (to which one can only reply that imageboards are forums) happens regardless. In fact, it is exposes a deep ignorance of online social systems.
There are also repeated claims about users this, users that. Back that shit up, because so far it has been nothing but conjecture - not even anecdotes.
>>36000Astounding hyperbole, this post. Link to example. I dare you.
>>36006This. Uncycling threads, or even banning generals out right is a bandage on a cancer patient. And even that is assuming the most favourable position.
>>36016>>36017well noticed.
can you answer my initial question or are you only here to insult people?
>>36013im open to removing cyclicals, at least a few of them, but im afraid you might be right. i just want to see /leftypol/ survive & hopefully improve. been here since the beginning and i still enjoy it, though granted i dont really use any other forums or social media. but its not the first time quality dipped
to everyone who thinks closing cyclicals is besides the point i am sympathetic, but what do you suggest be done instead to try to revitalize the site? as cringe as it can be, a new promo campaign might be good. NOT just to grow for the sake of growing, i never felt like that was especially important, but at least to bring in some new blood. if half the threads are always going to be revisiting the same questions over and over, at least if there were new posters coming in with some consistency it wouldnt feel as pointless to revisit the same topics, and i do think that having a little bit of a sense of beint outward-facing gave /leftypol/ a little more sense of purpose as a community back in the day. never been the smartest or friendliest place, but there used to at least be a sense that we were eager to promote ourselves as an alternative to other leftist "platforms." its like the ratty pub of internet communist "spaces", people might be more ugly and belligerent but you can let go of your pretensions and rant and indulge. i think theres still a desire for that among leftists and /leftypol/ can still provide that
more instrumentally, bickering about "campism" aside, this is one of the few mostly anglophone communities on the anglophone internet that is 99% pro-palestine & anti-NATO as well as broadly communist/at least socialist of some kind. i dont think /leftypol/ can really aspire to being an especially useful force for the international left in general, but as far as it has any use, a more informal & anonymous place to discuss palestine/ukraine etc could be reasonably suggested as a justification for a new promo campaign
>>36021I'd prefer to have a normal imageboard with that kind of thread than the current staid overmoderated website that no new visitor would ever look at and see anything to contribute to.
also
>generals bring a veneer of being smartlol
ok this is an example of shit that bugs me, this thread:
>>1977682
low effort OP, sure, but its not outright bait, its very relevant if generic question, if people answer it seriously it can generate good discussion. maybe not, but whatever, i have a little time, let me type out an answer in good faith assuming this is an earnest question and hopefully i can help set the tone of the thread and encourage other comparable responses.
apparently while i was typing, the mods sage the thread & spoiler the image (because why? its nonsexual image with a mans buttcrack showing somewhat?)
whats the purpose of being this arbitrarily strict? its one thing if its low effort clealrly bait, thats what sage & anchors should be used for. but something like this happens frequently, i try to respond seriously to an OP thats below average or getting shit replies to contribute a little bit to quality of discussion, and thread is either merged with a general, shunted to siberia, or anchored
>>36034they are called carrots?
I call them forward arrows but i like that it's better.
What are backwards apples called? Parsnips?
>>35908Please do something with the general/sticky at the top of /edu/. No need to see that stupid Zizek & Peterson post every visit.
Make the sticky more general, much shorter, have a few links for getting books online, and put in a picture that's more to taste like pic related. Keep the posting if you feel it's worth it, but please just fix the original post. The board is uninviting as it stands.
>>36183and now all the boards are pure slide garbage threads
good job
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