Since the drama over the Elon/h1b meltdown thread, I've noticed some people would like an opportunity to provide more generalized feedback. Most of the time mods would prefer to stay behind the scenes and not engage with the userbase due to the numerous bad faith actors, crossposters, and others who would take advantage of that. The downside is that moderation is often really opaque to users which is a frustrating experience.
Just note, this thread is for general site governance and policy, not specific ban decisions for example, which still goes to the relevant /meta/ thread or tech feedback, unless you really feel you can't get ahold of those people for whatever reason. I would like to continue the type of conversations that we've had in threads like
>>>/meta/37778I'm not terminally online and obviously I need to eat, sleep, go to work, and do other stuff so I won't always respond here instantly, but when I'm online I will try and respond to the queries in relatively timely manner.
Also note while I take suggestions, the website isn't a dictatorship, its a modocracy so any ideas I take from this thread still have to be put to a vote for 1-2 weeks or more before, for example, it can become an ordinance. Same for repealing ordinances or any other major decision. Normally, this sort of thing would go in /meta/ but some users have expressed that /meta/ doesn't get enough traffic for it to be truly representative of the userbase (not that anything ever could be).
This thread will be cyclical - also note that this is feedback to ME, specifically, not the whole mod team. For that use /meta/. Not to say they can't also chime in but it isn't a requirement.
TLDR: this is a suggestions/complaints + AMA thread.
I think the biggest detriment to the board is posters that are hostile to any kind of action, or even the idea that leftypol should be anything other than their shitposting hangout toilet.
I've been on leftypol since 8chan, where I was first a participant and then a mod.
I think what really made 8chan's leftypol its energy and dynamism early on was that it attracted a number of people that were really interested not only on READING but in trying to apply that knowledge. It attracted artists that used their talents to spread the information others dug up and discussed. There was a strong industry of creating propaganda, whether just cutting up existing videos or creating infographics or detourning existing works like resubbing anime to teach people the joys of creating your own self theory. There were some talented individuals like Muke and Pierre, Papadripopolous and the Political Ideologies Catgirls artist, and people eager to calloborate on everything including a crazy plan to create a commune in Detroit.
I think that over the years more so than people knowledgeable about communism fading away, the bigger problem has been that people that actually want to DO stuff has faded away. A general feeling of pessimism and hostile negativity has consumed the board. The motto in legtypol's header is "The anons of the past have only shitposted on the Internet about the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." At this point I think it should have the further subheader, "But I Would Prefer Not To."
I think part of this tendency can be typified in the "fear" of "reddit." There's long been an insular tendency among some of the userbase against "advertising" elsewhere, on other boards, on social media, in any way or place that might attract "reddit." I think that pessimistic position has to go at this point. The fear that outsiders are going to come and liberalize leftypol has to be discarded for the optimistic confidence that leftypol as a community is not only resilient but will change the people that come to it for the better.
But on a more fundamental level I think the problems with leftypol, its two main roots, are that one the website structurally doesn't fit the needs of either the people using it, or users out on the wider internet.
For two, leftypol has no mission any more. At least on 8chan, the proximity to such a wider, hostile userbase at least gave it a purpose if only out of contrarian defiance. Since being severed from 8chan, it's just been drifting, and while the internet has changed around it, leftypol has consigned itself to irrelevance by stubbornly refusing any kind of substantial change or even engagement in favor of hermetic stagnation.
I think that what leftypol needs is to be fundamentally, radically changed, both in form and in purpose. We have to reconceive what an imageboard is and how it can serve and promote a leftist community. Most important of all we need to reinvent leftypol as a community itself and decide what the fuck we're all here to actually do: actually develop the communist project, or just distract and console each other as the blackest reaction consumes us.
>>38130>its often the case that some mods go days, weeks, or even months between logins. That's fucked up. Do I have to go in the matrix to apply? I'm on this fuckin webbed site every damn day.
Also is caballo still in charge or what
sharty spam stays up for hours on /leftypol/
CSAM stays up for hours on /siberia/
I get banned for this thread and accused of "low effort concern trolling:"
https://leftypol.org/leftypol/res/2095580.htmlhttps://leftypol.org/meta/res/36480.html#38025>>38133also how is it that shitty H1B thread full of /pol/yp race warriors got to stay open for hundreds of posts but my comparatively tame and reasonable thread that was NOT trying to scapegoat immigrants btw gets closed instantly? I was literally talking about the mode of production and its global incentive structures. I spent a half hour making a diagram and doing a writeup and I get called a "low effort poster"
I wrote most of the article about the reserve army of labor on fucking leftypedia
>>38132>That's fucked up. Do I have to go in the matrix to apply? I'm on this fuckin webbed site every damn day. Also is caballo still in charge or whatyou can go to the matrix waiting room if you're not there already. Caballo is still an admin
>>38133I removed your ban and unlocked the post. Use report button for all CSAM.
I think the reason that mod banned you was because it was about outsourcing/immigration right after we had that shitshow of a thread on h1b shit as you said
>>38134 and people are little on edge about it.
>>38135I kneel. Thank you!
>I removed your ban and unlocked the post. Use report button for all CSAM.Always do and immediately clear cache
>I think the reason that mod banned you was because it was about outsourcing/immigration right after we had that shitshow of a thread on h1b shit as you said >>38134 and people are little on edge about it.Makes sense. Thanks again!
>>38134>also how is it that shitty H1B thread full of /pol/yp race warriors got to stay open for hundreds of posts but my comparatively tame and reasonable thread that was NOT trying to scapegoat immigrants btw gets closed instantly?>>38136The reason is because it is different mods making different decisions. Users tend to think if
X got banned why did
Y not get banned or vice versa? the reason its because its two different mods doing or not doing two different things depending upon whos on at what time of the day.
The modocracy in practice follows what I call the "pantheon model"
The modocracy isn't a hierarchy with me (or other admins) at the top. Its a flat horizontal structure, where no one person has authority to make overall decisions, and each mod is a sort of sovereign entity unto themselves who can do whatever they want for the most part unless its something so unbelievably, extremely egregious that they are kicked out. But that's exceedingly rare.
Basically its less a vanguard party and more like a pantheon of ancient pagan gods, each with their own fickle and capricious whims, personality, etc. Except that those fickle pagan gods are also LARPing as an occupy wall street general assembly which uses conversation to get to a consensus, and then affirms that consensus via vote.
And when someone doesn't agree with the outcome they just ignore it and do whatever the hell they want anyway, with little to no consequences.
anyway, enjoy your posting
>>38131> leftypol has no mission any more. At least on 8chan, the proximity to such a wider, hostile userbase at least gave it a purpose if only out of contrarian defiance. I agree. Fighting fascism unified the board, brought in people and we did good things with that.
>Since being severed from 8chan, it's just been drifting, and while the internet has changed around it, leftypol has consigned itself to irrelevance by stubbornly refusing any kind of substantial change or even engagement in favor of hermetic stagnation.That i am not so sure of, though i am atleast cosigned to agree with death of 8chan that things have been drifting. Granted i haven't been here for the entirety of that time, Covid changed a lot of things and one of those things was less leftypol. But i came back, i am happy we are still here, still a community. I also think we need to get back to our roots in a way and talk more and engage with people outside leftypol. The lack of a unified "/pol/" has been to our own detriment, we have not been actively combating fascism as a community and i think we should again. Leftypol can be a force, we just need to organize for a united purpose again.
Suggestions:
<Per-thread user-ids for all posts, with "hide post" applying to all posts, allowing me to mute people within a thread rather than sifting through individual posts.This has drawbacks though
<It's less anonymous<Trolls and raiders may just use alternative methods to get a different id for each post<People may rely on the hide feature rather than reporting rulebreaking posts
> https://leftypol.org/static/manifesto.pdf>"An important part of /leftypol/’s unique character is our opposition to identity politics"Define this in more detail, it's vague and I see it interpreted in many ways, both by posters and mods. In the past I've seen mods defend that LGBT people existing and basic information about them is not idpol, as expected. But posters disagree then resume shitting up threads.
In my opinion, add:
<Racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. are identity politics (idpol) and are bannableTo the actual rules. It's not there currently:
https://leftypol.org/rules.htmlThe fact that the LGBT general can't exist in leftypol board without being completely spammed by homophobia and transphobia shows something is wrong in my opinion. Not sure on the solution but clarifying rules could help.
>>38131>the bigger problem has been that people that actually want to DO stuff has faded away.I mean why would we? Specifically, why would we post about what we're doing or what we're going to do?
Remember Sage? Dude was involved in a tenant union, but I remember a lot of people shitting on his efforts.
You make OC but dare to have some presence outside of /leftypol/? You're a petite bourgeois poser.
Shoplifting? Cybercrime? A soup kitchen? You're a libtoddler lifestylist
A tenant union maybe even an ordinary union? You're a moron who doesn't realize unions aren't socialist (and renters aren't workers!)
Join a party? Electoralist class collaborationist nonsense
A protest? Useless anarkiddie performance art
Voting? Hahahaha!
You admit you post on other platforms? You need to fuck off and go back
Eat your landlord? Glow
You're right about this place not having a mission anymore, but I think one of the worst parts is how negative this place is. I found it rubs off on me too, ruins discussions and constantly pushes the idea that if you want to be taken seriously and have people engage you have to be as obnoxiously abrasive as possible.
>Look how cynical and contrarian I am, everyone is stupid except me, lol you think you have any idea of wtf youre talking about you dumb shitlib redditor brown shitskin kkkracker westoid glowfag, oh you don't like how WE use slurs around here? I bet you're offended now are you???? Go back uyghur libI find myself engaging more with friends and offline than here. And when I do visit it's either /siberia/ or 2 or 3 generals. Hell after trying it, I think I prefer interacting with ChatGPT over visiting this place.
It was bad enough 5-10 years ago. It's even worse nowadays.
tl;dr: crack down on slurs/fedjacketing/constant insults and abrasive debate addict contrarianism. If there's a civil discussion on and 50 (effort) posts in some rando walks in, starts throwing insults and otherwise behaves like an obnoxious debate bro, ban them and delete their posts
>>38134That thread was disgusting, I don't get why more people weren't banned earlier.
>>38138First of all, gunsmith cats was a great anime.
Second of all, lots of people have tried to reform leftypol before and thats partly why mods/admins have such a high turnover rate because the system is very difficult to reform, other than by pulling a coup/split which has happened several times in leftypol's history for that very reason.
I'd personally prefer slightly more hierarchy but my fellows mods/admins don't really agree.
>>38131thats all well and good but kind of lacking in concrete suggestions. I agree that /leftypol/ has gotten more conservative, to use a word, over the years, and thats coincided with the aging of the typical channer userbase. to quote
>>>/tech/11469
>The chans are dying. Really, they have been dying a slow death for quite some time, given a bit of a boost from the anti-sjw/Trump mid 2010s era, but quickly returning to a dying status, accelerated by the death of 8chan. Now, in the minds of normies, chans represent at worst, a hellhole filled with incels, white supremacists, pedophiles, and god knows what else. At best, they represent a “boomer” style of communication that’s deeply uncool, as opposed to the dopamine inducing, shiny-colored-box experience of tiktok and [dis.cord]s <The conservatism and resistance to change of the current chan userbase is inherently connected to it’s age. While there are of course some young people, the preponderance of current alt-chan users are 25-40 year old millennials who came of age during the 2000s “golden era” of 4chan. This can be seen most clearly on lainchan, which is rife with arcane references to gibsonian cyberpunk novels, 1990s anime, ‘hackers’, and disgraced free software guru/activist Richard Stallman.>Like an aging video game with a slowly eroding multiplayer playerbase, the chan era is slowly passing from history. Many of the young, edgy people who would have been attracted to chans in previous eras are now on platforms like disc.ord. The whole appeal of php-based chans is that cash strapped youth could buy cheap shared hosting and slap a chan together with minimal technical knowledge and little money. Now, [dis.cord] allows them to do the same thing with absolutely no technical knowledge, no money, and no effort. The barrier to entry is far lower, not to mention that a [dis.cord] “server” does not expose the owner to the same level of legal risk as ownership of a standalone website. The private nature of [dis.cord] servers also keeps it away from the prying eyes of journalists and others who would likely freak out if they saw the same or similar content on a website. <It’s only an influx of new people/users that would lead to the space for a radical reimagining of anonymous internet communication to succeed. As long as the chans remain a place for aging neckraging neckbeards, driven nostalgic for a bygone era of the internet, rather than a vision of the future, the chaniverse will continue to bleed users to other platforms. >>38141your tech suggestions might be alot of work and are more zan's wheelhouse so try the tech feedback thread.
>>>/meta/37383with regards to your other ideas, reworking the constitution/manifesto is something we have been working on but its kindof also a big project since large parts of that document are dated and no one wants to go through yet another constitutional debate.
your idea on sexism, racism, homophobia seems like something that would work better as an ordinance, but IMO its common sense and lack of enforcement on that is more about mod time than unclear rules. Maybe use the report button more on sexist, racist, and homophobic posts?
>>38142>tl;dr: crack down on slurs/fedjacketing/constant insults and abrasive debate addict contrarianism. If there's a civil discussion on and 50 (effort) posts in some rando walks in, starts throwing insults and otherwise behaves like an obnoxious debate bro, ban them and delete their postsI mean… thats the 'reddit' debate, do we want leftypol to be like revleft or just /pol/ but communism instead of fascism? Its unclear that a chan will ever be the best vehicle for theory-heavy posts, if its that important its probably time to start a wordpress blog or something.
I also don't remember the so called golden age of leftypol theory posting with rose colored glasses like some other people do, there was quite alot of terrible theory going around then including leftcoms trying to argue that labor vouchers weren't Marxist, etc.
Even the praxis wasn't that great, AFAIK the greatest praxis leftypol ever achieved was funding that one episode of Richard Wolff's show. Is /leftypol/ suppose to be a place for serious organizing or theory discussions? in my opinion it never really was, the fact is it was simply more popular on 8chan due to that being a bigger website and having more crossposters, not to mention an army of minor ecelebs before old BO's rojava purges around '18.
>>38146Revleft was even worse. See Rafiq/H*z.
>'reddit' debateI don't think the place should be sanitized. But it would help if discussion was a bit more civil. Like the world is horrible enough as is, and it'd be nice if there was a (leftist) refuge from it all.
You go on twitter… it's a faucet of racist, schizophrenic, xenophobic drivel
You go on telegram… it's geopol and slurs
You go on bluesky… it's constant Trump derangement syndrome posts making their way into your feed (even if you tell them not to do it)
4chan? Same deal as twitter. Reddit? Insta bans if you post outside of your echo chamber, most "political" subs which aren't dead are thoroughly liberal and only allow posting MSM articles. The "best" you end up with is r/stupidpol, and it's like /usa/ at it's worst.
I'm not saying there was a golden age of theory posting. But I think discussion would be improved by cracking down on the abrasive debate (addict) bro posting.
says a lot about mods that marxism gets you banned and deleted on sight but being an electoralist or third worldist ape is totally fine
>>38129mods that dont have an emotional attachment to this shithole and have a life are better than the spergs who spend half day arbitrarily banning anything they dont like and the other half cultivating some leftoid personality cult on twitter or disc or whatever the fuck
>>38151There it is
Don't blame us when this place dies like Revleft for the same reasons.
>>38153>Civility is bourgeoisYou're sheltered if you think like this.
Like I don't even get this argument, bourgeois civility? Even if this were true (Meanwhile actual oligarchs are out there on social media insulting people) what does not being civil add to a discussion?
>thinking a fucking website is da epic praxisNot what I said
>>38127I used to think the staff were just mildly annoying and attention-seeking memecommunists but the rule against shitting on middle-classers (of any country, I'm not a MTW fuckhead) really made it obvious you simply can't have a communist imageboard because they're always going to gravitate towards radlib bullshit. It was fun posting Marx, Engels or Lenin calling out the middle-class or that the petite-bourgeoisie isn't just small business owners and always getting a bunch of posts saying I'm not le real marxist while it lasted.
Anyway you aren't the vanguard of the revolution, we don't need a bunch of rules and moderation and communism doesn't depend on debate or propaganda and never did because communism is already existing proletarian association, not activism or debating or propaganda or making OC with some stupid academic in-joke. You should just do enough to make the site usable.
>>38157The posting error on /siberia/ the other day was due to me deploying a new "weapon" to help staff deal with this sort of thing.
Still, the best option remains posting from a clearnet IP.
One issue with moderation I noticed is arbitrariness of rule enforcement or just flat out deleting post and banning users based on personal disagreements. My suggestion is, mandate that when post or threads are deleted or moved to different board, or users banned, there needs to be an explanation of why. Nothing long, just one sentence is enough, but specifically describing was is the issue and why the measure was taken. When someone looks at board log, they should be able to tell what the mods are actually doing.
https://leftypol.org/log.php?board=leftypol right now there are either no explanations whatsoever, single word reason that you can tell nothing from, or references to a rule.
Example: instead of writing "pol shit", you write "user was derailing thread >>/leftypol/2095615 by repeatedly posting hostile comments and ethnic slurs"
Please refer to my other posts in the thread now on the meta board
I think fundamentally leftypol has lost its original role and goal over time as well as the core of its userbase maturing beyond its current state. Yugopnik used to browse, but does not anymore, for example. There's no more artists, no more creators.
I think leftypol as it exists today lacks a clear reason for existing and those that remain either hope it will get better or are debate addict trolls.
I don't have the full answer as to what leftypol ought to be but to me as someone who was active in organising irl and is going to be again now that the shitstorm has blown over and exposed in my life irl, my ideal would be a much greater focus on being a place where people from different parties can come together and discuss actual practical matters anonymously, so that they aren't subject to potential overzealous party boards and that they don't feel the need to push their orgs official line, but can truly discuss their own opinions, unafraid to turn out to be wrong, which was always the greatest strength of an anonymous board.
The population engaged in irl activism rn is rather low, and the population of useless sacks of shit who just want to shit on people doing stuff irl is too large, so moderating such a forum is going to be rather hard. But if effort is made to create an environment of constructive discussion, by beating negative online debate addicts off the board (and probably also toning down the slurs a bit if we're going to want to attract more new people if we're honest), it might just become just good enough that it can attract competent irl people looking for broader discussion on tactics and theory, which can then lead to the accumulation of information in the form of lists and graphs and tutorials on organising.
That's all I can contribute after just waking up. I will check back in later.
>>38162>I think fundamentally leftypol has lost its original role and goal over timeWe never had an official goal. Leftypol was created on 8ch and slowly anarchists, socdems, and Marxists started using it. What gave it its impetus was the constant /pol/ raids that formed an overarching solidarity between ultimately competing tendencies. OWS was still fresh and the Bernie campaign burned out a lot of Americans as it went on. Back then anti-idpol "classism" was consensus and as slowly hopes of change in America faded people reverted back to supporting culturally progressive causes over a more economic-focus. It's quiet an understandable phenomenon, because if we can't have economic justice at least give us our rights and whatnot. With the fall of 8ch mods' daily activity shifted from having to delete daily scat spam from poltards to a much smaller and mostly left wing (whatever that means) userbase and begane policing posts of lefties.
Idk how we could back to the days of that much activity and OC production given motivations for them were lost. I'm not sure if I buy the "imageboard format is dying" narrative either, because sure as fuck late stage capitalism prosuces more social outcasts than before, supposedly offering us the very userbase that would thrive in such an environment. I think it has more to do with the fact that to this day English speaking imageboards are mostly American and European/FiveEyes user-bases and in said countries literacy rates are falling with attention spans as well.
Still, I think that if political prospects change giving people hope, the site could catch up eventually, but there's really no substantial movement in the Global North to give us fuel.
Also I'd like to note that lot of the OC that came from the height of leftypol were covering "leftie classic topics" like what is class struggle, exploitation, imperialist war crimes, etc. plus a lot of academic lefties made into webms (parenti, chomsky, zizek, rdw, etc.) of the past 3 decades plus shitting on the "alt-right" that was still fresh then. When a new generation of reactionaries and progressives produce their content there will be inevitably a recap of them again to introduce the youngest among us to them. Altright lost its "punkrock" character a long time ago and the dirtbag left that parodied them integrated well into yourube and podcast algorithms.
All I'm saying is that it's futile to blame this site, this community, and our dirty ass mods who do it for free when it feels like nothing is happening that would restart the class conscious political projects in our countries. It will come, eventually, and we'll be here with the same hopes and creative energies.
>>38162>The population engaged in irl activism rn is rather low, and the population of useless sacks of shit who just want to shit on people doing stuff irl is too large, so moderating such a forum is going to be rather hard. But if effort is made to create an environment of constructive discussion, by beating negative online debate addicts off the board (and probably also toning down the slurs a bit if we're going to want to attract more new people if we're honest), it might just become just good enough that it can attract competent irl people looking for broader discussion on tactics and theory, which can then lead to the accumulation of information in the form of lists and graphs and tutorials on organising.This is what I'm hoping for. There's too many people here who have zero interest in organizing, or discussing anything in good faith. They're only here to act as contrarian trolls looking to dunk on people.
>>38164>>38165We saw the effects of "less is more" recently
>/siberia/ filled with pepe/wojak one-liners and endless incel threads>recent H-1B thread which hit nearly 1000 posts filled with open racism before jannies got online and banned several posters and deleted over 100 posts and eventually the whole thread >>38171The problem is that the only place you could banish them that would heal them from their mostly self-imposed psychoses is offline. You aren't helping them by giving them a "leftist space." The only thing you achieve is that they shit up discussions here.
The problem with incels is their class background, in other words, typically NEETs and p-bourg kids living in their parents' basements or on an allowance. Unless they proletarianize they are useless to us and no amount of "giving them online spaces" whether this or that kind will help them.
>>38161Generally, most posts are of such clear-cut bannability that writing more than a few words about *why* they are banned should be enough, tbh. On our end it's easy to cross-reference as well since we can see the banned post in question even if it was deleted, and the user that was banned can see the same on their appeal. There is the rare case of someone being too edgy or whatever but those usually just get sorted in the appeals. There is something going on in the background of having a medium-point between outright post deletion and keeping it up with a ban message where posts can be hidden by a ban but can still be referenced by linking, so it would be easier for regular users to cross-reference, but that is something further down in the development pipeline.
But tl;dr actual use of the log by non-mods is so sporadic that improving it is kept more in the medium-term. It is on the agenda though, and would be a good way to have a paper trail without overly-complicating things in the short-term.
>>38162>>38163I think the best way to conceptualize the heights of /leftypol/ (and often, all chans in general) is less that they were a singular community with a coherent purpose, but rather a loose collection of several communities which intermixed on the same website by virtue of the format which created the loose idea of "board culture" - what topics were discussed, what memes and in-jokes were funny, what the social etiquette was, so on. This is best served by social circles with very strict control on the social norms (much like the far-right with its cringe culture) and generally less helpful for more leftwards or generally "open" groups with less social control and regulation, as the communities tend to "spread out" across time and lose much of their connective tissue - see /siberia/ exclusive posters compared to a /leftypol/ exclusive poster. We've been trying technological solutions to get everyone back on the same page (like overboards) but it's something which has to come through more cross-board activity.
>>38169Incels are banned, period. They were purged during bunkerchan and they will be purged again should they think of trying to come back. If they want to post here they can do us all the pleasure of not uttering a word about their cringe fucking beliefs and maybe learning how to be a functional human being with a sense of empathy.
>>38179>Incels are banned, periodYet radfems are fine to the post with the sole condition they don't bring up their TERF beliefs, which they clearly all hold to some degree but you're just naive enough to believe their misandry doesn't extend to trans women.
Regardless, the incel ban is unenforceable and incels regularly post on /siberia/ without any action being taken beacuse it's impossible to implement an "incel ban" in this sort of environment. Like this anon says
>>38182 your statements about "incels being purged" is just vibes alone and you have no actual policy to follow through with removing and keeping incels off the site.
>>38127Good on you for taking this to the broader userbase. It is encouraging you took some of the criticisms in the /meta/ thread to heart. I hope to see this going forward.
I feel many anons have already addressed my feelings and concerns, recently and in the past. However, I can not overstate that the ridiculous hostility towards tor users should stop. The lack of understanding of what tor is and how it works among the moderation is worrying, let alone active villainisation.
To be blunt: anyone with actual skin in the game would only ever post here through a proxy. Anything else is political suicide (if not actual death). Decrying that as "glowing" is putting the whole thing on its head, and exposes profound confusion. Only useless NEETs have the luxury of placidity.
>>38130>Some people just like to have mod status and hang out in the matrix and chat.Empathically: remove mod buttons from these people. It is not merely an efficacy problem, but a security concern.
Not to mention the clique mentality that stems from this (and is evidently present, in e.g. misato).
>>38131I am also an 8chan originalfag, and more importantly one of the regular artists who contributed to your 'industry of propaganda', pretty much from the start. Pointing out that there is a culture of pessimism and hostility is a platitude. It contributes nothing. Why is there? What happened?
To me it is obvious that the board taking a fucking nose dive, first in 2017, then again in 2020, from which it never recovered should be a paramount concern.
Furthermore, as to why artists don't bother anymore: producing comics for you cunts took me several days, if not over a week, of continuous and unpaid labour. Why would I put that effort into a community that is so, so terrible as /leftypol/? Whenever I voice this sentiment, I get recognition from other artists - and I can confirm that at least one person you mention explicitly also feels like this.
In a nutshell: /leftypol/, mods first then users, fucked it up.
The last three of your paragraphs are a bullseye. I am more cynical, however, and don't believe there is *any* use for /leftypol/ anymore. All that is left is for it to wither away. Maybe something new and beautiful will arise from its ashes.
>>38144This whole narrative of chans aging out is bullshit. Pure bourgeois consciousness, where the myth of innovation is fetishised as technological change. It is not what happens to fora; their growth may stagnate, but the population is still replaced. More pointedly: when 4chan was young it was populated by people well over 20, with some teens in the mix (hence why they were so loathed). People who regurgitate that claim have no idea what they are talking about.
Having read the thread, like many before it, I also want to note that whenever the administration asks for input, the thread is flooded with genuine concern by numerous posters. That is fertile ground.
Please refer to:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/hampton/1969/misc/power-anywhere-where-theres-people.htmOurs is the power to create the new world, from the ashes of the old. Etc.
>>38147First of all I don't really buy the rafiq = h*z theory. He's too young he would have had to have been 10-12 years old or likely even younger at the time.
In order to ban so-called "debate addict" posting, it would have to be rigorously defined enough so that it doesn't become an excuse for whatever mod to ban anything they vaguely don't like. What exactly is "debate addict"?
>>38195Thank fuck.
>>2096358Bro this is a sfw board.
>>38194I didn't buy it either until I found out they both grew up in the same state (Michigan) and both Infrahaz and Rafiq were based in Detroit, both have a middle eastern background ('Rafiq' is also an Arabic word/name), they both had their political "awakening" at roughly the same time, they're both infamous for their rage, and their writing styles are the same - especially both Rafiq's and H*z' obsession with "ecologism" - a very obscure term otherwise.
I also know a bit more from a former admin of RevLeft who also told me Rafiq = H*z.
>>38199maybe H*z just read alot of those posts? I mean people who read alot of a certain authors works (ex: lovecraft) sometimes adopt their idosyncrasies and writing styles?
So rafiq was really a 11 year old, in this theory?
Look, I respect and thank the staff for their efforts in maintaining the site, but I have to be honest. The moderation in the past few years is some of the worst I've seen on /leftypol/. I quit for about a year so maybe it's changed since then, but my main issue was the highly inconsistent and arbitrary behavior by the mods (or certain mods), essentially making rules-based order meaningless. Pic related explains it. You could adhere to the rules as a user and still get banned because a mod didn't like your opinion, or it was misinterpreted or it was deemed spam. And sometimes I've just been banned without explanation or context (especially by wvoobly). Mods also come off as childish when they brag about their privileges, celebrate coups and splits, and respond to you in the most condescending ways. I also disliked how in the past they gave preferential treatment to certain posters, like shaytan, junko and that monarchist poster and other obnoxious posters from years ago that I can't remember anymore. These kind of things made the mod team look more like a circlejerk than a mod team. So yeah, that is my assessment and I hope that these systematic problems have been or will be solved. Thanks reading my rant.
>>38201Rafiq joined revleft when H*z was around 14 years old
>At age 14, Adam (Aka H*z) discovered MarxismIt's a lot of coincidences which line up, and together with what I was told by a former RevLeft admin, I'm inclined to believe it's true.
>>38205Some of your board eceleb references are rather dated. What you experienced is the result of the pantheon model i described earlier here:
>>38137 which means that modocracy in practice is a sort of pseudo-consensus democracy. I agree that this "ma[kes] the mod team look more like a circlejerk than a mod team". I have also been thinking of this and looking for ways to address it.
>>38208bruh, I was banned 5 weeks (on my work IP, no less, essentially making me produce more surplus value for porky) for saying that anon who had a cancer ridden dog should euthanize it because it's inhumane to keep a fucking suffering animal around for your own amusement.
the ban reason was "sociopath pol" while my entire posting history was Marxist besides that. Like, if your pantheon has a god named PETA in it from the planet Vegan, banning Marxists who are actually posting in favour of humane treatment of animals, your mod team sucks ass.
Remember when it was just casually dropped that the jannies regularly use the accounts of inactive/former mods to undermine the public mod logs? The excuse given at the time was pretty poor too, because you continued to use pasquale's old account long after it was well-known by everyone that he was removed from the mod team. The actions being performed on his account by other mods were also very sus iirc.
I think we could do with some more details on that episode @cyberbarbarian
pics are from:
https://archive.is/cD5tY#34966>>38217The simple fact that a mod was handed the account of another mod at all is seriously disturbing.
The fact that they chose to impersonate the most insane abusive mod in the history of the site, one which both users and staff alike demanded off the site for years, is mindboggling. And the fact it was handwaved away as 'who cares' should have been grounds for expulsion.
To chalk that up to whoever was admin at the time is odd, I don't understand the logic in it. Would the current admin have stopped it? Have they kicked the people braindead enough to do it?
>>38222>Do mods know by the posts they post who's a mod and who's not?If they can that incentivizes corruption.
>Can mods get banned?If not they are above the rules.
>Can they unban themselves?If yes they are above the rules.
>>38221>The simple fact that a mod was handed the account of another mod at all is seriously disturbing.yeah it is. that's why i said it is massively discrediting. i also happen to know by contingency that what was being done by such unsavory means was also the most banal inconsequential shit you could ever imagine, and so i am inclined to temper what i say about it.
>The fact that they chose to impersonate the most insane abusive mod in the history of the site, one which both users and staff alike demanded off the site for years, is mindboggling. And the fact it was handwaved away as 'who cares' should have been grounds for expulsion.everything you say here is true. the problem is they don't see it that way. the fact that they are put upon volunteers stretched thin has given them a wonderful excuse to just pretend that there really is no pressing need to act like a real organization of fucking grown ups.
>To chalk that up to whoever was admin at the time is oddyou miss my meaning. the blame doesn't lie solely with the former admin (though i'd argue the highest ranking person with the actual buttons to press at the time does bear the lions share of responsibility). what i meant by that is that this really isn't cyberbarbarian's cross to bear. as far as i remember he didn't return to consistent active duty until the server crashed and staff had to play kingmaker. unless he wants to actually make something of his role, nut up and take responsibility like a leader really should, and get to the bottom of these things. but i am beyond expecting people to do good things these days.
>Would the current admin have stopped it?that is a very good question i don't have the answer to.
>Have they kicked the people braindead enough to do it?and that is a good question i do have the answer to: no.
>>38222Disclaimer: I am not involved in the site and it's possible
but unlikely things have changed:
>Do mods know by the posts they post who's a mod and who's not?Not unless they choose to stalk IPs and said mod isn't hiding their IP with proxies. Plus, a mod can just be logged out.
>Can mods get banned?Yes.
>Can they unban themselves?I believe so. This was allegedly (I don't have evidence on me) a big issue with Zul back in 2021 who was accused of unbanning themselves regularly whenever they were banned as an anon.
>>38225>Not unless they choose to stalk IPs and said mod isn't hiding their IP with proxies.say one mod tells another mod in chat: "look at my post" (link)
…from that point on his past and future history will be known by other mods, right?
>>38226generally the way i could always tell was looking at the post history of a given ip or ip range and looking for a mod tag. beyond that we also get pretty good at recognizing eachother anonymously because we communicated often.
any way the short answer is yes mods can unban themselves, but in practice they post so little that it isn't really that much of a factor.
>>38226History is an interesting concept. Bans are based on IP addresses, a horrible choice imageboard developers have defaulted to for decades now (thanks Vichan et al!). IP addresses are not an identity. In fact, viewing the IP address I'm posting on will bring up other people's posts - I use a VPN because I want my feds to at least have to put in a little bit of effort!
don't misinterpret that joke as opsec adviceIP History is flimsy and it leads to false positives and false negatives. Mobile posters, for example, would unwittingly switch IPs and used to frequently get hit for ban evasion when they never saw the first ban.
But getting back to your question:
1) there is no guarantee it will be their history, especially since some mods are/were tor users
2) but on the other hand, yes, it could be
>>38231the matrix chat is in generally much higher quality than the vast majority of what you get on the site. in large part because it is populated by people driven away from this place by mismanagment, and because it is moderated less strictly and less by the people with the worst ideas on staff.
really for the clique that i'm talking about it's less about that or parasocial shit, and more providing an agreeable space to attract liberals and "educate" them. those of whom i speak will never publically state their vision that way, but i know that is the vision because that is the way they put it to me when i pressed.
>>38162>which was always the greatest strength of an anonymous boardI think that is still the point of leftypol but bad moderation is an impediment to that because obvious troll positions are treated as equal to non-sectarian orthodoxy. You cant really have a productive conversation if there is no back stop or limit to unhinged shitposting when mods lack a basic understanding of entry level marxism. leftcoms, mls, mlms, and ancoms should all agree on a vast majority of positions and be well read enough to recognize and understand other tendencies are valid and logically sound. which position is correct depends on the material conditions they are applied to and is borne out through practice not arguing online. abolishing commodity production immediately makes sense in highly developed countries, increasing productive forces i underdeveloped countries, and decentralized organization in individualist countries, but whether they will actually work depends on practical application in the real world. the real movement etc
>>38174he didn't actually advocate that he just used them as examples because they are contentious and popular topics
>>38127moderation should be dictatorial but based on responsive feedback from users.
in practice: ban shit posts and posters, often for short periods of time, but invite people to apologize, explain themselves, or whine an argue about it in the moderation thread.
what you want to do is nudge users towards better posting. if i make a stupid low-effort soyjak reply, there's no point permabanning me - i'll evade and be back in 10 minutes. if you ban me for 20 minutes, on the other hand, it's inconvenient enough to cause friction but not inconvenient enough for me to bother evading, and i'm less likely to do it again. if i really, really object to the policy, we can argue about it in the mod feedback thread.
what you want is a dialogue between users and moderators, which is the only way to run a good imageboard. user-domination leads to the dominance of baiting (you)s and in-group retardation, while mod dominance leads to a staid and dead culture. i've written about this at length (yes fans, it's *that* rose flag) and gotten bored of this site for the most part, and only now does it dawn on me that i would've had a lot more people listening to me if i'd branded this as
DIALECTICAL MODERATION.
>>38131simply being a good imageboard is a goal enough, sub-projects would flow from that if the site was coherent. the problem is, as you correctly note, a total fear of advertising our outside engagement. (the in-group retardation i mention earlier - the idea imageboards are ruined by outsiders from reddit or tumblr, a moronic and anti-materialist understanding of how websites work. put redditors or tumblrites on /leftypol/ and in a year they'll be leftypolers, and vice-versa for if you were to parachute users from here onto twitter.)
>>38232>an agreeable space to attract liberals and "educate" themah, so attract people based on the more palatable bourgeois political affiliation instead of their class position.
that doesn't sound so communist to me
>>38205>You could adhere to the rules as a user and still get banned because a mod didn't like your opinion, or it was misinterpreted or it was deemed spam.Its a huge problem when mods ban for extremely basic 101 level communist positions.
>>38208maybe thats the problem
>>38209>while my entire posting history was Marxist besides that.Ive noticed jannies sometimes comment referencing post history but whenever you dispute a ban they demand the id number and pretend like they cant see your IP. if this is a case of differing levels of authority then maybe they should implement an IP mask for lower level mods and include recent posts below the report so people dont get banned for what should be obviously facetious sarcasm to someone actually in the conversation. effort post for 5 posts in a row and still getting trolled so you throw out a troll response and catch an egregious 3 day ban for losing your cool while the illiterate keeps posting. many such cases
>>38131Agreed. I wrote a few big posts about some of these issues in my last year as an active mod, and addressing them is a big part of Nukechan's mission statement. Not even plugging the place, it's was actually made as an attempt to revive those efforts. Many of the living threads match those examples: /art/ encourages agitprop drawfaggotry and it even mentions the anime detournament and started making a similar Shrek sub, there are multiple (albeit slow) reading threads. It's got that creative spirit.
leftypol.org is currently a dirtbag chatroom site after a botched, half-hearted gentrification effort. It is full of contradictions.
As for the site doing nothing, I would mark the /itg/ Haz raids as the point where mods decided to ban raids and doxx as it was too much work for the understaffed team to clear up counter-raids and too risky to host. The irony is, /pol/ users still scapegoat and raid us anyway! The last raid we did was the pol/jak/ one back in 2020.
>>38144>This can be seen most clearly on lainchan, which is rife with arcane references to gibsonian cyberpunk novels, 1990s anime, ‘hackers’, and disgraced free software guru/activist Richard Stallman.wow a cyberpunk imageboard named after a 90s anime still has references to foundational cyberpunk culture
Some of the other parts are decent points, but what the hell. /leftypol/ must be full of century-old men reminiscing about Leninist literature.
>>38234>simply being a good imageboard is a goal enough, sub-projects would flow from that if the site was coherent.I agree. Everybody wants to start running before they've even learned to crawl. And this isn't a dig at the users on this site, I've even seen this in IRL organizing. So lets forget all the stuff about encouraging OC, productive debate, or even recruitment for now. We need to make this site something that people even want to use first.
To reframe the topic of this thread:
How do we make leftypol into a good imageboard? >>38246would be really weird since my IP stays the same for months at a time. this just returns us to the issue that mods ban for basic marxism and arrogantly reject appeals without understanding the context. the ban in question was for advocating the right to self determination in colonized countries and the reason given was "nationalism"
>>38248if all mods can see post history and dont use it that is worse, but we know what is really going on is radlib jannies were recruited by their friends to ban opinions they dont like
>>38252>the ban in question was for advocating the right to self determination in colonized countries and the reason given was "nationalism"Noticed lately a complete aversion from some posters towards basic Lenin texts even. "You worship ancient texts, abloobloobloo!"
Wouldn't surprise me that there were mods here with the same mindset banning way more well read posters if this is true:
>>38232>really for the clique that i'm talking about it's less about that or parasocial shit, and more providing an agreeable space to attract liberals and "educate" themAnd if they actively recruit libs and slap a mod badge on them after a few months that's complete travesty when we have people who spent years hitting the books.
>>38234more theorywanking: rules should be a guideline instead of hard-and-fast tests. a bad post which isn't
that against the rules, but is tedious slop you've heard a thousand times, deserves to be cast into the fires of hell. a much more rule-breaking post which is
interesting on the other hand, should be allowed to live so long as it remains interesting.
all moderation is arbitrary - you counterbalance that by inviting discussion and revision, not by trying to craft a perfectly logical system. playing it by ear and apologizing when you get it wrong is better than codifying "no naziism, unless you're exempt under section 2d paragraph 15, being an interesting kind of nazi schizo we've not seen before")
this is how you handle cases like
>>38142>If there's a civil discussion on and 50 (effort) posts in some rando walks in, starts throwing insults and otherwise behaves like an obnoxious debate bro, ban them and delete their postsif the thread is shit from the start and i show up to pour more shit in, there's no need to ban for that, but if there's a good thread going on and i shit it up with a much lower tier of bad posting (piss, perhaps) then up-against-the-wall-motherfucker…
also: this site's use of flags in the early days was something unique among western imageboards, and it's lame it died. (answers as to why on a postcard, today my gut feeling is "moderation on 8chan attempting to enforce an ideological monoculture, combined with the userbase's inner desire for the same") voluntarily flagging your ideological tendency was an underrated from of user-identification. more anonymous than a name or a tripcode, more meaningful than a country, and immediately telling you where someone came from. "we should bring that back", but how you'd do it i have no idea. (probably by telling new users to do it when shilling the site.)
>>38141user ids are a bad idea and the backlash against them back on bunkerchan is what showed me the light of reflexive (sorry, dialectical) moderation in the first place.
having racism, sexism, homophobia, etc, explicitly against the rules is good. the magic of guideline based moderation is that if someone does a funny joke that breaks these rules, you don't have to ban them (or if you do, make it a slap on the wrist.) and while edgelords might not like it, this actually makes it funnier. (see: every "how did that get past the censors?" joke on pre-2010s television.)
and if someone's not funny, if someone's aggressively unfunny but thinks they're a laugh riot, you can always report them.
>>38237i don't think most of them care all that deeply, really, it's not 2017 anymore. the real hard part is getting the name out there, even if it's out of scorn - if all of left twitter are mocking /leftypol/, they're talking about /leftypol/, and some are gonna check it out. hell, some are going to mock in one tab while posting here on another…
(if i was playing god i'd also try to kill 4chan-style use of "fag" on this site as part of the long-term project of making it a culturally independent imageboard, and generally removing the central place of 4chan in the western imageboard world, but, well, keeping the lights on is a more practical goal at the moment. people on twitter love saying fag, just not as a suffix.)
>>38236i suffer in starmer's britain as we all do, but they couldn't keep me locked up forever.
>>38243i'll take the opportunity to rephrase: moderation is inherently dictatorial, here's how to run a dictatorship that gets results.
>>38250fundamentally it's a question of bringing in new blood. you need a constant inflow of new people to make up for old ones leaving, and to keep a constant influx of people who haven't figured out their particular posting metagame (are you enjoying the "confusing people with a socdem flag while theorizing about administering a community" thing i have going?)
the inflow of new people, combined with effective moderation to discourage undesirable posting, creates an audience for original content and high effort posting. OC and effort posting flow out into the wider internet, bringing in new people… like that king who was also a lion said: it's the circle of life.
the second thing is just to avoid being boring. not just avoiding dry, theoretical boring, which is easy, but also avoiding "i can predict every shitposting reply i'll get before i post" boring, which is harder, but which is also the precise kind of boring that made me give up and leave. the worst thing that you can be is boring and predictable.
(that's one reason to focus efforts outside 4chan: 4chan is a bigger imageboard, sure, but people are used to a very boring style of posting, where stock replies are locked in well in advance. posting should be new, you shouldn't be able to pull out a "cope > seethe > dilate > cope" tierlist, you should be crafting new words with each reply! two idiots arguing can be fun to watch so long as it's not a
re-run!)
>>38242We know of there being certain organizations of dedicated spammers, yeah. Trying to effectively differentiate them in the moment-to-moment though is mostly useless because they tend to have a uniform schizophrenia that makes the outcome of their posting mostly the same.
>>38250Generally what I think, yeah. There isn't a way to force OC, it's just a byproduct of community engagement, which itself is a byproduct of stable and competent management allowing for discussion. Building that framework doesn't lead to instant results, and it's effects are probably going to be measured in months and years rather than hours and days. Even during periods of wild growth like the burgerkrieg, those short term gains never really stayed beyond that happening, and focusing on them as user-growth as a sporadic event is futile. Instead, the goal should be propagating OC which leads back to leftypol - which loops back around to the prior point.
>>38146>Its unclear that a chan will ever be the best vehicle for theory-heavy posts, if its that important its probably time to start a wordpress blog or something.A chan imageboard is probably an inappropriate format for serious discussion. The core bump system and lack of authentication and reputation (constrast with heavily guarded forum sites) mean that short baitposts are mechanically rewarded and harder-to-process theoryposts will receive some of the least bumps.
A link aggregator (term for reddit-like sites) is even worse than a chan imageboard because age is an active penalty, new content is prioritized. So long conversations rarely happen at all.
I wonder if a whole new format would need to be invented for that purpose, and how a convenient one (one without, say, manual staff curation) could exist.
>wordpress blogyo, admin, leftypedia exists.
>>38258i was a mod (and the only new mod) for a year while you largely sat on the sidelines doing absolutley nothing. when i was kicked off the dashboard you stood by and made excuses for it, and then you proceeded to place yourself squarely on the side of the enablers and political fecklessness that has plagued this website since before i solved your problem for you and you decided you could stomach coming here to fulifll some (but certainly not all) of the responsibilities that come with the privleges you enjoyed throughout your entire absent period.
the thing is i am very sympathetic to this viewpoint that the userbase is immature and irresponsible themselves, but only in as much as it comes with and equal recognition of staff's failings, at that is something that is severely lacking in your collective public communiques.
>>38258People who got banned two dozen times during our years together aren't so eager to join a team that is obviously dysfunctional and don't take their responsibilities seriously while suddenly coming all together to oppose any kind of reform to the moderation.
You are literally complaining about communists not being eager to join a corrupt bunch of under-read libs, frankly.
Fuck your guilt tripping.
>>38261>I was willing to work through the issues you were having but you left so yeah, it didn't end up getting followed up on, the future belongs to those who show up.you were willing to shut up about a massive abuse of power and move on about it because one of your character defects is passivity in the face of obvious wrongdoing out of a proclivity for conflict avoidance. that, to me, does not "work".
>it didn't end up getting followed up oni believe that is mostly down to your own cowardice and lack of vision more than my absence personally.
>The way you were conducting yourself was not okay eitherthat is the excuse making i was referring to. i conducted myself in a way i would expect of anyone that actually gave a shit about site moderation. again, your only problem with me is that i wasn't nice about what i said and you don't like when people vociferously disagree.
>I'm not going to claim I'm super active but at least I have pushed through some of the recent changes and initiatives.i don't use this website anymore. you and some of your collegues did a good job of ruining it for me. still, looking at the existence of this thread, whatever you have pushed through is utterly inadequate, and you should change perspective and strategy before you fuck things up even more thoroughly.
>>38188>However, I can not overstate that the ridiculous hostility towards tor users should stop>Decrying that as "glowing" is putting the whole thing on its head, and exposes profound confusion.The hostility and the reason for the "glowing" epithet come from the monstrous amounts of low quality bait that came from the node, at least before the "Glowing" prefix was added.
It's purpose is to give a heads up to the users of "Hey, this guy is consciously posting from a zone which staff cannot easily moderate, take what they say with salt".
>anyone with actual skin in the game would only ever post here through a proxy.I'll believe it when I see it. Staff has had contacts with various party members from half the globe along the years and to my knowledge, no one ever contacted us or used the board via Tor.
>>38205>five concrete proposals>none enacted, apart from mods finally demanding one single insane mod be kicked>this is two years of progressEven if sincere, Caballo's
"ok sure but we need concrete suggestions" mantra is just an empty cop-out.
>>38269I remember the engagement on that thread I made asking about public gym alternatives had good engagement.
Also chihuahua is bretty consistent at making banger threads but they seem less active lately.
>>38255>but how you'd do it i have no idea.1) bullying. "No flag, no right to speak."
2) setting the default to nazi
>>38222No unless we tell each other or stumble upon a mod tag while browsing the history of an IP.
Yes
Yes
>>38268the idea of labeling tor posters was something i pushed through and today it is something i am massively conflicted about. my original thought process was that the tor node is and has always been a vector for ban evasion. because the tor node is shared, posts through it are deleted when they would normally result in a ban on a normal ip. in this way, tor node posts are privleged above others in that the threshold for restricting posting as punishment is higher for them than the vast majority.
really the way it went down was that i mentioned the half joking idea of forcing every tor node post to have a special flag (pic related was my suggestion, but maybe too inside baseball) so that if someone's posts were getting deleted, but they were obviously ban evading to anyone with any experience with site moderation, it would be clear why. it went through a few meetings with minimal comment, and a dev just implemented the basic idea in the form of the glowing tag.
>>38213this was an issue a while ago so my memorys hazy but AFAIK one of the mods forgot the password to their account and ended up using the old/kicked mod's account.
Its generally not practiced to share mod account passwords, so im not sure what exactly was going on there. We ended up making a whole new account for that mod and now that problem is solved.
As some have said here I wasn't really admin when that happened.
Former mods accounts are generally deactivated and de privleged because deleting them outright would mess up the logs too much in the software.
>>38265the elephant in the room is that caballo is the rogue jannie who facilitated /isg/ and moffin/zankaria to shit up the board because of his personal dislike of tankies
>>38265>did a good job of ruining it for meworking as intended
>>38263Look, you gotta take your licks. I've been banned plenty of times when i wasn't an admin or mod. it happens.
And its less malice than inertia that keeps reforms to modding from happening.
>>38277>the elephant in the room is that caballo is the rogue jannie who facilitated /isg/ and moffin/zankaria to shit up the board because of his personal dislike of tankiesi appreciate the spunk, but you are really overestimating how much caballo actually gets done lol. when i get carried away, and particularly when i am addressing them individuality, it is easy to take from what i am saying simple recriminations against the bad people who need to be rid of so we can have perfect socialism by 2050.
zank is a really good dev. when i was on staff they expressed to me a desire to stay out of the way of moderation shit. they are also far from the central problem.
i also want to make clear that the new mods i've been in contact with are not just "libs", though if what they said abive is true and they've really added however many it's supposed to be then i've only spoken to maybe two.
>>38282>while i totally disagree with his politics I also don't get why hes hated to much to the point of people making up schizo conspiracy theories about hes a puppetmaster or something.caballo is no puppetmaster, but i am also reticent to put my name and effort to any project headed to any signidicant by someone of his politics. and i mean that beyond just theoretical tendency mongering. his practical political approach to running this political website is a symptom of the much greater rots that i don't think you really appreciate the scale of.
>>38275>AFAIK one of the mods forgot the password to their account and ended up using the old/kicked mod's account.That is totally different from the initial explanation given in the /meta/ thread back in August. It also makes little sense because surely creating a new mod account would be easier than breaking into an old account and changing it's credentials or whatever happened (you don't even seem to know yourself as the fucking admin).
I get that this is probably just the bullshit excuse you have received from those involved, but at least admit that it was a mistake. Isn't that the purpose of this thread? How active was this mod who "forgot their password"? Do you really buy that?
>Former mods accounts are generally deactivated and de privlegedBut this didn't happen to pask's account? The insane guy who spent months spamming the site after you kicked him and his account just didn't get deactivated… that doesn't strike you as odd at all?
>>38285>(you don't even seem to know yourself as the fucking admin)I wasn't actively modding when this event happened so i'm going by second hand accounts as your surmised. We noticed this later and changed it so the issue is resolved for now.
>But this didn't happen to pask's account? The insane guy who spent months spamming the site after you kicked him and his account just didn't get deactivated… that doesn't strike you as odd at all?again, that was before my time. Nowadays I/we deactivate old accounts.
This was indeed a bad way to run things but again, this issue has been fixed already. Obviously, there's no way for me to stop people from sharing their passwords but i can ask them not to and make people reset their password/account if they do.
>>38286a socdem is already an admin on this site
>>38286no. as I explained here
>>>/meta/37961 a 100% maoist moderation would be perfect. and so would be a 100% social democrat team or a 100% euro-communist one. the bigger the spectrum the lower the quality
>>38287The explanation you're giving now is completely different to the one given at the time. It was inferred in August that multiple mods were using pask's account to maintain the illusion that he was still on the mod team, but now you're saying it was a single mod who forgot their password. Which one is true?
If it was several different mods using his account, pask must've shared his password in your group chat, otherwise how could multiple people have his login credentials? I know you weren't the admin at the time but this should really be ringing alarm bells for you.
>>38290>If it was several different mods using his account, pask must've shared his password in your group chat, otherwise how could multiple people have his login credentials?you can send direct messages to multiple people in the matrix anon, or start another group chat entirely. The account in question (pasq) is entirely de privileged now so theres nothing anyone can do with it.
Again, anon I understand that was a big problem at the time but as far as I know, as of now, no mods are sharing accounts at all. I'm less interesting in digging up stuff that happened months/years ago and fixing issues of today.
>>38287yeah i'm more setting out why it's a good thing because people get too caught up in "real" politics to realize that what's good for the inevitable victory of the immortal science of dialectical materialism on a macro scale (kill all the social fascists rawr!!) isn't always good for running a marginal imageboard for nerds.
>>38288when it comes to the userbase or permissible content, you need a certain critical mass to keep PPH in the fun zone. a socdem imageboard would have 1 post per decade, and it'd be from me. within the admin team itself, having an ideological monoculture is a bad idea because they'll start to imagine they're running an ideological project instead of a social or entertainment one, and the site will inevitably suffer when they start making you captcha the red book before posting.
i agree with you on the uselessness of debate, but my answer to it is twofold:
1. pointless debate can still be fun. imagine a socdem / nazi debate where both are throwing up insane OC images they're slapping together in real time. nobody is going to change their mind, but maybe that's not the point
2. discussion, as distinct from debate, where you establish from the outset that you're not trying to change your interlocutors mind and instead just poke around with where you disagree, is still interesting and more high-brow without becoming completely and utterly arcane (as most internal ideological debates become.)
e.g. it's more interesting for most readers to see a marxist and a keynesian distinguish their analysis than to see a neo keynesian distinguish themselves from a post keynesian and a new keynesian.
ultimately you've gotta remember quality isn't a single thing. a quality documentary and a quality wrestling match are very distinct forms of entertainment. if we have debates here, they're for fun, not to change the world. if i change a single mind today, it'll be a happy accident flowing from some self-indulgent theorizing about how to run a website.
>>38289fair, but a good number of people do care.
>>38291>I'm less interesting in digging up stuff that happened months/years ago and fixing issues of today.I would consider the fact that all those who were involved are still on the mod team to be an issue of today. Especially when they have the audacity to change their story when their old one is still there for all to see. Look at pages #3 & #4 of the /meta/ mod logs if you want to see why there could be a desire to brush this incident under the rug.
If you're wondering why people hold animosity towards the mods, it's because shit like this happens regularly and nobody ever admits that mistakes were made or faces any consequences. One person in particular has managed to make consistently bad calls yet still has considerable say on the team, even becoming an admin themselves. Until you implement a method of holding mods to account or start calling eachother out for pulling this sketchy shit nothing is going to change.
>>38275>>38285>this was an issue a while ago so my memorys hazy but AFAIK one of the mods forgot the password to their account and ended up using the old/kicked mod's account.This is not the truth. Like Glownon said, it's probably a bullshit excuse you were given and I know you weren't in charge at the time, but it clearly doesn't make sense.
A certain mod was sick of their reputation and requested if they could take take someone else's identity. It was shitty, disturbing, reckless and disreputable that the mod thought this was ok and that an admin or dev fulfilled their request. This is the same level of abuse as Zul adding non-staff users into the mod chat which rightfully got them expelled from the staff.
If the mod hasn't been expelled for that, then the issue hasn't been fixed. It's been brushed away, just like their long history of corruption.
Arrogant shit like this needs to be treated if the mods want to be able to salvage their reputation. And that reputation needs to be salvaged if you want to fix your understaffing issue.
>>38292Wasn't me, but here is the post:
>>24163Only the third image loads. I believe the first is a 3 day ban with the reason "take a time out", the second is a 1 day on all boards for reason "nafoid", the third are range bans and IP wipes for one word shitreasons, the fourth was one of the new mods at the time writing angry mini-essays in their ban reasons, and the last a post (from an egoist flag!) asking "How is this not a /pol/ violation".
>>38298Gather evidence using your admin powers, speak to mods who were present but not involved, and if the the events as described by
>>38297 are proven to have occurred then boot the mod in question and reprimand/demote those who enabled them. That's what I would do if I were in your situation.
>>38300>>38299Just a heads up its not that simple, since anything like that would be subject to a vote - keep in mind the admin isn't a dictator and can't just unilaterally kick people out of the mod positions - and you're really rocking the boat of a consensus based system with stuff like that.
no promises but I will investigate into this further.
>>38297This is not actually what I had suspected was happening, but thank you for finally giving me a straight answer and confirming my suspicions that something sus was going on. I had thought the mods were collectively using pask's account as a sort of janitorial condom for questionable bans and post removals, so their names didn't show on the log. But what you say still shows a complete disregard for transparency and undermines the whole purpose of the public board logs (albeit from only one mod rather than a wider conspiracy).
The janny who wanted the identity change should definitely be dismissed.
>>38131As someone thats been using leftypol on and off since well a couple months before 8chan got nuked. I was lucky enough to have found the place through I think it was that anarchy mouse guy. I don't think the modocracy is necessarily the issue, I think its partially the community being insular and unwilling to expand like you said,
but also one of the biggest hurdlers to overcome is that the kind of people we want to attract back to the board prolly think of image boards themselves (wither being a relic of the past or just having to carry the legacy of stank of 8/4 chan) are just not worth posting on. However I really do think leftypol is really worth saving and to make it thrive or continue to self-sustain. First off its one of the few places on the internet were you won't see fucking ads. Second the amount of resources and things I've learned from here have been immeasurable. I mostly stick to USApol being a mid-wit debate addict but I take the time to read some of the PDFS shared here, as well lurk the rarer theory threads that pop up. I especially eat up any threads about history. Lastly say what you want about the mods but the fact they managed to keep this community afloat, and the community itself. Through multiple splits, site migrations and raids is short of nothing but amazing. So I don't want to shit on the people who have kept this place alive so long through so much even in the face of site stagnation. I don't really have a lot of solutions though. I'm interested in being a janny though to help clear out some of the garbage. I've been shit posting here for free for years so if I can help make the site better.
>>38307libs have a nebulous use case: cast a wide net for bringing people in and dragging them left, giving socdems someone to punch right towards, exposing the board to mainstream counterarguments (rather than always arguing with either /pol/ or other leftists), and triple underscoring that this isn't an ideological project, it's an imageboard. (if somehow it seems libs are taking over,
then you can deploy a harsher moderation policy, but you should wait for signs of infestation before coating your crops in DDT.)
unserious anarchists on the other hand are the only people with objectively correct personal politics in a system where you have no power and are constantly propagandized towards some variety of quibble-over-if-it's-fascism.
empathetic and unselfish enough to want to help others, anti-authoritarian enough to not fantasize about giving out that help at gunpoint, and not outright autistic enough to memorize hundreds of pages of bullshit about the Cambridge capital controversy in the deluded hope that learning this may one day contribute to a society with marginally lower healthcare waiting times. childish and unfit for real world implementation as their incoherent ideas are, If you reject them you reject any prospect of success as a board, because they've got an unrivaled strength of character. this is particularly useful in a mod team - the only risk there is that they could "grow up" and try to make up for lost time by taking "real action" to further their new ideology by fucking up the board.
>>38309the purpose of leftypol is ultimately to have fun, not to make people read. furthermore, a board which is not fun will never make people read. i would bet my life savings and credibility that "people reading on /leftypol/" peaked on 8chan.
"succdem radlibbery" is a vague bogeyman of the sort that can only because we don't actually have any social democrats left. (they used to try to make you read Steve Keen!)
>>38312leftypol was instrumental because it was fun and full of vitality. had it been dull and orthodox it would've succeeded only in putting people to sleep. "marxist, non-sectarian" is a contradiction in terms - this board peaked when (small numbers of) people were shilling non-Marxist Steve Keen!
If a band which hasn't toured or done a new album since 2020 was instrumental to people's political awakening back in 2016-17 you'd ask "wait, how do you politicize instrumental music? that sounds artsy", but you'd also appreciate that if they want to keep waking people up politically "write more fucking songs, do some more shows, and perform your older bangers that've held up" is much more likely to succeed than deciding that the problem is probably the drummer being more of a post-structuralist than is desirable.
>>38311>this isn't an ideological project, it's an imageboard.i resisted this sentiment. the project may be petty, but for what you say here to be true i would have to say it is an imageboard that trades on the rhetoric and aesthetics of radical ideology while at the same time denying the actual responsibility entailed by disseminating radical material.
>>38313i don't know how things have been going down since you became head honcho, but i know there is truth to the acusation that pretty routine marxist positions are routinely banned because a moderator sensed controversy or just outright disagreed. rules 3, 7, and 14 were all constantly being used for this purpose in my time. this was one of the primary tensions that caused me to throw my hands up in disgust with your prior administration.
>>38313campism/anti-campism is pretty obviously driven by a section of the mod teams affiliation with isg and their overzealous/paranoid defense of minorities against patsocs that has led them to labelling nearly all marxist/leninists positions on national self determination as chauvinist bourgeois collaboration which leads to them enforcing classic pro imperialist lines in favor of vague human rights, which demonstrates a severe misunderstanding of the material reproduction of capitalism in the monopoly stage
i dont even know why im responding because i fully expect you to deflect say you dont know or that these problems are inherent to the pantheon model. its like talking to corporate HR
Also, while I'm overdoing metaphors, sometimes it helps to think of this as a team sport. Imagine we've all got our ideologies flagged accurately, so whenever you argue you're battling for the honor of your team. You hate the other team, right? Fucking socdem flags with their puns and their weird little rediscovery of class conflict purely within the context of a "conflict over distribution" theory of wage-price spirals. It's like sport, they're fucking annoying. It feels good to win against them and bad to see them walking around without a glass bottle bonking their skull. But you only
think you want them dead and gone, because if they actually disappear then you don't have a team to play against anymore, or you do - and it's 50% people who used to be on your team but have betrayed you, and now you want to break a bottle over their head… which isn't really as healthy as when that sentiment was directed towards an actual outgroup.
>>38315What responsibility do you imagine it entails? Speaking purely practically, your options really come down to whether you want the material disseminated (perhaps in a slightly sloppy fashion) or not. (and "online but unread" is fundamentally un-disseminated.)
>>38317this board should really be less autistic about foreign policy in general. this is another area where some libs would be good: bring in a few people who're openly and enthusiastically pro-NATO so people can spend more time tearing into the kind of status quo positions you're gonna find in the wild, and less time arguing over whether REAL marxists backed Iran or Iraq in the 1980s.
it's the number one area where "this is an entertainment website for nerds, it is not that important if some nerds believe something utterly retarded, the worst thing they can do is be tedious" needs to be stamped on your hand (uhh, kinda long, maybe on your arm) before entry. my Eglin AFB handler said he thought so, and frankly I agree.
Ok I got back after asking some folks about the controversy around the guy using pasq's account. He had a real life dox scare and for opsec reasons wanted to not use his old mod account. It wasn't malicious AFAIK or to cover up any unpopular modding decisions. Its going to be hard to have him make a public apology because that would obviously link his doxed account to his new one. In retrospect it was a bad decision albeit not one I was really around for.
>>38317>campism/anti-campism is pretty obviously driven by a section of the mod teams affiliation with isg and their overzealous/paranoid defense of minorities against patsocs that has led them to labelling nearly all marxist/leninists positions on national self determination as chauvinist bourgeois collaboration which leads to them enforcing classic pro imperialist lines in favor of vague human rights, which demonstrates a severe misunderstanding of the material reproduction of capitalism in the monopoly stageok but are you saying these are the mods positions or that they are literally banning people based on this? Not all marxists are leninists or buy into unequal exchange theory. But we're talking about modding decisions, AFAIK people aren't really being banned for being """campist"""? If thats the case its just the normal sectarian shitflinging. I mean imperialism theory is part of Lenin's contribution to Marxism, let alone world systems or neocolonial theory and its not even part of other types of Marxism let alone ancom/mutualist or whatever thought.
I guess my point is do you think the mods need to enforce a straight ML/ML with chinese characteristics and/or third worldist line? Or that the oppsite is happening?
>>38319>these are the mods positions or that they are literally banning people based on this? both, and they are arguing on anon and banning when they lose
>Not all marxists are leninists or buy into unequal exchange theoryI did not say or imply any of this. I said marxists/leninists meaning both, not marxists-leninists and i did not mention unequal exchange. do you actually think unequal exchange being true is necessary, or that it being false debunks imperialism? this is exactly what i mean about mods not having an understanding of the basics
>mods need to enforce a straight ML/ML with chinese characteristics and/or third worldist line?no, and none of what i said should imply that
>Or that the oppsite is happening?yes
you dont have to support russia or china or think that china is communist to not ban people for arguing against people saying that hamas is bourgeois or that palestine deserves a right to self determination. imperialism is directly implied from monopoly consolidation and the falling rate of profit, lenins contribution wasn't novel it was just bringing things together and giving them a name. self determination is already in marx. you dont have to be a third worldist or leninist or neocolonial theorist to understand that some countries are imperialist and other countries are dependent, or that building productive forces is a necessary component of building communism originating with marx in the manifesto, like i said, the absolute basics. instead you are jumping to extremely wide conclusions when ive deliberately maintained a non-sectarian position throughout this thread
>>38315*rule 2 not 3
>>38316i don't have screenshots. i could point at wvobly banning whichever namefag it was over an inflammatory but still fundamentally marxist post. it's still vaguely fresh on my mind. it was erroneously labelled as idpol. this was just as common as all the many times something was simply labelled as "spam" with no further elaboration. in my time it was often easier to get leeway from moderation as a straight out liberal than as a marxist who offends a moderator's particular sensibilities. these were the tensions that, again, occasioned my throwing my hands up in disgust.
the irony is wvobly was also the person who is the most singularly responsible for the recent multipolarity fetish. they were the primary moderator handling the ukraine-russia thread through most of the early half of the war. they were very adamantly pro-russia, and their moderation, often quite arbitrary, is what resulted in the "anti-campists" taking up a segregated position in /isg/, or however the schizo story is supposed to go with this one. it is ironic because the pro-russian sentiment those actions cultivated now looks at the mods as a whole and say, "they are pushing anti-campism on us!" i don't know what to take from this aside, but it seems vaguely funny to me.
>>38322
>both, and they are arguing on anon and banning when they losewell that shouldn't be happening and I'll run it by people.
<ban people for arguing against people saying that hamas is bourgeois or that palestine deserves a right to self determinationanon i'm trying to work with you here but I'm 99.9999% sure this has literally never happened. There is not a single member of the mod team, AFAIK who is a literal zionist or something.
>>38323<wvobly was also the person who is the most singularly responsible for the recent multipolarity fetish. they were the primary moderator handling the ukraine-russia thread through most of the early half of the war. they were very adamantly pro-russia, and their moderation, often quite arbitrary, is what resulted in the "anti-campists" taking up a segregated position in /isg/i'm sorry so are the mods supposed to be nafoid anti marxist vauşhite liberals or multipolarista ziggers?
>>38322like im half expecting of getting accused of being an ACP racist/homophobe for even bringing up patsocs even in a negative light and you are just proving that the mod team actually does think basic marxism is patsoc. i guess haz won by making you think his retarded takes are integral to communism. instead of people critically supporting reactionary regimes in developing countries on the basis that human rights come from the sovereign development of productive forces you think its an endorsement of social reaction. enjoy your board of moderate rebels i guess
>>38326right on cue
>>38327The haz+ ban predated me fyi.
Being anti imperialist isn't banned anon - the only problem would be if a mod is abusing their power to ban an opposing side in an argument which shouldn't happen.
I don't think this is happing nearly as much as you think it is if at all, but that said, I'm not sure what you want. The logs are accessible publically,
perhaps we should force mods to namefag/capcodefag 100% of the time otherwise theres no way to prove a negative when someone comes up with a paranoiac theory that everyone they are arguing with is a thread is a mod in disguise, when in reality its probably just another anon and they pressed the report button and a mod with no context of the thread comes in and has to make a decision about whether its bannable or not if they choose to read through 999 posts to get the full Silmarillion tier backstory of whos saying what and if its ironic or not. Keep in mind posts in the report queue are presented completely out of context by default and a mod has to click through to see the whole thread anyway.
>>38329>The haz+ ban predated me fyi.are you just skimming posts or is this the new thing where children are taught to read by guessing? just focus on the controversial media figure youi recognize and completely dismiss the material analysis. do you really think its acceptable for the gatekeepers of this website to be so illiterate towards communist theory that they truly believe that human rights are imposed by decree instead of emerging from social reproduction?
>perhaps we should force mods to namefag/capcodefag 100% of the time thats already a rule and its never followed
>>38330I agree that the rules are too subjective and are thus often misapplied. Well thats why I started the ordinance thread, to list out explicit applications of the rules, ultimately there must be a wider reform of the constitution and the rules in general, but thats a bigger ask. Again, you're kindof complaining about the same shit I already stated when I already said we/I are working on it.
>>38331>are you just skimming posts or is this the new thing where children are taught to read by guessing? just focus on the controversial media figure youi recognize and completely dismiss the material analysis. do you really think its acceptable for the gatekeepers of this website to be so illiterate towards communist theory that they truly believe that human rights are imposed by decree instead of emerging from social reproduction?i'm not going to have a theory debate with you here anon. This thread is about site governance not re-litigating 999 campist vs anti campist debates.
I also don't think forcing mods to always capcode is a rule.
>>38329> a paranoiac theory that everyone they are arguing with is a thread is a mod in disguise, when in reality its probably just another anonactually my paranoiac theory is that regular anons are friends and in chat with jannies that they cry to whenever they lose an argument and have a tendency to post in groups to try to manufacture consensus and all suddenly sign off at the same time after a few hours of trolling the board. and a mod has admitted to repeatedly making bait posts they know are wrong to drive engagement
>>38332the problem with site governance is a problem of theory. the hamas example is the least controversial broadest non-sectarian position that should be a consensus floor after i explicitly said peoples positions on things like russia or china aren't important. whether or not china/russia constitute a capitalist camp should be a completely different question then if its legitimate in any way to seriously argue that palestinian resistance is imperialist. things like that should not be up for debate and aren't exclusive to minority sects or tendencies. not even actual anti-campists take that position, but people who post here do and are protected. you are just confirming this thread isn't meant to actually solve anything.
as an exercise for the class: how do you take tedious foreign policy debates and make them interesting and novel?
fundamentally the problem with the site and the positions within it is that they are boring, predictable, and repetitive. in a world where random events keep happening, it's amazing that /leftypol/ often manages to be more boring than a mainstream news site. (jesus christ, how nyquil stays on the market when the ukraine thread exists i'll never know.)
how do we cultivate more original takes and more original spins on existing takes? i'm all ears on this one, i really am. best i've got is stripping out rote, historical language and substituting neologisms. i don't think that's enough.
>>38330mods
should take broad interpretations of vague rules, it's just that this should be balanced by users - like you - complaining if they do so poorly. mods should adapt their moderation in response to such feedback (and other discussion that may occur), with the end result being a pantheon of leaders responsive to the needs of the userbase. moderation decisions should be predictable, but not consistent. sometimes a pro-israel post is a permaban worthy offense, other times it's an interesting prompt to discussion. it all depends on the wider context in which the posts are made. a fixed rule cannot handle this distinction well, nor can a fixed ideological position, but a back-and-forth between mods and users can ensure you zap most of the bad posts while keeping most of the good ones.
>>38332rules work best as broad guidelines. if you attempt to moderate based on some rigid, rules-based system, you'll have a bunch of bad actors who don't technically break any rules and a swathe of novel and harmless content which does. there should always be some leeway for "this violates no rules, but you're fucking up a good thread with tedious shit so piss off" (which may only need a 30min ban! or a warning and post deletion!), but if you include such a rule you've already got an enabling act for any ban you'd like to make - so the only way to counterbalance it is with user discussion and review in the moderation thread.
perhaps it would be best to be fully open that moderation is based on the subjective judgement of individual people, reviewed and appealed by the subjective judgement of others. it's something we'd seemingly like to forget on every website because it means moderation cannot and will not be impartial. but you can make it somewhat fair and predictable.
>>38333this is a good idea. as a general point, things decided on the matrix are entirely opaque to some - and i imagine most - of the userbase. as established, i for one will never use it.
>>38334someone who thinks palestine is imperialist would potentially be a fascinating lunatic to talk to. someone who genuinely believed this, hawaiian battleships style, is the kind of insane site personality worth keeping around for laughs. banning them for something as trivial as being ideologically flawed would be a huge misstep.
>>38334Again, maybe its because I wasn't really in those campist/anti campist threads, but WHO is literally arguing that palestinian resistance is bourgeois or something at all, let alone on the mod team? Again, I'm not saying you're making it up but I haven't ever seen something like that show up in a report queue. Maybe we're just using two different parts of the site or something.
But I haven't actually witnessed anyone saying palestinian resistance is imperialist and thats a ridiculous stance. I haven't seen anyone saying that and if they did I might actually assume they were trolling/baiting for (you)s
>regular anons are friends and in chat with jannies that they cry to whenever they lose an argument and have a tendency to post in groups to try to manufacture consensus and all suddenly sign off at the same time after a few hours of trolling the boardI can't really answer for the other mods but I don't really participate in the non mod leftypol matrix chats.
>>38333>and i have been outlining to you why i don't trust the judgment of the people you are doing the writing with. the reason users don't get a vote is because this is an anonymous forum and people could game voting using VPNs, etc. However I sort of agree that a drafting process could begin with user input, probably a thread in the /meta/ board. As a gesture of good faith I have unlocked the ordinances thread, even though i honestly think it would be better discussed in separate /meta/ threads.
>>38335>mods should take broad interpretations of vague rules, it's just that this should be balanced by users - like you - complaining if they do so poorly. mods should adapt their moderation in response to such feedback (and other discussion that may occur)this is the basic framework i tried to use as a mod, and through that experience i came to find it was inadequate. the problem is not merely a refusal to engage the userbase.
>sometimes a pro-israel post is a permaban worthy offense, other times it's an interesting prompt to discussion.fine, i will grant you this. now, if you are perma-banning someone for a post, there should be a clear indication why and how that determination relates to a rule someone wrote down somewhere. i don't feel like that is too much to ask. if you want the people to give feedback to someone's interpretation and execution of something, they have to be able to understand it. that's to say nothing of the people doing the interpreting and executing themselves.
>>38336>the reason users don't get a vote is because this is an anonymous forumyeah i know. that's why i'm not banging on about a user democracy.
>As a gesture of good faith I have unlocked the ordinances thread, even though i honestly think it would be better discussed in separate /meta/ threads.a fair first step. now encourage mods to discuss it there rather than matrix congress (or not at all). do me one better by making plans to do a whole new constitution in that manner and i would be more than pleasantly surprised.
>>38336>let alone on the mod teamits people taking the anti-campist position to the absurd when the logical conclusions of it are pointed out, and then mods defending them or banning people who oppose them. they might be trolling which wouldn't be as big of a deal if they didn't have authority publicly putting a stamp of approval on it. like its pretty clear that people such as FSLN anon who used to be pretty reasonable have been trolled into taking hardline maximalist positions he probably doesn't believe because he keeps getting banned. why are people allowed to troll him with shit takes but he is banned for weeks at a time for responding in kind? imo its because mods are lacking in theoretical rigor and dont see how positions like "stalin did nothing wrong" are a response to "evil dictator" propaganda, because they actually do believe the ussr was an evil empire and arent interested in a nuanced review of its merits and flaws. so when people get tired of explaining that nuance for the 100th time they skip to short quips and mods ban them for it but the evil empire propaganda stays. this exact example might not have happened here but similar things happen over syria, russia, china etc. like putting forward the position that russia is a full on colony against people saying that it is full on imperialist in an effort to force people to at least concede that neither are entirely true. its not really about context from a given thread that they would have to read but not recognizing when certain positions are logically consistent and emerge from basic marxist principles.
>I can't really answerwell in my imaginary schizo fantasy they are using an offsite discord so that makes sense. you can keep pretending my complaints are incoherent but there are anons itt who know exactly what im talking about
>>38336in my experience what has worked well in the past is having users argue out the merits of site changes. a vote can be gamed, but you can't game the discussion to the same degree. ultimately mods still make the decision, but they'll have a much better sense of whether it's going to be popular, and a much better sense of whether the people for/against it are in the right. if they want to push through a bad decision regardless,
shikata ga nai. websites are inherently dictatorial like that.
>>38337removing boards is probably now a non-starter, but i'm curious if anything could be done to try and invigorate the ones we've got. (past ideas include: opportunistically offering a home to groups on other sites - such as inviting a 4chan general banned on that site to /hobby/, or inviting people from sites at immanent risk of death, spinning off some boards to another, entirely separate site in a GETchan style relationship / iichan style structure, uhh, maybe i had some others i forget.)
>>38338there's a problem with getting users to provide feedback, but i think you could nudge people that way - inform people in the ban message that they can discuss their there, for example. for bad faith mistakes the aim shouldn't be to punish, but to discourage - having someone go say sorry in the mod thread and then get unbanned has the joint advantages of (a) showing them their feedback matters, and (b) getting them to go "sorry, won't do [the bad thing] again". (or they freak out and you know you're dealing with a loony.)
i think a permaban (and arguably any longish ban) is owed an explanation, but not necessarily a rule. if you like, i'd turn it on its head: rules should be a good guide to how
not to get permabanned where that may be unintuitive (e.g. everyone on the internet loves idpol discourse, but we're harsh on it, so users should be forewarned), but if you do something which common sense tells you will get you permabanned, "there's no rule!" isn't a defence. (e.g. i believe there's no rule against cracking a moderator's password and deleting everything, but that's not something you could do by accident in good faith.)
>>38324>you're a zionist if you correctly identify the class position of Hamas as bourgeois, which they are just as Lenin identified the first Russian revolution as a bourgeois revolution. They're not fighting a socialist revolution, so it is a bourgeois revolution.Are you implying you ban people for making those arguments because if so holy fuck you are a liberal, banning people for idpol reasons. I'm assuming this is the case because of the label of "zionist" for just actually reading Marx. Sorry if I'm wrong and you don't ban, but that's the vibe I'm getting from that post. Take a step back and read before you start banning people because they offended your gaps in knowledge.
Note: This is not saying that they "deserve" it. This is just a reminder of basic marxist theory.
>>38344>i think a permaban (and arguably any longish ban) is owed an explanation, but not necessarily a rule.i think most any ban should have both.
>rules should be a good guide to how not to get permabannedi don't know why you present this idea as counterintuitive or flipping anything on its head at all. the rule is a good guide to how not to get permabanned precisely because it informs an explanation of why someone might be permabanned.
>but if you do something which common sense tells you will get you permabanned, "there's no rule!" isn't a defence.right, but now you are leaving quite too much to "common sense" for my liking. having some agreed upon middle ground in the form of rules which outline expected and discouraged behaviors is good for all those woeful times that "common sense" ends up less than universally obvious.
>e.g. i believe there's no rule against cracking a moderator's password and deleting everything, but that's not something you could do by accident in good faithi mean, banning someone from posting wouldn't do anything to resolve that situation anyways. in practice, banning rarely prevents someone from carrying out any kind of obvious bad faith activity.
>>38345I think i mixed up my words there. I was saying that they banned an anon for getting heated while arguing that hamas was not imperialist. In the same thread the person saying that hamas was imperialist said that the PFLP in a united front against colonialism was fascist because it is class collaboration, so PFLP are revisionist and not real communists, and I was backing up the guy saying that it is not true and that there is a distinction between united fronts or temporary alliances under imperialist conditions and Moossolini advocating for the state as a solution to mediate class conflict. Since this was in the campist thread and not the palestine thread people advocating united fronts were banned for chauvinism when they advocated for palestinian self determination in a what i consider a reasonable but hostile manner to such provocation while the provocateurs were spared.
The position that hamas is imperialist is coherent if you reject marx and lenin, but if you accept marx to be correct then most of lenin follows and imperialism emerges out of monopoly consolidation and the falling rate of profit, which would exclude palestine because it is not developed enough to have imperialist monopolies. If you were an anarchist who believes all states are bad and imperialism is when a state does aggression that would be fine, but these people were claiming to uphold the true interpretation of marx, and of lenin, while misrepresenting both. The problem isn't really so much that I disagree but that this style of moderation effectively promotes disinformation.
You dont necessarily have to be a zionist
>>38328, but to imply that only zionists would call hamas imperialist does come across as an attempt to dismiss the allegations instead of address them. It does appear like someone trying to frame the conversation as unreasonable, like the only people who support hamas just like supporting reactionaries or fundamentalist islam or putin or assad or saddam or whatever because they hate white people or gays or women or whatever narrative that just conveniently happens to align with the west, NATO, US state department. No, the mods aren't Zionists they just happen to ban anti-zionist/anti-imperialist/pro-communist advocacy when it has an actual military force behind it because they are so incredibly incompetent.
>>38346i'm not saying don't have rules, i'm saying that "common sense" comes to the rescue when rules fail a lot more often than rules come to the rescue where common sense fails, especially when you can argue back against a bad "common sense" decision. if someone is posting in a way detrimental to the thread or board, you want to have some way of bonking that poster on the head. maybe a warning, maybe a short (<30min) ban, maybe a longer one with an expectation they cry about it in the mod thread. what you don't want is to go "well there's no rule, and any rule to cover this precise scenario would be absurdly specific, so just leave them to it."
if the mods misjudge and bonk a good poster on the head, you complain, hopefully they don't do it again. it's a dynamic system with a lot of moving parts.
if you want to get really esoteric, it's about a world-view more than the specific details: internally i conceptualize it as a distinction between "discretionary vs rules based" world views, because this philosophy originates in part from debates on how central banks run monetary policy. very glibly: some central banks believe that because the economy is unstable, you should set interest rates according to predictable rules so as to avoid adding to uncertainty and instability, while others believe that because the economy is unstable, you need discretion to set interest rates according to the circumstances at hand.
(so if inflation goes up due to an oil shock, for example, a rules based regime may raise interest rates to fight inflation based on a rule that goes "raise rates if inflation is above target" - worsening the oil-crisis induced downturn, while a discretionary regime can go "prices will probably stabilize once this oil shock passes, we shouldn't worsen the downturn by hiking rates")
ultimately whether you're dealing with a moderator or a central bank policy committee, you're dealing with a subjective human decision maker. i think one should be open and above board about this, and invite review and revision of decisions, rather than pretending some fixed and eternal rule can cover all circumstances. and interest rates are easy compared to all the nuances of what makes a good imageboard discussion! (sometimes "USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST" elevates a good joke into a sublime one - how do you codify a rule that you can ban people for 10 minutes if it's funny?!)
a lot of people want to make the case for less opaque moderation, but they instinctively imagine you do this by codifying a better set of rules, by further pretending moderators are machines following some immutable logic. i go the other way: stop pretending they're not people, stop pretending they won't make mistakes, let them take risks and talk it over when they fuck up. if the userbase and moderation team are in close communication, you'll have transparency without needing to hide behind the pretense of objectively administered rules.
>>38347have you ever considered you might be getting banned less for what you say, more for how you say it?
if you sound like a reactionary while making a marxist point, there's a degree of culpability on your part for not reading over it first. (or, let's be real there's a 45% chance, for actively trying to piss people off)
(this being another of those things that needs a back-and-forth between mod and user. "why was i banned for this innocent post?" "because it reads like a reactionary post" "well it isn't, i'm good", "ok, unbanned" [unspoken: "hmm, i better write less reactionary-sounding posts in future"] )
and i'm not saying this to be judgemental: i had a whole phase of starting arguments by posting marxist talking points under this flag and then playing a game where people would get mad because they'd assume from the flag they were talking to a socdem who wanted them to go out and vote. i could predict the entire conversation 3 posts ahead, and i could spell out that i was doing this, and it'd still happen. people simply do not pay attention.
>>38351this is a problem for communism, not for having a funny website to post on. ultimately this is an entertainment marketplace and we're trying to develop a superior product to give it away for free. (and get high on our own supply)
>>38352>i'm not saying don't have rulesand just as much as you are not saying "don't have rules", i am not saying "a response for every possible scenario must be codified".
>a lot of people want to make the case for less opaque moderation, but they instinctively imagine you do this by codifying a better set of rules, by further pretending moderators are machines following some immutable logic. i go the other way: stop pretending they're not people, stop pretending they won't make mistakes, let them take risks and talk it over when they fuck up.it's the fact that people are not machines and fuck up that makes me lean towards minimizing how many decisions and risks any given individual is expected or formally empowered to make, particularly when they aren't really accountable to anyone except a clean majority of staff. what you want sounds a lot like what the mod team has self consciously thought it's been doing for a long time. i will be skeptical until they actually try it.
>>38353if a response for every scenario is not codified, and moderators are empowered only to make a small number of decisions and take a small number of risks, you wind up leaving a lot of things to the basic dynamics encouraged by the board software itself. (e.g. baiting for (you)s as an effective meta, cope > seethe > dilate chains of predictable posting, etc, etc.) it takes active and flawed human effort to overcome that.
someone fucking up isn't the end of the world: better to have someone fuck up and apologize than to have a million "natural" undesirable things be left alone because they're nobody's responsibility.
(i trust it doesn't seem like i'm presuming and arguing against any specific view on your part, i'm really just hammering home a certain philosophy because it's generally counter to the unspoken assumptions i expect to be held by most users.)
also: compared to 4chan and to a fair few other imageboards, i'd say the mod team here
have put these principles into play. if they've done so imperfectly, that seems like a case for further engagement and refinement rather than abandoning the experiment to return to something we know has failed to some degree everywhere else. materially speaking, the administration of
any website is accountable to nobody. in most cases an undesirable change is imposed top down, no amount of whining will fix it, and if you want to whine you'll just cop a ban. (remember when people pretended to remember that 4chan captchas were supposed to be temporary?) if the administration here is voluntarily accountable, or at least open for discussion, that alone is a novelty.
>>38354>if a response for every scenario is not codified, and moderators are empowered only to make a small number of decisions and take a small number of risks, you wind up leaving a lot of things to the basic dynamics encouraged by the board software itself.i really don't think codification is that complex a problem. it wouldn't take very much imagination to create a robust and concise ruleset that would cover the vast majority of cases. if a case is found to fall outside of what codified precedent can be referenced it, then you just codify it and reference it in the future. the ordinance thread is a step in the right direction. if the moderators do actually engage in the process collaboratively with the userbase in that fashion, i expect something like what i'm talking about to emerge organically. those are big ifs.
>it takes active and flawed human effort to overcome that. >someone fucking up isn't the end of the world: better to have someone fuck up and apologize than to have a million "natural" undesirable things be left alone because they're nobody's responsibility.it's a wonderful story, but people fuck up and then the first instinct is to downplay or lie about it when confronted before apologizing about anything.
>>38341>like its pretty clear that people such as FSLN anon who used to be pretty reasonable have been trolled into taking hardline maximalist positions he probably doesn't believe because he keeps getting banned. why are people allowed to troll him with shit takes but he is banned for weeks at a time for responding in kind? imo its because mods are lacking in theoretical rigor and dont see how positions like "stalin did nothing wrong" are a response to "evil dictator" propaganda, because they actually do believe the ussr was an evil empire and arent interested in a nuanced review of its merits and flaws. so when people get tired of explaining that nuance for the 100th time they skip to short quips and mods ban them for it but the evil empire propaganda stays. this exact example might not have happened here but similar things happen over syria, russia, china etc. I've encountered this and it's imo part of the "debate addict" problem.
I remember the Israel-Palestine threads at one point, where you'd have one or two people arguing EVERY jew in Israel should be killed and kicked out and if you didn't agree you were probably a glowfag zionist jacking it to images of dead Palestinian kids. (Even if you posted in support of a one state solution)
The same shit happened in the "anti-campist" threads. You either believe Russia is a AES civilization which has never done anything wrong and Ukrainians are a fake made up hitlerite ethnicity, or you believe Russia is a fascistic totalitarian asiatic dictatorship engaging in a genocidal imperialist war against the peaceloving Ukrainian nation. A more nuanced take? You obviously want proles to die/support NATO/are a Duginist etc etc etc
You don't think Rojava is literally fascist? You're obviously a Kurdish chauvinist who wants all Arabs to die for Greater Israel. Assad may not have been entirely bad? You would have supported ᴉuᴉlossnW in the 1930s.
There's a consistent few (autistic - no offense) debate addicts who behave like this in almost every major thread. Who always push the most extreme Manichaean black and white thinking, and accuse anyone who thinks differently of taking the other side of the most extreme contrarian stance.
The end result is a lot of people with more nuanced (and frankly - better) takes end up exhausted and stop participating.
You want to discuss the issue at hand or share experiences, but instead you're constantly defending yourself from extreme shit-you-never-said (you want to kill everyone in Gaza/Every Jew, you want a Kurdish ethnostate/you support Syrian fascism, you want to genocide Russia/Ukraine, you think Russia is AES/Fascist, you believe China is post-scarcity communism/1984, you're a demcel who wants everyone to vote Kamala and thinks the Democratic Party is socialist, you think CEOs are proles, you want oligarchs to be allowed to enslave third world proles because you don't support closed borders, etc etc etc)
>>38357>if you prove me wrong youre le debate addictlol every post youve made itt makes you look like such a little bitch
>>38341>dont see how positions like "stalin did nothing wrong" are a response to "evil dictator" propagandaretarded view. arguments should stand on their own merit
>>38358>lol every post youve made itt makes you look like such a little bitchWhy post at all if you have nothing to add? Still haven't explained what's so bad about this "bourgeois civility" (which isn't bourgeois).
Which is the other side of the coin; This goddamn cowardice. These fucking "edgy" drive-bys by people, who, when pressed, immediately fuck off, refusing to elaborate.
>Lol you don't like slurs, strawmen and ad hominems lol you fucking baby you little bitchYes what about it? Spit it out.
>>38323I always find it funny that I've gone from Russia's biggest hater because of my critique of Assad's Syria to Putin's strongest cocksock because I criticize the absolute state of Ukraine and it's ethnic cleansing campaigns of minorities in the far east backed by literal Azovites. I handled the Russia-Ukraine thread alone not because I asked to do so alone but because I could not get anyone else to come and help me a lot of the time - even with pretty basic stuff like gore spam. The war was early on in it's actions and people were either too unsure of it's events or too busy with their irl lives to help much. This was also the time that a lot of our mods had to leave active duty over college or work or what have you - not that I blame them, real life comes before moderation every time. There was never a point at which there was a mass-sentiment for a "true marxist" position which I banned - anti-war posters were always in the right and people who saw "multipolarity" as a cause to be championed instead of a neigh-inevitable political reality were always misguided at best, completely leaving the realm of Marxist geopolitics the most.
The fundamental misunderstanding which you carried into the mod team is that we were the people with the time or ability to make the moderation team into some kind of micro-party vanguard. We all work and a lot of us have our own irl party memberships with all of those associated duties, we cannot go through the rigamarole of a party congress to decide to ban some random bullshit - even if we had the means, the effort on our end to do this vs. the effort of the general posting candor of the board is just so disproportionate it would be madness. For there to be that kind of expectation reasonably made, every single board would have to be /edu/. That's more the realm of something like e-regime rather than /leftypol/, ultimately this is (both on our intention of it and how everyone else treats it) a casual political space.
>>38341FSLN anon is only permabanned as much as he does not want to serve out his ban sentence and continually ban-evade. We've offered detente to people like sage before where they just agree to take the L and sit out a week-long ban and we just stop bothering them, they just have to stop actively evading every ban they get to get that treatment.
>>38357There is a lot of off-the-cuff codification of people's politics where you get *a* fragment of what they believe and automatically start putting in the work of reconstructing their whole ideology in your head like some kind of political phrenologist determining their racial hygiene by their jawbone. This is largely because there is a contingent of people who treat the board + the conversations that are being had as battles to be won rather than conversations to be have because they have somehow gotten it into their head that /leftypol/ is the battleground for the next wave of leftist theory rather than a relatively small website where we banter about political goings-on and our favored old books. Some guys just need to fucking chill, we're not on the frontlines fighting 8/pol/ anymore. We're not the Young Hegelians, but even if we were supposed to be I think those fuckers had a better time talking ideology and theory than a lot of these anons do. And we're not a party congress.
>>38341case in point lol
>>38361>FSLN anon is only permabanned as much as he does not want to serve out his ban sentence and continually ban-evadethe reason i ban evade is because the ban that caused me to ban evade in the first place was completely bullshit, zankaria banned me for "anti-semitism" in the palestine thread, and the only reason it keeps getting applied again and again and again is because mods don't like what i post even though the shit you delete does not break any rules
>We've offered detente to people like sage before where they just agree to take the L and sit out a week-long ban and we just stop bothering them, they just have to stop actively evading every ban they get to get that treatment.i've asked the other mods and you specifically on /meta/ and every single time you just delete the post and ban whatever IP i posted the question from
>>38362>The people who immediately responded to nuanced takes in those threads with "You worship Putin/are a Duginist/Think Russia is AES" should have been banned imo.the issue is that the mods were the ones posting those threads and using it to ban people who disagreed with what they were posting
you can repeat that it was a "moderation issue of not banning shit-stirrers fast enough" until you're blue in the face but the fact is that the mods created the problem by being the shit-stirrers themselves
>>38371i have nothing to offer, you just keep banning me for ban evading a completely bullshit month-long ban from however long ago that was
nothing to gain either since you've shown that you're willing to permanently ban people on a whim for posting things you don't like, i have no incentive to trust you
>>38368>FFS in my last ban I attacked an anticampist poster in /ukr/ who tried to claim Assad invaded Ukraine with Russia and thus Syria was imperialist and he got off scott free despite blatantly lying. Mods are tipping the scales when they get called out on their bullshit.A lack of a ban is not agreeing with it's content, both in the sense that we don't agree with all content but will permit it as long as it follows at least basic leftist thought processes, but also in that we are not omniscient. The two things we see most is the things on threads we personally browse and things that people go out of their way to report. The only way the scales are tipped are if something that is bannable is not being reported, and that ultimately comes down to user choice to not use the report function to call attention to it.
>>38372Let me make it simple for you. There is a funny button I press which deletes your post. I have to go out of my way to press it, it's a little bit of a pain. If I have no reason to delete your post, I don't want to go out of my way to do the effort of deleting it. Do you really want to give me a reason to keep pressing the funny delete-your-post button?
>>38373>There is a funny button I press which deletes your post.and i've got a much bigger button on my desk, it's called ban evading and it requires you to take down posting through the Tor node for everyone and ip range ban brazilian ISPs plus whatever VPNs i use
again, i have no incentive to trust you'll stop banning me if i do X or Y since you're already banning me for no reason
your faggot ass snark reply is not helping either, "olive branch" my ass lol i've been asking about it constantly and you never answer
>>38375Well the problem with that is, the VPN doesn't really help you all that much when we just press the funny delete-your-post button, in fact a lot of the time when we know someone is VPN ban evading we stop banning IPs and instead just delete the messages from all the fresh IPs which are very obvious. Our goal is not just to stop you from posting - for now that's not easily possible with the range of tools to do otherwise. We're just denying you the visibility of your posts being seen with the deletion campaign. You can keep posting all you like, your posts just will be deleted before they can make much of an impact. That is the funny reality that makes fighting ban evaders worthwhile, people making all the effort to pay real life human money to try and defeat us when we just press one funny little button. And we're getting new, funnier, more effective buttons all the time.
Do you want to be subject to the funny buttons?
>>38370We remove posts when we see them, it's not like there's a priority queue
>>38376Ok bro, when I do those ideology tests I get 'orthodox marxist' but that's basically meaningless since everyone would claim they're that, or 'eco-socialist' which I feel is vague.
most tor posts itt are fucking embarrassing lmao
>>38360lol youre doing the same thing youre pissing your pants about, assuming random shit about me from a single post
all thread youve been whining that people disagree with you in a way you dont like. fucking pussy. if someones wrong theyre wrong whether theyre polite or not
>>38380marxism is a scientific analysis and critique and communism is a practical movement, neither is an ideology
>eco-socialistso just another radlib. explains your mod logs a lot, just another larper without a single leg to stand on banning anything they dislike based on vibes
>>38382i was supposed to sit out a month-long ban for a week? is this 3 weeks discount your way to admit it was a complete bullshit ban?
alright, but do you understand the problem you're creating here? if to get out of the constant ban blender i need to sit out a fake ban why would i or anyone else do that? zankaria, you or someone else can just ban me again after that week like nothing changed, there is 0 trust here
you can hand-wave it away again and post more "lol i can delete" shit but i'd like to hear you actually answer for once
>>38383We give the possibility of ban appeals, and I am of the opinion that leniency is the better part of administrating, so long as people follow the proscribed pathways. It's what seperates an ordered community from just being some lawless bullshit like /pol/.
More simply put, we usually accept the majority of appeals that constructively say that they were in the wrong or explain context we might've missed or whatever else someone thinks can exonerate themselves or admit wrongdoing. Even very egregious cases can get a big length reduction if they ask for it - like what I offer now! For the FSLN anon, either they didn't appeal and thus missed that process, or they did appeal and didn't make a good case for theirself.
>>38386>is this 3 weeks discount your way to admit it was a complete bullshit ban?Think of it as a Little Treat to show that we aren't unreasonable or sticklers for the rules or procedure. Like I said, we're not a party or a vanguard or whatever the fuck, we're just interested in keeping peace and procedure for the community to abide by, but we're willing to bend things if it is in the interest of continued peace and stability. No matter what we think of your posts specifically, mass-disappearing posts is not always practical or good, and we'd rather have an accord with you.
>>38387>We give the possibility of ban appeals, and I am of the opinion that leniency is the better part of administrating>we usually accept the majority of appeals that constructively say that they were in the wrong or explain context we might've missed or whatever else someone thinks can exonerate themselves or admit wrongdoinglying olympics gold medalist right here
i was given literally no explanation for it other than the "anti-semitism" reason zankaria slapped on the ban, my /meta/ post was deleted despite a mod telling me to "take it to /meta/" and no matter how many times i asked it again no one answered
there is no fucking appeal process or any form of transparency, you just keep banning me for "ban evasion" long after all of it because you don't like what i post
>>38349>but if you accept marx to be correct then most of lenin follows and imperialism emerges out of monopoly consolidation and the falling rate of profit, which would exclude palestine because it is not developed enough to have imperialist monopoliesLMAOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
le material basis of imperialism is such a funny thing to jack your dong over considering lenin himself explicitly recognized fucking tsarist russia, a nation far more backward than virtually every current one on earth, as imperialist
all goddamn capitalist states are imperialist, imperialism is the competition between bourgeois states on the basis of the world market, unless palestine abolished class division and nobody told me?
< October, 1950 >>38392>Well I am not around 24/7that's the silver lining i guess
>I couldn't have seen your appealyou're lying again, you replied to one of my posts asking about it on /meta/ talking about how my posts were "self-aggrandizing" or whatever non-answer crap you wrote basically admitting there is no reason for it other than disliking the posts
you're not "willing to overlook" anything, you're a petty asshole using the excuse of "ban evasion" to ban people you deny any appeals or explanations to, the "I'M GONNA DELETE!!" threat is empty because that's what you were going to do anyway, there's no point
>>38394I personally do not agree with the way the rules are currently set up, I feel ban lengths are way too long and arbitrary, I will try to work on this to create a unified system where the same offense will receive the same ban, but this is difficult and tiresome to work out and negotiate, so I will do my best. We may post soon about this.
>>38385ok whatever you say man.
>>38397by your own metric i've already "served" the ban, this was so long ago that i've already went a week without posting while i was traveling LOL
you're not offering anything, unless you're talking about the "accept this made up bullshit ban and i promise i won't make up new ones pinky swear" contradiction i don't want to hear it
>>38391>a nation far more backward than virtually every current one on earth, as imperialistbecause of the consolidation of world trade in russia at that time constituted monopoly finance capital, not because it reached an absolute threshold of development, but because the concentration of capital qualitatively changes capitalist production from progressive to parasitic as monopolists cease competing to build productive forces as advances in technology are exhausted and the market becomes saturated, to instead live off rent and chase profits by reducing wages and imposing austerity, or by redividing the world in imperialist wars to expand into new territory.
>all goddamn capitalist states are imperialist, imperialism is the competition between bourgeois states on the basis of the world marketno, it is an advanced stage of capitalist development, that is relative to world capitalist development. capitalist states that are kept underdeveloped by occupying powers or military threats and debt are not at the stage of advanced capitalism where banking capital and industrial capital merge to form finance capital with integrated global supply chains. periphery states today have even less relative development then they did in 1950, as capital has become exponentially more concentrated with the monopoly imperialists predominantly represented by the united states and its allies
>>38331Regarding e-celeb bullshit, someone who has the time and energy to bother about what some Johnny or Bobby said online is hardly going to be a good contributor to the place, lol.
>>38398If you want the moderation to be more lax then more power to you, man.
>>38334>>38336>>38368>>38393>>38395What does "Palestinian resistance" mean exactly? Palestine is a whole country so it's bourgeois by default and Hamas is literally a bourgeois party which means all violence done by it is, by definition, reactionary. It's no more "revolutionary" than ᴉuᴉlossnW's march on Rome in 1922 was. Disagreeing with this won't stop the Palestinian genocide.
Asserting that Palestinian proletarians even are interested in a "free Palestine" should not be uncritically accepted as truth anyway. No doubt they are sick and tired of war and desire a halt to it, but this is far from translating to some pious wish for national martyrdom. All discussions are people typing comfortably from their homes urging starving proletarians to support a terrorist Iran-backed group that has been responsible for them being murdered by the thousands, a group against which they've carried out labor strikes.
>>38401here in advance an arbitrary in the abstract is assumed as the distinguishing feature of imperialism and reality is then cherry picked in order to suit this categorization. this isnt marxism, this is not science, its speculation in the purest sense of the term
<small businesses that are kept poor by big business are actually proletarianthis is how you sound
was nazi germany proletarian too when getting their shit kicked in by the allies? you stop being bourgeois when you arent as good at competition as other bourgeois? by this logic several european states do not qualify as imperialist as well, since finance capital isnt dominant either
super cool leftoid analysis, even your screenshot is lcalling imperialism a stage of capitalism as a whole, not an arbitrary category that hinges on subjective policy motives. you attribute the growth of more successful countries to 'imperialism' instead of an organic result of capitalist development
(Not a theory thread) >>38349>>38391>>38401>>38404The bourgeois state is necessarily in competition with other bourgeois states, owing to the fact that it is the representative of some "national" capitalism on the world market. How good or bad they are at this is irrelevant in the equation.
>>38405I thought you were trying to make a joke and realized you were serious as I kept reading.
>Liberalism failsCapitalism is still the dominant mode of production everywhere last I checked, so the only progressive action today is communist revolution, not kicking out the foreign bourgeoisie in favor of the national bourgeoisie.
(Not a theory thread) >>38385>DisagreeingYou mean like
>>38153<stop thinking a fucking website is da epic praxis(Shit I never said)
>if someones wrong theyre wrong Not the point. It's about the insane strawmen derailing threads pushed by contrarian debate addicts who are only here to bait and troll.
>>Fucking pussy, bitch, babyYeah dude god fucking forbid if people were told to chill, instead of shitting up every thread with their abrasive baiting and trolling. And when you oppose this you're accused of trying to push "bourgeois civility" even thought actual oligarchs are on social media calling others pedophile rapists, retards and (racial) slurs.
You know, the sort of shit that, if you did it offline, would get you into fights with actual proles. (Been there done that)
>>38361>I always find it funny that I've gone from Russia's biggest hater because of my critique of Assad's Syria to Putin's strongest cocksock because I criticize the absolute state of Ukraine and it's ethnic cleansing campaigns of minorities in the far east backed by literal Azovites.i don't care just how peculiarly correct you are about geopol wooby. just describing your actions as i remember them. i've never said a word on assad, much less your opinions towards him or his fallen government. bringing it up without being prompted as a defence is pretty funny.
>I handled the Russia-Ukraine thread alone not because I asked to do so alone but because I could not get anyone else to come and help me a lot of the time - even with pretty basic stuff like gore spam. >The war was early on in it's actions and people were either too unsure of it's events or too busy with their irl lives to help much.i never suggested that you rubbed your hands together and demanded the "responsibility" of having to ban and delete posts you didn't like to read. what i suggest is that you use your position of power to enforce your particular views upon other in a way almost indistinguishable from pasquale. the only difference is you don't act like an outward psychopath about it, and you do it in support your own idiosyncratic interpretation of vague noncommittal "marxism-leninism". caballo also does this, for his vague noncommittal "libertarian socialism". granted at least he doesn't set retarded month long range bans.
>The fundamental misunderstanding which you carried into the mod team is that we were the people with the time or ability to make the moderation team into some kind of micro-party vanguard.and this is why i don't see that anyone should trust you people to do anything lmao.
<hey don't ban people with a vague one word reason, or even no reason given at all.>nope, you just want a micro-party vanguard.like i don't even understand why you land on "vanguard" as the jargon you want to try and use here because if anything i am the one trying to argue that people like you come out of the insular and false "party discipline" you've built to shield yourselves and the other members of the old boys club. if there's anyone operating under the model of a "vanguard" when they picture ideal moderation, it is you in particular.
>There was never a point at which there was a mass-sentiment for a "true marxist" position which I bannedthere were times, and plenty of them over the course of my time, where you banned posts with basically no elaboration. it was a practice i raised concerns to you about privately for months before i ever "antagonized" anyone as caballo put it. you refused to do the work of even just using the pre-set ban reasons that disco built for your dumbasses lmao. if you can't be bothered to give plausible justification for bans repeatedly, over and over, for periods as long as i witnessed, what good reason do i have to trust your decision making whatsoever?
>We all work and a lot of us have our own irl party memberships with all of those associated duties, we cannot go through the rigamarole of a party congress to decide to ban some random bullshit - even if we had the means, the effort on our end to do this vs. the effort of the general posting candor of the board is just so disproportionate it would be madness.and here is the exact attitude that will make the admin's gesture of good faith totally worthless. the most senior mods still think it's just not worth bothering with what people on the site have to say about anything at all really. no one said "call an entire congress if you need to ritualistically ban the guy on a vpn." the suggestion is talk about ongoing policy decisions here as they are being made not after. on the website. stop cloistering yourself off from the users who you've convinced yourself are basically all just gang stalkers or something i. your private matrix chats.
>>38367>Dude we have people decrying too much moderation and others complaining there's not enough of it in the same threadboth are true depending on what aspect of the website you are talking about.
>>38250>How do we make leftypol into a good imageboard?More nice posting.
More comfy posting
More dead billionaires.
>>38266If that was the intend it has slid of the tracks. Not sure how you didn't anticipate abuse.
>I'll believe it when I see itYou, and the people who contacted you lot, are fucking stupid. Speaking for myself, I wouldn't want to be found dead with connections to /leftypol/. Merely affiliating with random internet jerk offs signals to everyone you are unserious and gullible.
>>38204>TOR users are fine as long as they realize banning the TOR node is not some personal attackThat was my mode for the longest time, being grateful to even be able to post through tor. However, the above measure, well intended or no, made that untenable.
>>38419>analysis and critique is just semantics broooolmfao mentally handicapped leftoids will call me a debate addict and then utter shit like this
the left-wing is part of capital and therefore entirely antithetical to communism. youre a retard
>>38425 (me)
/comp/ for competitve, but now that I think about it /pvp/ would be better.
>>38188>This whole narrative of chans aging out is bullshit. Pure bourgeois consciousness, where the myth of innovation is fetishised as technological change.Can you back up this opinion?
> It is not what happens to fora; their growth may stagnate, but the population is still replaced. More pointedly: when 4chan was young it was populated by people well over 20, with some teens in the mix (hence why they were so loathed).Yet, most of our political faux pas are usually people over twenty five.
>People who regurgitate that claim have no idea what they are talking about.Well, again, do you have evidemce for this claim?
>>38433>>2098033>>2098031nod an aggumend :^D
By liberal standards I'm surely an evil totalitarian but I feel the need to distinguish myself from supposed socialists who want power over others just for the sake of it, because they aren't happy with their own lives, and actually think barracks communism would be a good thing. Of course the state should intervene to protect life in examples like COVID but it shouldn't attempt to control every aspect of culture and existence.
>>38437No, I am talking about unspoilered pornography being posted inside SFW threads. Its especially upsetting in light of comments from mods like
>>38179, about incels being banned. If I post a semi-ironic blackpill video it does get removed, but porn of some women being violently brutalized is perfectly ok.
>>38433 (me)
>>38435but barracks communism would actually be a good thing though, nechayeav was right!!!!
>>38448 (me)
Like Marx himself coined the term to criticise. Marx would be a libertarian socialist if that's how this worked, but nah he's just a socialist.
It's very common to see people get shit on for asking a stupid question, like with
https://leftypol.org/leftypol/res/2098551.htmlI'm of the opinion that these kinds of posts should still be responded to either in good faith, or not at all, and allowing people to reply with things like "fuck you retard SAGE!" is detrimental to the overall quality of the board. Good discussions can come from bad initial posts, and even if they can't, responding to garbage with more garbage ultimately just produces more garbage.
Of course, the counterargument is that not all posts deserve replies, and to that I say, why is the post still up then? It's the moderator's job to moderate, not the user's.
>>38447Its shocking that a socialist who has been in spaces like leftypol for nearly a decade
wouldn't believe it! There's currently a 300+ reply thread on this very site full of faggotards arguing whether the concept of hiphop is kosher for konunism (for the record, it is, China allows it and it's mainstream there, the guy who says they banned it is flat out wrong). So many of the people on this site think that Communism is fascism with the social values of 20th-century Russia.
And before you say anything, I'm not Vooshcoded. My stance is that of subsidiarity, that issues should be solved on the most local level that practical reality allows: federal government < state government < city government. If a town votes to ban homosexual relationships, for example, good for them. Go be gay somewhere else. You'll find very little resembling liberal notions of "human rights" in my thought.
>>38456I personally
am gay. But if a community finds homosexuality intolerable, they should not be forced to tolerate it by outside forces.
>>38459If a community finds homosexuality intolerable, then they already demonstrated non-ethically founded morals and will be counter-revolutionary.
Being a leise fair lolbert when it comes to reactionaries is just enabling reactionaries.
>>38460mandatory furry boykisser hypno
>>38461You are indistinguishable from a neo-liberal. Homosexuality is not and will not be sanctioned by any communist states, and like any other form of bourgeois decadence will be subject to repression until it falls out of fashion. Most of the population is already very much opposed to public displays of unproductive sexuality in any form, much less sodomy, so the only way you are going to get the proletariat to tolerate your ilk is through direct force of arms. In which case the status quo of NATO is perfect for you
>>38460Degeneracy is neither quirky nor funny
(USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST) >>38462>Homosexuality is not and will not be sanctioned by any communist statesObjectively wrong. How embarrassing.
>>2098887I consider myself "libertarian" in the sense that I believe in decentralized authority; specific communities impose the rules they need to deal with their particular problems, rather than a giant state attempting to figure out everything in the abstract. Also, authority absolutely exists and if you claim it doesn't you're retarded.
>who rejects the scientific and successful applications of Marxism in Marxism-LeninismI don't reject them, I just think there's a better option.
>>38453>If a town votes to ban homosexual relationships, for example, good for them. Go be gay somewhere else.This is why lolberts are cringe lmao.
If a town votes to ban homosexuality, blow up city hall, preferably with as many bureaucrats inside as possible.
>>38462>bourgeois decadence<proletarian identitarianismThere it is again
>Most of the population is already very much opposed to public displays of unproductive sexuality in any formMore like in some cultures any public displays of affection are generally disliked.
Anyway dude you'll find a lot of proles are bi and do gay stuff without labeling themselves as homosexuals. Been there done that…
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