>>41044Flags were the greatest cultural innovation of /leftypol/, although they've now withered and died. They allowed you to flag your ideological tendency (or in the case of someone like British SocDem, to check people are reading the words and not the flag by flagging yourself misleadingly) so people know where you're coming from. An anti-Stalin post is interpreted very differently depending on whether it comes from a SocDem flag, a 4, an Anarchy symbol, or a Stalin mustache, and much more efficiently (in most cases) states the theoretical background of your argument. (Of course, you may state a
different set of premises in-text, and someone may ignore them and look only at the flag - but then you know they're lazy and not worth your time.)
When /leftypol/ was at its most culturally vital, people mostly-accurately flagging their tendencies caused people to competitively argue their case. You got a good "team" identity for both your ideology and for the board as a whole, which could be donned or abandoned at will while still basically retaining anonymity. For a board of so-called materialists, you'd think people would understand more clearly that this is the kind of environment that incubates a wildly successful meme like "Made by X gang".