@moss Wouldn't that make this place have 2 rules, which defeats the whole purpose of the rule? I know original 196 didn't force you to put "rule" in the title, people just did
EnglishMobster
joined 2 years ago
I wouldn't really call it "rumors" when you can go directly to the horse's mouth:
https://www.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/cqgztr/fuck_the_white_supremacist_reddit_admins_want_me/
Hey all, longtime Marxist-leninist, recorder of left audiobooks, and megathread shitposter here.
Posting this in light of a recent one week Reddit ban I earned for shitting on US police, as I'm sure many of us have gotten in recent weeks.
So I've spent the past few months working on a self hostable, federated, Reddit alternative called Lemmy, and it's pretty much ready to go. Unlike here we'd have ultimate control over all content, and would never have to self censor.
Obviously as communists, we agitate where the people are, so we should never abandon Reddit entirely, but it's been clear to all of us from day one, that communities like this stand on unsteady ground, and could be banned or quarantined at any moment by the white supremacist Reddit admins. This would be both a backup and a potentially better alternative. Moderation abilities are there, as well as a slur filter.
Raddle isn't an option obviously since it's run by this arch anti tankie scum, ziq.
I wanted to ask ppl here if they'd like me to host an instance, and mod all the current mods here.
My concern is with this line: Obviously as communists, we agitate where the people are. I'm pretty left-leaning myself (I draw the line at authoritarianism though), but they're very open about using their platform to push an agenda.
That post was made by the founder of Lemmy and the instance they mention at the end became Lemmygrad (because lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad are the same people - the ".ml" in "lemmy.ml" even stands for "Marxist-Leninist").
With Lemmy.ml as the "main" instance, you're exposing all these posts to an admin team who has openly said "we are agitating for our views wherever the people go, and we have ultimate control over all content." They have already removed posts critical of China as being "orientalist" (which shows a severe lack of understanding of what "orientalism" even is - it's not "anything that criticizes our Dear Leader"). I can't trust that any community hosted on lemmy.ml is free of bias.
It isn't "rumors" when you can clearly go and back it up with a source.
(FWIW - I don't mind Lemmy as a platform. My Lemmy account is actually from 2020, before I realized what they truly were. The maintainers have done a good job of keeping politics out of the software, and the concept of only using "ethical" things is a myth when your computer has rare earth elements in it. As far as instances go, Lemmy.world seems fantastic and has grown to be far larger than the tankie instances. But Kbin is more fully-featured and has a lot more long-term potential, even though it's lacking in the short-term.)
I'm so mad at goddamn Lenin and Stalin for co-opting socialism. We went from the Paris Commune to the fucking USSR?
Now we gotta deal with shit like China being an authoritarian dictatorial hellscape that commits genocide (and denies the groups ever existed). And because they pay lip service to Marx you get people bowing down to grovel at Winnie the Pooh's gaze, or mummifying Lenin and treating him like a deity or something.
And of course then when you say "Hey, capitalism is unsustainable especially when automation starts replacing jobs en masse" people go "YOU MEAN YOU WANNA BE CHINA YOU TANKIE????" And the fact that there is a subset of people (many of whom are right here in the threadiverse...) who would love to be China and openly spread Chinese-style communism where protestors get run over by tanks and turned into a fine paste really doesn't help matters.
They suck all the goddamn air out of the room and cause serious discussions of socialism to get dismissed out of hand as supporting USSR-style "fascism with socialist characteristics".
If these hardcore authoritarian tankies didn't exist, it would be a lot easier to make the point that capitalism is incompatible with democracy as well. I'm not just talking about how money is speech and bribes are okay as long as you call them "campaign contributions".
But you don't see capitalist defenders pointing to Putin or the Democratic Republic of the Congo as examples of the wonders of capitalism. They're capitalist countries, yet they don't get accepted as such by people trying to discredit socialism. Curious. Yet China, Cuba, Venezuela, and the USSR are always their go-tos for discrediting communism. It's almost as if fascism/democracy is largely separated from capitalism/socialism (a fact that's frequently ignored...).
But it's really hard to make the point of "socialism does not mean authoritarianism, you can have democracy in a socialist state" when the largest group of socialists loudly advocate for an authoritarian communist dictatorship where they silence all dissent.
So now we can't have that discussion at all. Even people who hate "elites" and are class-conscious immediately shut down when hearing the "socialism" word because of how badly the USSR and China fucked Marx up.
God, I hate tankies.
I just wish I could hide things I've already read. I hate having to scroll past 100 things I've already seen/commented on.
If Reddit has an employee on staff as a mod that can approve posts, then they lose safe harbor protections. Anything that mod approves is considered representative of Reddit, giving them editorial control and causing them to be handled more strictly. https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-9th-circuit/1856011.html
Further, if Reddit gave bonuses to mods, then mods would be considered unpaid employees. Any kind of "swag" or quid pro quo for being a mod of a big subreddit increases the chances that those moderators will be considered unpaid employees by the Department of Labor. AOL famously got in big trouble for giving free/discounted internet access to their volunteer moderators. https://casetext.com/case/hallissey-v-america-online-inc-sdny-2002 (Settled in 2009 for $15 million in back pay.)
Combining the two is terrible news for Reddit and would make their business model absolutely unsustainable. Every mod would be an employee and every post would be representative of Reddit as a company. If a mod approves a link to copyrighted material, then Reddit could be sued.
That's true, but that's not how Reddit sees it. Reddit says they have a "legitimate interest" in keeping your posts around, no matter what those posts say. They say that just removing the username is enough.
Again, I can't speak to whether that'll hold up in court, but that's what Reddit is saying.
How are you searching? I was able to search for it just fine on lemmy.world by going to the magnifying glass in the top right (by your username) and searching https://kbin.social/m/japonic.
Reddit sees "anonymized" data as being okay via GDPR. Thus Reddit thinks they can comply with GDPR by simply deleting your name off of the top of all the comments you leave behind.
This is why you occasionally see comments marked as written by [deleted] with the comment body intact - that user used the GDPR to wipe their account.
I'm not an expert on any legal system, let alone the European one, and so I can't say if that's sufficient by the letter of the law. But Reddit seems to think so, and thus if you "delete" your stuff it really just deletes your username (basically).
You need to search for the full url; e.g. search for https://kbin.social/m/PoliticalHumor in the Lemmy search bar up top.
I dislike this since it's "wrong". Everywhere else (Kbin, Mastodon, etc.) would accept a search for @PoliticalHumor@kbin.social instead. Lemmy's just different in a weird way.
Yes. The actions of the sub's moderation team are distinct from the actions of Reddit admins. AutoMod is run by moderators. And specifically that subreddit hates the admins.
I mentioned this elsewhere - but Reddit has shown they are willing to ban places for the smallest perceived slight. That subreddit is used to coordinate the protests (alongside a private Discord for mods).
My guess is that AutoMod is aggressive on that subreddit because the admins are going to be looking for an excuse to ban it and the mods don't want to give them one. So by setting an aggressive AutoMod, the mods can keep the community focused on its purpose - moderator coordination - and avoid the potential of a false ban for so-called "harassment".
This is probably the subreddit spam filter or AutoMod, not something Reddit is doing.
EDIT: By that, I mean - the mods likely set this up to avoid any pretext of the sub being banned for "harassment" and it's probably not something that Reddit (the corporation) did.
It feels like Windows Vista to me. I hate it.