Site with over a million users and one of the biggest agitprop vehicles of the last five years and now it's private. Lol. Lmao.
Edit: Ok, now the mods are saying making the site private is only temporary while they "deal with the cleanup from ongoing brigading."
Extraordinarily stupid decision for a reddit mod to go on fucking Fox News with a completely predictable outcome
Everyone thinks they'll be able to beat the system because they are exceptional.
Oh yeah, sure. All those other losers got dunked on, but they were dumb. I am smart.
What's crazy is that this is exactly what Fox hoped would happen. A single bad interview shut down a platform threatening capital.
Eh. They wanted a bunch of people to click on the Jessie Waters interview and like, comment, and subscribe. I doubt they care one way or another what happens to a subreddit.
The most inane part of it is that Fox News here doesn't even ask hardball questions, the mod just decided to self destruct from the start. Any basic planning would have beaten the system in this case.
Or if you're uncomfortable with that (many valid reasons to be), just do an audio only interview. Like it's also an option
It would have helped. But any serious push back would have just resulted in Jessie yelling "Cut his mic" and abruptly ending the interview.
It's what I've been saying: Fox News has 30 years of experience in this shit. If that moderator refused to answer a single personal question and tried to steer the conversation back to antiwork, the interview would have ended before they got 5 words in.
You are never gonna beat Fox News at their own game, in their own house.
You better make it a 3-second speech then. That's how long you'll get before they shut you down and then complain how evil radical communists don't want a rational conversation.
Maybe the interviewer will try to talk over you before the producer realizes what's going on, then you might get 5 seconds.
Like, I've seen a video of Fox instantly cutting away from a Trump press secretary speech because she said "illegal votes". Two words, boom, cut off.
as a wise drug addict once said, "the internet makes you stupid"
idk bro pretty sure there was a thread here and everything
Yeah, he parodied himself in Minecraft rather than pay alimony and child support. Rest in piss.
Reddit moderators and their consequences have been a disaster for human civilization.
It is, but doesn't warrant the shitstorm that was coming their way at all.
Worried this means the good mods will step down and the libs will have full power and then it will reopen fully coopted and controlled by :cia: er I mean :reddit-logo:. Would be better if it just shutdown permanently than have that happen
homie that mod may have well been a psyop with how surgically perfect it fed inti right wing propaganda. i cannot imagine a worse representation of this movement or leftism in general and fox news got handed it on a silver platter.
the spooks could literally brainstorm for months and not come up with a better way to sabotage that community than what the lead mod did themselves.
lol and lmao.
Apparently Fox News specifically asked to interview that particular mod so... :sus-torment:
And the guy interviewing them was apparently named Ryan Wrecker :agony-4horsemen:
As they say, giving a bad defense of something does more harm than a good criticism of it.
The "Never Play Defense" strategy is basically inviolate when it comes to media presence, especially in the context of internet activity and communities. You can never, ever go into even marginally hostile environments to speak for a politically charged group, act with any form of contrition, and expect to walk away not having given your enemies free ammunition.
Going into an interview with Fox News without having he entire interview completely locked down on subject matter, questions, length of discussion, etc., is such a bad fucking idea that I'm amazed anyone on the mod team was not screaming at everyone else to just ignore the invitation.
Failure on the other mods who did not immediately have alarm bells ringing in there heads when a reactionary outlet is hand picking somebody.
One thing that I do think it's important to keep in mind is losing a subreddit isn't going to kneecap the workers' movement in the US or anywhere else. The current upswing in labor action, both coordinated and spontaneous, have been the product of material conditions and on-the-ground organizing. At the end of the day, r/antiwork was at best a place to distribute agitprop, and it was never an ideal place for that.
This is to say that all the redditors saying that this incident has "killed" the "anti-work movement" are far more cringe than the interviewee.
Any movement based on a mainstream social media platform was bound to get shut off or sabotaged in some way. I just hope it got some people exposed to lefty or at least broadly anti-capitalist ideas and how they relate to their actual lives.
At the end of the day, r/antiwork was at best a place to distribute agitprop, and it was never an ideal place for that.
:10000-com: Social media (especially a subreddit without any clear direction) is a reflection of material conditions, not the cause of them.
That sub really got compromise by the lib since it got popular, a lost cause, tbh.
It was purely a place where liberals could read dunks and then feel like they're revolutionaries for upvoting them. Any leftwing cause that makes its home on reddit is lost from its very first moment.
I disagree. There was good discussion going on there, and it seemed like it was rapidly evolving past being just a glorified dunk tank. Its loss is, well, a loss.
Fierce disagree. Putting aside the almost inevitable fact it would be overrun by feds / liberals (assuming it wasn't from the get-go!), I don't see value in a bunch of atomized people logging onto a surveilled website and getting their dopamine hits by reading about how much it sucks to work at Walmart.
It had quite a lot of smug libs who boasted about making $80k - $200k+ for their do-nothing jobs -- people who are a billion times more likely to support a rightwing project than a leftwing one. It's a loss in the sense that Warren ending her campaign was a loss, imo.
I guess the question is what's the alternative? We can only work with the conditions we have; is there a better way to connect mass numbers of alienated workers? I don't think anyone expected the place to be an openly revolutionary Leninist site, but it still played an important role in allowing workers in a moment of crisis to realize their numbers and share examples of small victories over their exploiters.
Then there's also just the inevitability of it. People are congregating online like never before, that's just a reality. I expect that there will be other, similar sites that will come after antiwork, and so long as they exist we may as well use them to further class conciousness among users.
I take a very dim view of online-only political work. Maybe those workers did feel good when reading examples of small victories. But there's no next level -- all they're doing is feeling good and righteous from reading stories, some of which were probably fake.
What's the alternative? In-person stuff: tenants unions are something I'm impressed by right now -- stuff that gets you moving and meeting people in real life with real stakes. You could argue 'well we can do both' but I don't see the online stuff as leading anywhere.
To me, it's like the belief that, "Oh, canvassing for politicians is useful because it teaches people social / organizational skills!" But the situation of asking someone to vote for Bernie Sanders are much different than asking them to participate in a rent strike or direct action. Antiwork is similar to my mind, as would be campaigning for Bernie Sanders. You'd probably even hear the same sort arguments from its advocates: "Maybe this won't get us up the hill, specifically, but we're building the possibility of something in the future."
It’s not the same as being in person. It’s time-asynchronous, you aren’t using body language or tonality to communicate, and your level of investment is significantly lower. Compare going to hang out a neighbor’s house vs. texting them on social media. One of those is a bigger investment than the other, and people feel it.
If you enjoy living like this, whatever. It seems to be the new normal they want for us. But with the ‘ease’ of communication comes a drawback imo: i don’t think we care the same for someone we’ve only met online. For working together? It’ll be fine. For recruiting them into a risky political project? I doubt it will be very effective.
Every time I browsed that sub, the posts with the most upvotes were the "professional" workers, mostly tech guys about how their 75k job sucked and how they easily found another job that payed better. The few posts from low payed workers were lucky to get 1k upvotes, any posts trying to radicalise the movement were lucky to get over 100 upvotes. With this group of users on that sub and anarchists mods, it was bound to go nowhere and get taken over by libs.
That was what helped me realize how ridiculous the sub was. That they considered it a victory for the workers every time some disphit techbro bragged about doubling his salary by changing his cakewalk job. It just looked like a hug box / sneer club to me. As I said before: a place for liberals to get their dopamine hits + use that moral outrage to think of themselves as radical despite not being part of any political project.
I haven't really hung out there but
Any leftwing cause that makes its home on reddit is lost from its very first moment.
Lol i have seen comments saying that anarchists are worst than nazis on gzd
Any popular movement is going to eventually be compromised by libs because most people are libs. Having a massive public forum to espouse leftist ideas is still a good thing though
Stormfront is going public in a couple months, you can pretty much consider the whole site as good as sanitized. Yupp
I would say this might be a good thing because it would mean the place would finally lose its status as a pedophile hangout for white supremacist radicalizing, but who the fuck am I kidding here.
The sub has basically transformed into a storytelling sub (who knows how many posts were fake) and it seemed that any anticapitalist furor was already being removed. I don't think there was much room left for actual socialist education/organization.
It looks like the major splinter r/workreform is explicitly liberal, so it still sucks to lose the sub. Even once they reopen it, it'll have been hollowed out.
First of all online movements aren't real anyways: they can be valuable tools for organising, but you can't do the revolution on the internet.
This subreddit was doomed from the start anyway. "Antiwork" in a western context to most of the members there just meant UBI while the global south manufacturers all their treats. There was zero talk over there about antiwork outside of a western context. No solidarity at all. If you mentioned it you were called a "red fash tankie" and instantly banned.
That sub is a little sus ngl. Only one mod and someone on r/genzedong was saying that they're pro Hong Kong. I took a look through their post history and couldn't find anything indicating they're an ML.
Edit: Someone asked if they'd get banned for posting a picture of Lenin, and the mod said they wouldn't, so it seems like they're cooler than the r/antiwork mods at least.
Yeah i def think workREFORM is not an honest follower of antiwork
It's just extremely sad and unfortunate. She deserves both heavy criticism and sympathy.
Nah the mod has been at it since the start.
They're just very naive and do not interview well. Fox doing a hatchet job on them was definitely an op though, and what follows up from it are also definitely ops. Attacking this mod is now an easy human target with emotions.
If you combine that with the fact the modteam is definitely infiltrated you can probably assume they want this mod to leave the team, this would allow the infiltrating group to consolidate internal power around them and become a steering committee.
i mean the impression i got is they messaged all the mods and waited for one that was vulnerable to bite. they do this with trans people a lot happened to zinnia jones at one point
Doubtful. I'm sure if you put a majority of posters in that situation they do the same or worse.
A truly hilarious arc.
-
Starts with grassroots nascent class+consciousness of people telling their bosses to fuck off.
-
Mod team gets/exposes anti-"tankie" brain worms, bans communists on sight.
-
Community continues to be a catharsis for nascent class struggles but has no action that can be taken because (1) they're mostly libs, (2) they banned the posters that spend the most time agitating for building organizing structures between locales, (3) the lines that mods do push are "post-left" navel gazing.
-
One such mod pulls a definitely-not-authoritarian move and embarrasses the community by going on FNC.
-
Mods ban piles of users that complain about the embarrassing things the mod did.
-
Classic Reddit slacktivism takes over and they whine so much that mods can't contain the posting about the embarrassing interview.
-
Mods take the whole community private citing brigading.
Just pure painful lol. This is why we need coherent left unity, folks. We can't appeal to the libs if we let lib garbage masquerade as socialism/anarchism. It sucks all the air out of the room.
They really turn it into joke and the interview just end it. I do wonder if there’s some shady shite going on since there’s no way the mod could go on to fox news without knowing they going to ask question in bad faith.
Then why didn't she ask Fox for an audio only interview? Just explain to them that she has no experience with video interviews and doesn't have a team of professionals to make the presentation look good like Fox does, etc. If Fox won't accept those terms just reject them.
That's just pure naivety then. It sucks, and she definitely does not deserve any of the abuse that will be sent her way. She should just turn off her computer and phone for a week and ignore all the online BS.
I think she was just naive, personally. This is an American "post-left" mod, she won't actually know what she's talking about, she's just a victim of liberalism that thought she'd do well against some FNC ghoul. I think of her as a representative of the larger problems in these kinds of communities and don't have anything bad to say about them as a person.
Lots of reasons she might have thought she'd do well, but my guess is we don't need to look much farther than the :reddit-logo: format where you can have lots of bad takes and spend three hours crafting a response to own someone and everything works out, which in no way translates to handling a bad faith FNC charlatan.
Edit: forgot that we knew her pronouns.
-
Honestly not surprised that it happened, but I didn't anticipate how it would happen. What a shitshow.
What was the thing that....er, happened? I'm not up on all the recent subreddit drama.
A mod was interviewed by FOX News, did badly and apparently the users disliked that enough for the mods to react that way
Wouldn't surprise me. That one called themselves post-left and posted unironic anprim stuff.
People there are advertising a new sub called "workreform" which sounds even more liberal and seems really fucking suspicious
Edit: lmao I was right
Wait, seriously? They (the 'post left' mod) had been modded only a few weeks ago… :amogus:
It is not the post left mod, at least not the one that was posted here recently
Oh shit duh, I was reading that thread earlier today and didn't put 2 and 2 together. That just glossed right over me when I read the comment I originally replied to.
The reason I think it was an OP is because I can't think of how you could have done the interview any worse if you were indeed trying to sabotage the movement. The interviewer even made the background of their house (didn't use a false background) as messy as possible. Anybody who goes on TV knows millions of people are going to see them only at a glance and make a snap judgement, the interviewee went out of their way to make the quick look at themselves as bad as possible.
I agree. It's completely unrealistic to think that Reddit mods of all people actually represent the left or the working class, especially on such a high-traffic sub. In one fell swoop the entire subreddit looked as bad as possible and destroyed any of its credibility, and it was all because of the mod team.
Pretty unfortunate. I never participated or saw it as a mOVeMenT or anything, but it was neat to see some lefty agitprop on /r/all again. All the “THIS IS A LEFTY SUB” posts were encouraging too - just nice to see ideas like that spread around. I figured like at least half the mods were dipshits though and I guess I was proven right with that Fox drama.
Now the sub currently poised to be its replacement is a lib reformist circlejerk where the mods are getting showered with upvotes and gold (lmao) for telling the refugees everything they want to hear. Goofy shit. No lessons learned. Goes to show all these places (this site included!) are only good for shitposting and venting about how shitty all our lives are. Nothing more, nothing less.
I just like this place because I can get good commie memes to share with family and friends lol, it's definitley not a revolutuonary venue. Just a good place to kinda chill and discuss reality with likeminded people.
Any real movement will have to start on the street, but if we have a digital agitprop factory, we should use it.
I feel the same way. It’s always reassuring and comfy to be around likeminded folks. Keeps me sane in this cartoon world we live in. If I can learn a thing or two or be exposed to important shit, even better.
But yeah, achieving worthwhile change is always going to involve getting your shit kicked in by a jackbooted pig - not through arguing with randos on a self serious meme forum. Those Kelloggs workers that were celebrated here and on /r/antiwork - they couldn’t give two shits about these sites if they’ve even heard of them. Too busy actually getting that bag.
Yup, the only thing this site has thays moderately revolutionary in the forum/social media sphere is the fact that we seem to have actually achieved some sort of zen. Ive never used a site that had so little bickering and fighting. Any we do have is usually short lived and all the anger is directed the right way and resolved.
This is only good because sites that generate rage and conflict suck you in more and take up a huge amount of your mental energy. One that doesn't feed off your anger is good because you'll use it less.
This place is like terminally online rehab lmao
True. Thinking about it, I realize it was way easier for me to log off from here when we had those early struggle sessions. Feels nice.
I've noticed that while I come here a lot and comment/read, I never get in arguments. When a reddit thread or a Twitter thread gets linked here, I can feel the difference going to those places.
The way in which I engage here is totally different than the highly gamified Reddit experience and the void screaming hivemind of Twitter.
Any movement organized online will not be on a public social media site. Hexbear is useful as a platform for leftist education, agitprop, and also (of course) shitposting slop.
:Hoggers:
This is an extremely common Fox News tactic, they'll bring in an interviewee to intentionally embarrass as a stereotype (due to inexperience and/or lack of preparation) live on air to confirm every single one of the prejudices of their viewers. The anchors are certainly coached to goad and humiliate the interviewees as much as possible.
Yeah but where did they get owned? The anchor just laughed and the mod just had honest answers that made sense.
She fell for Fox's naked attempt to steer the interview direction away from actual motivations for having that community, and towards her dogwalking and personal motivations. She fell for talking about dogs more than the injustices felt by millions of people by participating in this unfair American labor system.
Aside from that, she also didn't prepare physically for the interview. Unbrushed hair. Poor lighting. Not staying still. Low quality webcam. Not looking into the webcam. Not dressed up.
She got "owned" because she didn't have any media training at all. She could have gotten some basic media training from a local DSA. Instead, she turned on her webcam and got on national television as if it was a school zoom meeting. She put in no effort in the situation, which has people rightfully feeling cheated out of proper representation.
I mean are you saying their hair sucked? It was a normal webcam, the background was fine, they looked around while they were talking cause they were thinking, they gave answers that made sense and were matter of fact. Fox didn't even really do much manipulating, they just asked what they did for work. It was on subject.
I get what you're saying but it just didn't seem that bad to me.
That's why the hate is unfair. She wasn't the best representative, but it's not her fault that Fox managed to scout out a clueless lefty stock figure.
I kinda thought the interviewer felt bad for them and was intentionally trying to go easy on them. But yeah you could tell he was having a hard time keeping a straight face. Fox couldn't have imagined a better interviewee to lampoon.
it is kinda cringe to say that but if there i ever an appropriate moment to say it, it's when talking about people like the /r/antiwork mods. had a huge platform of frustrated workers and managed not only to not radicalize people but to blow up their own platform as well.
