can i remind you all what this place is? it's a website that spawned from a subreddit about a podcast. that is it. and we still have so many people in the streets!!! im ready to bet that this 10k niche community has more people organizing and shit than most fucking subreddits 20 times bigger than us. cos that's wha we are, at the end of the day, a fucking subreddit. dont get me wrong, i love this place, but really, is this where you are expecting some great movement to start? we dont have offices, we dont have any type of local unity, we barely pay the mods of this place 400 dollars a month, we are just a bunch of dumbasses sharing memes and newspaper articles on a website.
and the thing is, there is a fuckton of people here in comparison to other places; now, im talking about the subreddit that had 12 times more people at the time of the ban, but we had a huge fucking part of our community volounteer and donate for Bernie, which ok, pretty cringe in retrospect, but we still mobilized quite a lot. but we still have people daily talking about helping the homeless, organizing communities, joining RAs, and all the jazz, something you just dont see anywhere else.
and also, jesus, some people simply cant or wont organize. that's it. you cant force those. so just let them have a place to post, talk about topics, get informed and chill out. i personally have way too much anxiety and i am not even sure of what to do in my own country that counts as organizing, so i use this place to rant about my life sometimes, something i wouldnt be able to do if this place was, idk, the DSA or something. idk what the DSA is actually. uh. will this bring any leftist project into actuation? no, and we are all painfully aware of that, and we tell off anyone who thinks otherwise. but so far, we have loads of people who organize, to the point where it is actually commendable, instead of shaming the empty half of the bottle.
Agreed. Encouraging people to organize and do praxis is good. Incessantly bitching, complaining, and shaming about how there are 10,000 people on the site and not all of them are actually doing real-world activism is not.
I'm a Socialist. Yes, I probably should be putting more effort into radicalizing people I know IRL, unionizing my workplace, going to more protests. But also, I'm a lazy piece of shit and I'm not going to do any of that, for the foreseeable future at least.
Any energy spent browbeating people for sitting in front of a computer wasting their life would be better spent building a path to activism. It's easy to say "You should be doing more", but while it might make you feel better, it doesn't actually result in people doing more. It's harder to put in the work of convincing people to do more, and removing barriers to people doing more.
A moderator team that generates a feeling of superiority over their userbase because they're doing more "praxis" than average can only really devolve into said moderator team eventually dissolving the community and telling everyone to "go outside", as if the actual result of such an action wouldn't just be the unmotivated userbase moving onto other websites where they can be lazy fuckers, while destroying a centralized left-wing community that could have been used as a pool for radicalization and recruitment.