Submitted by GenerationLeft in lobby
I'm in internal auditing professionally as well as being a leftist, so I believed I'm uniquely equipped to offer expert guidance to the community in these matters. I've been browsing the site for more than a month now (since the chapo purge from the infamous reactionary site Raddle has to compete with) and I've jotted down numerous interesting observations together with solutions, so without further adieu let us examine the problems the community faces point by point, and then identify productive solutions.
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To start with, we simply must address the unfortunate proclivity the Raddle community has to be unwelcoming and even outright hostile to new prospective members. Like many of the points I will make here today, this goes right to the top of the community's hierarchy, to the administrators, especially the top administrator who is simply impossible to reason with and has a history of abusive attacks against communists. How can we repair this counter-productive atmosphere? I will address that below in the SOLUTIONS section. Keep reading.
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The lack of solidarity for real functioning socialism in the world today is perhaps the most glaring problem we face and it makes serious leftists not want to get involved in a project that casts aside entire socialist nations because of whatever CIA propaganda is going around that week. Even if you believe a certain leftist society to be imperfect, this is no reason to dismiss it outright. Critical thinkers will understand that imperfection is no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. No society is perfect but a socialist society is by default far better than our capitalist society and we need to support it rather than join with the reactionaries in attacking it.
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Debate is needed. Debate is needed. DEBATE IS NEEDED. This can't be stated enough times. No one likes an echo chamber but in all seriousness that is what we have in the current climate. A niche sect of 10 nihilist anarchists who dominate all the discourse is simply not sustainable. Every conversation is civilization sucks this fuck organization that, anti-authority or bust, don't learn anything from history, don't vote for the lesser evil or you're not a good leftist. Any community needs a diversity of ideas to truly succeed. That's a plain fact. When even the memes are all against workers and are sectarian towards all other leftist schools of thought, you can see the seriousness of this narrow sectarian mindset. It doesnt help that so many of the links the 10 angry gatekeepers share are buzzfeed level idpol and race baiting.
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Sane leadership. This point is absolutely paramount. If Raddle's leaders are so volatile that they go on unhinged rants against invisible enemies whenever they are challenged by well-informed leftists, we will never be able to approach the gravitas of bona fide success stories like chapo.chat. When we have hostile uneducated leaders who ban leftists they see as a threat to their ill-thought out ideology under the guise of "protecting the disabled from bad words" and spam dozens of sectarian hate posts to drive out advocates of Chinese socialism, Raddle will never be able to compete with inclusive leftist sites like lemmy.ml and chapo chat. Raddle needs leaders who are patient and understanding and understand how to create an inviting and inclusive community. The current leaders simply have no ability to lead and will only continue to drive wedges between Raddle and the wider left.
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Technology. Raddle is spositively antiquated and behind the times when it comes to this. The people have made clear that they desire federation, and either we give it to them, or we close up shop. We need to switch to a federated platform such as lemmy and away from this centralized Php mess. Do we wish to change the world or simply to toil in obscurity for another 2 years while bigger, more successful leftist sites overtake us?
SOLUTIONS
Any list of problems would be useless if it didn't also come with potential solutions to these problems. I'm very aware of that and so I will now present you with my solutions.
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Every mod team must be inclusive in order for the whole community to be inclusive. This will mean adding moderators of every leftist tendency, not just anarchists. For every anarchist moderator, there needs to be a communist, a market socialist and a left communist to balance things out. This should apply to every individual forum on the site, except forums specifically intended for a single tendency. For example the anarchism forum can be modded by anarchists, but the communism, politics, news, and socialism forums should be moderated by representitives of every communist and socialist tendency. There should be an even distribution of moderators, so that each tendency is represented equally.
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We must write new rules to combat the exclusionary atmosphere, to guarantee every leftist persuasion is given specific protections in writing. This needs to be written in the terms of service, under a "Left unity" clause and any administrator who ignores these rules should be removed from the team after a popular vote.
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Under the site's Etiquette section, the pyramid of debate needs to be added. This will ensure that conversations are civil and productive and that toxic sectarian attacks will be nipped in the bud.
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New, diverse leadership. The current leaders of the community have honestly shown themselves to failures at creating a thriving community. They had the opportunity to bring thousands of new members here but have admitted to deliberately sabotaging the migration to drive the newcomers away because they weren't nihilist anarchists like them. All they had to do was open their arms and be civil and understanding, but instead they raised their fists in contempt of the arriving communists. This divisive attitude seems to be a long-continuing pattern so I suggest we select new leaders that represent all the colors of the leftist rainbow. A communist, a left communist, a Trotskyist, a democratic socialist, an anarchist and a social democrat.
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We should appoint a team to begin to migrate our posts to a Raddle lemmy instance that is collectively owned. We will then be able to integrate with communism.lemmy.ml and chapo.chat to create one big leftism-hub with three distinct but united communities.
cute wrote
I really don't think you understand this site, no way you've been lurking here for a month. Is reddit and or lemmy sending people over to here?