Raddle was up and running about as soon as the subreddit was banned, and dare I say had a better UI than this place for another month or two after chapo dot chat got off the ground. Really primed for success, and was mentioned pretty frequently in “where did CTH go?” posts on reddit’s remaining lefty subs.
The cardinal sin was a mod team (mostly one super active mod) that allowed, encouraged, and actively participated in sectarianism. You also had mods (again, mostly one mod) regularly jumping hard into bitter, wrecker-style fights – the kind the quickly becomes laden with personal insults, and that gets carried on from day to day and post to post. As part of that, you saw what was charitably an awful enactment of an anti-ableism policy: it apparently extended to words like “dumb” and “moron” (i.e., words where even in leftist circles it’s hard to find consensus agreement that they’re ableist), bannable language was never really defined, the policy was unevenly applied, and it sure seemed like mods would be awfully quick to ban users who responded in kind when a mod started attacking them. Unsurprisingly, this hampered growth, drove active users away, and paved the way for a late and initially inferior platform (this place) to grow as big as the raddle community ever did in less than a week.
While not giving a shit about internet drama on a small, largely-defunct forum is generally a good idea, this is worth remembering as an example of how easily promising leftist spaces can get destroyed.
Reason #2 is no one here has a sense of humor so the place isn't any fun.
Reason #3 is all the pro imperialism views and the vitriol you get for disagreeing with them.
Fix these 3 things and you might get somewhere.
ziq wrote
A lot of disinfo to unpack here.
Raddle was running for more than 3 years before your subreddit was banned.
Your UI is still completely borked 8 months later.
lol Americans always measuring everything in terms of productivity
Translation: I don't like genocide apologia and say so when I see it.
Yeah we don't call people who don't share your China fetish 'wreckers' around here, sorry not sorry.
Idk any other kind of insult I can use to call out a bunch of white kids stumping for Xi and calling muslims terrorists who deserve to be in concentration camps.
I see bootlicking, I say so. If you were bootlicking everyday, that's on you.
Idk what it is about American kids where you can't go 5 words without denigrating someone's ability. Anyway, this is bullshit because I've never banned anyone for using either of those words. Just for saying people deserve to be in concentration camps.
If raddlers asking chapos not to be bigots 'hampered growth', then so be it. This isn't a business that needs to constantly grow to survive, and you thinking about everything in terms of productivity and profit just betrays your shit politics. No wonder you think China is worth aspiring to.
Calling Uighurs terrorists who deserve to be imprisoned for being a threat to Han supremacy. There you go, I just defined it.
Congrats on that market dominance fam. Pretty soon you'll have the whole twitter-screenshot market cornered and will be able to initiate a hostile takeover of raddle.
Endlessly commenting 'post hog' is only funny the first year or two.