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ziq wrote (edited )

raddle wasn't a genuine community like we thought it was— a fair amount of faces we'd got to know were lies—

Everyone on a message board is anonymous. None of us are showing our real selves. I'm not even the only admin who used alts. It's normal to want to keep your admin account seperate for security and practicality (people ragequit when admins disagree with them).

and raddle wasn't democratic like we thought it was— he used these accounts to fake votes and completely sway dialogue in his favour (one of the more egregious things, IMO).

My favor? No. I voted multiple times in the thread about making f/mediation because I was concerned about the wellbeing of the site.

My initial strategy to deal with people using f/meta to mount witch hunts against dissenters was to parody them with utterly ridiculous ban proposals against defasher that would be mocked and quickly fail.

That way, the kind of people mounting the witch hunts would not feel empowered to continue their reactionary behavior.

When f/mediation was suggested, I saw that as a better solution to safeguard raddle from the struggle sessions and the looming threat of tankie takeover and took direct action to support it.

Democracy is an incredibly dangerous thing when the people wielding it have problematic politics. I'm honestly not sorry for that. I did it to get people to mediate instead of demanding we ban their enemies. The goal is more important than the method. Raddle's wellbeing was more important than a naive attachment to 'democracy' on an anonymous messaging platform where anyone with a keyboard can cast as many votes as they want.

If irl democracy doesn't work, idk why you have any faith in message board democracy. I influenced policy the same way I tried to influence people to embrace good politics. I'm not a communist. I don't believe in democracy. I'm incredibly skeptical of self-declared 'leftists'. Nothing I did contradicted my own postleft politics or my vision when I built this community.

The only promise I made to r/@ when I made this site was that I wouldn't let tankies take it over and destroy it. I honored that promise until my last day as admin. I'm now no longer an admin or a user of this site and it's up to all of you to continue to safeguard raddle if you wish to.

I poured 2 years of my life into this site and I don't owe anyone anything.

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