/meta/ - Ruthless criticism of all that exists (in leftypol.org)

Hey I may be a pos but I'm not a fossil

>here is no organization going on on leftypol. In truth, there is only an ongoing process of atomization. Every day our numbers dwindle and our site loses users. The fact that we are so unwilling to recognize leftypol, not as a silly hangout spot, but as a military base surrounded by enemies on all sides, is probably why glowies even keep this website from going offline completely.

Man, this website is for "lefties" to do shitposting and have fun, some good laughs and make some friends. This is not a personal army of anybody

>or seek out comrades to befriend in person
Find those is proving harder and harder by the day.

>Wake up. Start organizing on a regional basis and stop focusing on the internet. You wont find any cameraderie online and your online comrades are pure fiction. Go outside.
I don't like outside, the outside scares me.

For example, i propose to someone with this op flag, that we build a blimp in our homes. This would be fundamental for the socialist struggle, and how my proposal was received? With the sound of silence.

>>33054
It's leftypol vs mainstream social media like facebook and twitter, and it's a war we're losing. The alternative internet will remain dead until russia (for example) builds its own physical internet network for people worldwide to use as an alternative to the one western tech conglomerates own and operate. We need meshnets more than ever to save us from the enshittification and monetization of all digital infrastructure.

>>33054
You're what's wrong with leftypol.

>>33052
>focusing on the internet.
Nobody here is doing that.
You are projecting your own lack of organization or action on to others.

>>33056
You can always use fed…

And if you want a "unified organ whose sole purpose is to connect all these disperse organizations and fights" you can have some examples of that in >>>/leftypol/1811652

>>33057
>You're what's wrong with leftypol.

"What is the purpose of leftypol.org ?
The mission of /leftypol/ at leftypol.org is to provide a fun and enjoyable space for the working masses around the world, as an anonymous community of non-sectarian leftists united in common cause against the forces of capitalism, fascism, and liberalism. Our goal is to act as a centre for serious political discourse and less serious informal discussions on various topics related to leftist thought."

>>33052
this site isn't surrounded by enemies: it's too irrelevant for that. this site's failure isn't that it doesn't organize, but that nobody here is interesting. this site's doom comes from its failure to interact with the outside world - but that need not take the form of raiding. the real problem is that no new people come in while the old and the interesting leave. this site is no more than a place to have fun, perhaps at a push a place to discuss and learn things. this site's failure and death is that it is not fun and it does not teach you anything except to loathe what passes for the left these days.

organisational failure is endemic to the left, but this is not a place of organisation. it is downstream - here, the only problem is that posters are so arrogant you'd think they were speaking as someone who'd been on the CPSU central committee themselves while, in practice, have rarely done so much as sold a newspaper or had an original idea in their lives.

>>33056
new technology is unnecessary, the basic flaw is social. so long as you can chuck links to leftypol.org on twitter there's no deep technical reason for the site's death. the social reason is that nobody's putting it out there - and in fairness to them now, there is nothing to put out there. in 2017 and even in 2020 there was original content and good posts worthy of sharing elsewhere to summarise a topic, now there is nothing of value.

>>33060
>organisational failure is endemic to the left, but this is not a place of organisation. it is downstream - here, the only problem is that posters are so arrogant you'd think they were speaking as someone who'd been on the CPSU central committee themselves while, in practice, have rarely done so much as sold a newspaper or had an original idea in their lives.

Real lol, agreed

>>33059
>anonymous community of non-sectarian leftists
Good one.

The Detroit Commune might not have gone anywhere but it was a fun project and gave the board something to collaborate on and build a sense of community around.

The ideology catgirls were also a fun group project that gave people something to communally contribute their art and writing to.

The detournement thread taking anime and resubbing it with communist dialogue produced some good content and helped educate users on video editing and the ideology of the situationists.

Shitposters are a net detriment to the board because every post boils down to a negative, atomizing interaction where anything that shows any kind of impetus towards positive group action is treated as fundamentally bad or wrong. It runs counter to the entire point of a forum, which is group discussion and collaboration. Shitposters only have a good time when everyone else is having a bad time, and this creates an atmosphere of negativity and antisociality where discussion, which requires an assumption of good faith, is impossible.

"Shitposting" should be strictly relegated to Siberia and the discussion boards treated like actual forums with an enforced code of conduct. People that insist on shitposting should be shown the door so they can take their unfunny wrecking bullshit elsewhere.

>>33059
You're what's wrong with leftypol and you should kill yourself.

>>33063
>"Shitposting" should be strictly relegated to Siberia and the discussion boards treated like actual forums with an enforced code of conduct. People that insist on shitposting should be shown the door so they can take their unfunny wrecking bullshit elsewhere.
To vague so as to be meaningless. Will be selectively and widely varied in its enforcement depending on enforcer.
Not a bad idea in principle but needs more refined language, exact examples of unacceptable behavior, etc.
This very thread is a shitpost thread anyways, i'd say these constant meta and low effort threads that are made every day and resemble social media posts with a simple question, some fringe historical autism about the USSR or just staking a contentious position to have an argument, get a few replies and sink are more damaging to most of what is actually posted within threads because it always has the front page looking very unappealing.

>>33064
sorry chvd but posting isn't praxis

>>33065
the reason they get few replies and sink is because the site is already mortally wounded, a good number of them would've been perfectly vital 5 years ago.

Yeah no shit, this isnt the place to organize. You need to go offline, or at least find a way to participate in organization at large. You need to get involved, even with non-ideal orgs, and help with busy work while evaluating how things are being done and how they can be done better. Theres no alternative to getting that personal experience.

>>33068
There are no such organizations. And i cant drive.

>>33068
>Yeah no shit, this isnt the place to organize.
It could be, and so much more, if mods took it seriously and formalized shit according to best international practice. There would still be places for shitposting and porn in the basement. The opportunities for an intelligent left board in [current moment] are being ignored. Too scary for mods to go legit I guess.

>>33070
You could just go and make a forum if you want that.

>>33070
this site's problem isn't that shitposting crowds out good posters, it's that good posters are gone. when dealing with the imageboard format, it's perfectly permissible - even desirable - to have a thread where essays coexist with cheap one-liners. "quantity has a quality all of is own" is never truer than on an imageboard - posters ultimately thrive on engagement. a good joke playing off something you've said in your long essay may bring just as big a smile to your face as an interesting essay in return. the problem with the site today is that the essay writers are gone and the one-liners are crappy and unoriginal. we already have the alternative vision of a "quality-focused" leftypol - her name is /edu/ and she's in a coma, kept alive by machines.

>>33070
Is caballo still in charge of this dump? Because I made a similar argument to him years ago and the response was "leftypol will attract people through the principle of free speech," ie let people shit post as much as they want.

And here we are I guess.

I want to effortpost about stalin thought and word, any tips or guides do to that?

>>33072
>this site's problem isn't that shitposting crowds out good posters, it's that good posters are gone

They're gone because shitposters make posting here deeply unpleasant.

>it's perfectly permissible - even desirable - to have a thread where essays coexist with cheap one-liners. "quantity has a quality all of is own" is never truer than on an imageboard -

Except they don't coexist because of the tendency to try and generate the most (you)s by being the biggest faggot possible. There's no engagement with the content, just people creating garbage to try and piss people off.

> a good joke playing off something you've said in your long essay may bring just as big a smile to your face as an interesting essay in return. the problem with the site today is that the essay writers are gone and the one-liners are crappy and unoriginal.

I wonder why.

>>33073
>Is caballo still in charge of this dump? Because I made a similar argument to him years ago and the response was "leftypol will attract people through the principle of free speech," ie let people shit post as much as they want.
>And here we are I guess.
Leftypol was always a silly place. The mascot is a fucking anime catgirl. Why try and remold it into something it never was or set out to be instead of just making a new imageboard(or probably a more serious type of forum with usernames) if that's what you're after.

>>33074
Have a strong thesis, support your claims with evidence, try to apply it to real circumstances, and be prepared for rebuttals and criticism.

>>33070
>It could be, and so much more, if mods took it seriously and formalized shit according to best international practice. There would still be places for shitposting and porn in the basement. The opportunities for an intelligent left board in [current moment] are being ignored. Too scary for mods to go legit I guess.
See: >>33076

>>33077
any book recommendations?

>>33076
Leftypol was a refuge for literal former nazis to clear their minds of retarded spooks, located on 8chan, a den of neonazism and reactionary extremism more generally. The catgirl was a metaphorical representation of an eternal struggle to survive based on the literal freedom fighters in spain who were raped and killed by francoist scum.

>>33076
Things are constantly in motion and you have to adapt to that change or resign yourself to failure. Your retrograde mindset is part of what's killing this community. You can't let go of bullshit like "how leftypol has always been" or "what image boards are supposed to be," and we're sitting in the result.

If you're so in love with what leftypol used to be then go waste your time on archive.org. Circumstances have changed. The community has changed. And being unwilling to change with it is just an explicit endorsement of killing the board through ossification and irrelevance.

And what's more, having rules of conduct in place conducive to discussion and community building doesn't mean "no fucking fun allowed." There's plenty of space to be silly without being a wrecking piece of shit whose goal isn't to produce something that entertains the community but entertains themselves at the expense of the community.

>>33075
shitposter is a floating signifier which is now the primary barrier to giving you any kind of meaningful reply or gleaning any kind of meaningful informaiton from your post. without knowing what you imagine when you see the word "shitpost" it's impossible to know what you mean: are shitpost and shit post synonymous for you, or are you bothered by casual shitposting, to low effort posts that i might find perfectly enjoyable and in keeping with the site? i can't know - and equally, you can't know what i mean. we should find some way to agree about what it is we're talking about or we'll wind up talking past one another. i would say that shitposting has been with this board for as long as it existed, but the ratio of shit posts to good posts - even good shitposts - has become much worse in recent times.

my broad argument would be that people who try to get the maximum number of (you)s with terrible posts should be banned (if they haven't made a habit of it, perhaps only for half an hour or so) and have their post deleted. this doesn't need a specific rule about quality, it can be done subjectively - if the mods make a mistake then we can argue about it in /meta/ and they'll think twice next time. by creating slight annoyances as a deterrent to unwanted results, people will give up on them a lot faster than if you give them rigid rules which they can play lawyer with either way. fast action, fast feedback, and a mutual sense of what is and isn't acceptable developing over time.

>>33079
Unfortunately I'm not really an expert on Stalin. If it were me I'd start with his writings on marxists.org.

>>33081
Imageboards are for shitposting dude. If you want some decorum you should at least have usernames, if not post history, karma systems and all that. What does this format lend itself to besides shitposting?

>If you're so in love with what leftypol used to be then go waste your time on archive.org. Circumstances have changed. The community has changed. And being unwilling to change with it is just an explicit endorsement of killing the board through ossification and irrelevance.
But nothing has changed, that's what you're all complaining about.

>And what's more, having rules of conduct in place conducive to discussion and community building doesn't mean "no fucking fun allowed." There's plenty of space to be silly without being a wrecking piece of shit whose goal isn't to produce something that entertains the community but entertains themselves at the expense of the community.
Take OP for example half the board loves Shay's flamboyant persona they've developed here and then the other half would call him:
>a wrecking piece of shit whose goal isn't to produce something that entertains the community but entertains themselves at the expense of the community.

The "community" doesn't have one set of tastes or sense of humor.

>>33083
ok

>>33084
inane. imageboards are more than capable of being places of decorum. /leftypol/ shouldn't become such a place, but the idea that it's inimical to the format is the moronic runoff of western imageboard culture being yoked to 4chan. 1chan /rail/, for example, is not a shitposting board though there are some dickheads who've made some bad posts on it. i blame /qa/. except by the standards of even-more-autistic Japanese-language railway imageboards. an imageboard is a format like any other: nobody would ever say you can't have shitposting on a traditional forum!

/leftypol/ should strive to be a fun imageboard independent of 4chan cultural influence. imageboards in general should be deployed to an audience of people who've never used them before. only then will the potential of the format be reached. most likely, this will never happen. /leftypol/ didn't seize the moment years back and is unlikely to do it in the future, and there's an inherent catch-22 in starting a new site: only the people who know about imageboards are in the position to do so, and such people are inherently likely to kill their own project with preconcieved notions from other western boards.

>>33086
>an imageboard is a format like any other: nobody would ever say you can't have shitposting on a traditional forum!
I said lends itself. You can do anything with most anything. Once again, what does anonymity lend itself to besides shitposting? It's most certainly to avoid accountability. People can't come at me for anything I've posted over the years because I've never name fagged on here. If you want posters to feel some kind of accountability for what they post and also to put the breaks on drive thru spammers, you want usernames and signups.

>>33087
Oh yeah and also messages that don't auto delete. Lol, if this was all serious business quality posts we're making on said board, why wouldn't we want every post to be saved for the ages? Why would autodelete be the norm? Because you expect 99% of the posts to be worthless garbage that no one cares when it slides off the board and then they have to personally screencap the quality posts or maybe one of the mods will add the thread to the archive.

>>33087
anonymity frees you of the need to come up with a name. it compounds, in theory, the advantage of ephemerality. nobody should be reading the discussion we are having right now in 10 years, and if they are it can bring no embarassment to me. ideas can be thrown up freely on a whim and toyed with, argued out, etc, without much fear that they'll become a millstone around your neck or that some mistake or malapropism or inadvertent insult will cause you problems forever: one person's accountability-through-post-history is anoher person's crippling social anxiety, and another person still's chance to ruin a thread by ignoring your point and throwing up something dumb you said on an unrelated topic. spam and bad posts are a moderation problem, not a registration problem. (something shii actually got right in his stupid essay!)

it also lends itself to a discussion style that i'm fond of: it cuts out small talk, it encourages posts about ideas, objects, events, and such rather than "identity-focused" discussion about how your day was, how the family is, did you get into that course, etc… even when people use a username, a tripcode or tripflag, they tend not to do this because they're the only identifiable party so such conversations can't really be reciprocal. even when people blogpost, it's structured more as a story than as small talk. even when people have names and flags, their identity is more like an author's pseudonym than an actual identity of the kind you'd find on twitter. (there are one or two instances where conventional identity-focused discussions happen, even here. i find it distasteful - though i'd endorse a site entirely composed of such discussions if that was its purpose.)

>>33088
the primary reason that imageboards keep posts only for a short period is because they are image boards and image storage is expensive: look at textboards and you'll see that their archives go back to the very start in most instances, because simple text storage is cheap. that said: ephemerality has a beauty of its own. if a post is really, really good someone will screenshot it and share it elsewhere. on /leftypol/ good or important threads are sometimes archived, and in many cases there are full blown archives (i wish i could find a technical solution to make them unworkable, because truly ephemeral posting is far more interesting than anonymity… i save my best posts for dead sites where only one or two people will read them.).

also while i'm on the topic: the decline in flag-use is one of the tragedies of this site. in the early years when people would flag their ideological background/tendency more often this board had a unique dynamic where you could infer something about the anonymous poster you were reading and their angle on an issue, without getting to know too much. you could interpret a post differently depending on whether it was made by a maoist or an anarchist, reducing ambiguity on what their overall point was in a subtle way. (or just giving you a chance to throw up a shitpost image macro of embarassing posts under the flag of an ideology you don't like) plus it helped showcase both ideological diversity, and the relative strength of each ideological grouping, which also threw up interesting dynamics. (think like a materialist: is it a surprise that the board where people divided into flag-based factions is also the one that created "made by x gang"?)

that was something as far as i know unique to /leftypol/. /pol/ has flags but they're not used in the same way. /int/ and such have country flags, but country flags work very differently and if you're outside the major English speaking countries, serve to de-anonymise your posts to a fairly high degree. (just how many Nauru posters can there be?) but ideological flags that you can take on and put off at a whim, which people actually used, that was novel. dead now, naturally.

>>33090
Flags here have been a pseudo namefag system since forever because we have like 24 users and 55 flags. The reason you know where the user is coming from is because you know the user that uses that flag.

>>33091
A quarter of the flags on /leftypol/ proper are just shitposting flags that don't represent any ideology just a meme or inside joke in some cases. Then there's even more shitposting flags on siberia. I don't know why not just have one set for the entire board when you have joke flags on the main board anyways.

>>33091
this wasn't the case in 2017 and while i think the trend is dead (i opened by calling it a tragedy for a reason!) even now it throws up a pleasing ambiguity: there's a socdem flag poster now, but they're clearly not the non-socdem socdem flag poster of a year or two ago. on a leftist board of all places you should appreciate combing through the ruins of something once-great for analysis' sake.

>>33084
>Imageboards are for shitposting dude.
Retard.
>But nothing has changed,
Mega retard.
>The "community" doesn't have one set of tastes or sense of humor.
Ultra retard. The sense of humor is besides the point you stupid fuck. A troll wrecking the board and disrupting the community is detrimental to the operation of a forum, which is what this place is.

Actually kill yourself.

>>33094
your post is mostly tautological. what about a troll who fails to wreck the board or disrupt threads, but who - through incompetence perhaps - amuses everyone whenever they bumble onto the board to fail again?

>There is no organization going on on leftypol
Why would you expect any? Go to /praxis/ or something if you want some kind of internet project. This is a shitposting forum split from 8/pol/.
>The fact that we are so unwilling to recognize leftypol, not as a silly hangout spot, but as a military base surrounded by enemies on all sides
What possible aspect of /leftypol/ do you consider similar to a military base. Holy mother of roleplay, you go outside.
>We're an utterly worthless leftist organization.
We're not a leftist organization.
>What is all the philosophy for if all of it is stupid edrama bullshit and attempts to explain an outside world we never explore ourselves?
Nice projection. I'm at rallies and direct actions, I've visited the encampments, I'm in socialist orgs, I supply insider information to my union. You assume everyone else here is some internet addict?
>How exactly can leftypol have any purpose in this world if we don't convert people
Well for the past four years staff have banned most of the people who don't fit the hivemind so, uh, take it up with them.
>Why can't we have raids into other online spaces, or form communities on other websites that represent our interests as online leftists?
Mods have a conflict of interest there, they don't want counterraids to have to deal with so they don't encourage raids. And that's fair enough. Go to leftychin /i/ for raids.
>as well as everyone on leftypol being a piece of shit fossil who denounces porn addiction
You know addictions are bad, right? Like, categorically. It's a part of the definition that it's harmful.
>If 4chan can organize real life attempts to steal a flag from shia labeouf's private residence then why cant we, i dunno, form cliques and networks of people willing to actually do shit?
Because we're 100 people spread far around the world, many of us anonymous on purpose.
>I wanted comrades from this place and all ive ever gotten were parasocial relationships with people
Yes, you idiot. Did you actually expect imageboard users (of all people) to fly over to Georgia just to meet you and hang up banners?
>Why cant you people propose projects?
Funnily enough I do, and they tend to end up basically being solo projects pretty quickly. Alas.
>You firsties
Southern states confirmed for third-world.
>Start organizing on a regional basis and stop focusing on the internet
Hypocrite that you are!

>>33097
I can larp if i want to. I just want leftypol to self crit and if i have to be evil to force it then thats ok

>>33099
>larp
no, just rp. and that's exactly the problem you're complaining about.

>>1849926
>The detournement thread taking anime and resubbing it with communist dialogue produced some good content and helped educate users on video editing and the ideology of the situationists.
I was not aware of this, pls share link or screenshot.
(attachments from >>>/games/18613 )

>>1849964 [not that comrade]
You say this, but I actually have tried making a new forum with blackjack and hookers. https://nuclearchange.net
Crit welcome. But unless you already have enough users to keep it active or are fine with just making your core base the anti-social people banned from all the other sites, it's an uphill struggle to get people interested, even with new ideas, even with OC. That's the first mover advantage at work, and it's part of why absolute shitholes like twitter, reddit and facebook are so dominant despite everything obviously wrong with them. New sites don't grow without a few people satisfied with feeding it while it's slow. Either that or manipulative bullshit like fake users and post copying.

>There is no organization going on on (anonymous fucking imageboard)
gee i wonder why

>>33106
The Pleasure of Constructing Your Own Self Theory

>>33108
The Poverty of Daily Life

>>33109
This is leftism, you can't escape from it

>>33110
Looks like that's the last one. There might be a couple more but I don't recall at this point.

Appreciate the viddump comrade, did you just have these saved or is there somewhere they're all available?

>>33112
I just had them saved. It's part of my leftypol collection from way back then.

>>33113
Cool, thanks.
btw, not sure if you've used leftybooru before, and it's probably about to migrate to a new software soon which will make uploading easier, but its a great resource for sharing and tagging /leftypol/ images.
https://lefty.booru.org/

Love me some language barriers. ( >>>/music/14 )