It’s a liberal cesspool full of people who refuse to listen when you speak. I explained how the SMO in Russia was justified going all the way back to fucking WWII and Stepan Bandera to Russia not wanting Ukraine in NATO and some dickhead told me to “tOuCH gRaSS”. Didn’t even address any of my points, just that “dEnAziFIcaTioN iSnT a gOoD rEasOn, iT’s aS bAd aS wMDs”.
Fucking moron. I hate that fucking place so fucking much.
Reddit sucks, but we also have to resist the impulse to write the masses off and retreat into our own groups. While material conditions are a huge driver of peoples’ politics, propaganda works, conversations can change minds, and ultimately we have to bring a lot more people around to socialism before we realize any of the changes we hope to see.
Your pipeline left needs to start where people are, and where people are is shitty corporate social media.
Reddit is not a very good place to start trying to radicalize people. Go outside, talk to real people, they are more receptive than online dibshits most of the time.
I’ll let more capable people do that then. I don’t have the mental capacity for it anymore, I’ve been doing this shit since leftbook back in 2016 and just being on social media gives me anxiety.
Don’t let them get you angry. That’s what they want, for you to give up. Take a beat. Breathe. Respond with cogent theory and don’t take their bait. You’re not doing it for the radlibs. You’re doing it for people like me, who lurked on Reddit for years.
I gave a succinct explanation of the conflict in Ukraine and someone just said “touch grass” without even reading it. Maybe someone else got something out of it but with Reddit hiding anything that gets downvoted the value of what I said was lost.
Similar story to me. Reddit was part of my political education. I had already got to the point where I thought Marx had something useful to say and that liberalism was a dead end. But then I had so many questions that I couldn’t answer or couldn’t quite figure out for myself.
I searched for every question on Reddit and read through all the Marxist answers, glossing over and ignoring the trolls and liberals who were clearly misinformed.
It’s all right Marx being right but if he didn’t have a method for replicating more right answers, he would be no better than liberalism. It was Marxist Redditors who helped me realise that historical and dialectical materialism underpins the conclusions that Marx comes to and allows other Marxists to consistently come to the right answers and, somewhat, predict the future. Non-Marxists occasionally do the same but it’s random.
Can’t forget the wider audience! (Also, I fully accept the need to rant about the contrarians, though.)
You can radicalize people IRL too.
The lemmy fediverse seems to be paying attention to us so, i don’t think we are completely walling ourselves off.