Please check my post, I think everything I said is very valid, but I want this community to see it too, and help steer the discussion, I think reddit is doing this intentionally.
Please check my post, I think everything I said is very valid, but I want this community to see it too, and help steer the discussion, I think reddit is doing this intentionally.
See from my own neck of the woods, ‘tankies’ describes something with actual power, albeit very minor and entirely online. I’ve seen a shocking amount of online leftist communities infiltrated and taken over by them, with real earnest critiques about housing prices and wealth inequality diluted by worship of whichever anti-US dictator has caught their attention today. They’ll suck all the air out of the room, ban dissenters as ‘libs’, and then using the excuse “No Punching Left” remove criticisms of their weird ass views about Kim Jong-un and Putin.
I get that this might not be a widespread usage, but in left leaning online spaces it’s a useful descriptor just because it keeps fucking happening and it actively shits up whichever community it happens to. I wish they were fucking boogeymen, honestly.
The fear, I guess, is that given how many there already are in lemmy, they might pre-emptively poison the well in some way.
Yeah, that tracks. I’ll grant you that there are those left spaces on reddit that can get really tankie really quickly. (I don’t go to the ones in the fediverse - might eventually lurk tho with a critical mind of course).
I just find myself dismissing them pretty easily and making my own space. Left politics got really weird and counterproductive, so I found /r/TraumaAndPolitics and made that a small space that had some pretty interesting leftist conversation through a language of trauma. (I had made /r/TraumaInformedPolicy, but only found /r/TraumaAndPolitics a few days later, but we made the subs around the same time, oddly enough).
I suppose I shouldn’t dismiss the experiences of those who stayed at the expense of authoritarian communist propaganda and have likely been damaged in some way because of it.
It’s just that I find this fear counterproductive when it comes to building communities, if we’re betting that most people aren’t going to like Authoritarian Communisim (and that’s a damn good bet) then the idea is to get as many people into the community as possible as fast as possible.
I have some on-the-ground ideas that I’ll experiment with for tucson.social and report back when we see how that works.