I try to make it a point to post questions on communities that have not kicked off yet, knowing that I most likely will not receive a response for a while.
That’s just not true. I’ve made comments that I thought desirve no reply but humans find a way. If there’s no comments to read the shared content just isn’t that interesting. If I see comments then the shared content must be interesting enough to justify a discussion.
Well I think you’re wrong, fuck you and your opinion /s
I actually don’t know to what extent I agree with you, but your theory certainly feels plausible to me. It reminds me of the internet adage about how the best way to get a right answer to your question is to be wrong. I can’t remember what it’s called.
Aye, cunningham seemingly meant it as the fastest answer though, which was the sentence right afterwards in that wiki entry. So maybe mr. anarchist-with-a-machine-fetish would have gotten an answer earlier if he had said it was the anti-murphy’s law.
Division gives people something to talk about. Not everyone can think of something constructive and interesting to say at a given time, but when presented with an opinion, it is trivial for most people to formulate a comment either agreeing or disagreeing with it.
It’s funny how despite social media becoming very normal, the old phenomenon of most content getting generated by a small portion of power users persists.
Have you seen the shitpost communities? Cleverness isn’t required, and in fact I think in those communities it’s somewhat frowned upon, 'cause c’mon, no polishing shit!
I take a break over the weekend. If I comment, I need to check the client every hour or so. I don’t want replies/rebuttals to linger without a response if it is warranted. I need to work on my car projects and can’t be bothered with online interactions whilst doing so.
That’s probably the one thing I like about lemmy that surprised me when compared to reddit. I’ve found myself commenting on posts or to replying to comments days after the initial posts, and no one seems bothered by it.
For me Mastodon is still growing and getting more interesting, with more and more formal institutions joining (newspapers, NGOs, government institutions etc.).
I find it more comfortable to contribute to Lemmy than to other sites. There seems to be actual discussion and opportunities to learn, which can be much harder to come across on the other platforms.
When you come across a ‘user’ that almost exclusively defends one controversial politician/company/government and all of their comments seem to follow a script. Also the account is either brand new or 5 years old but only started posting recently.
That I agree with. I don’t post often but when I do it’s always very positive and makes me want to post more . Compared to Reddit where it would have alot more negative comments or would just get removed by the mods for some stupid reason. Did you know you can no longer post on r/buildapc about asking for suggestions on building PC’s ? What’s even the point anymore?
Did you know you can no longer post on r/buildapc about asking for suggestions on building PC’s ?
Yeah it’s like a sub for a specific narrow purpose then people get buthurt about how people are always making the same posts over and over. So they turn it in to a wiki to “address repetitive spam” or whatever, so at that point you might as well just refer to one of the hundreds of other build lists found on other reputable sites. A lot of the productive hobby subs turn in to “hey check out my [reddit hyped product]!” and people actually posting things they’ve put effort in get little to no attention.
Yep, I’m jaded in my expectations knowing what Lemmy was prior to the massive expansion through June and July…
It was still a fun place, but it was a couple dozen posts a day across all servers, by a handful of people from the bigger servers.
We still have a lot of fixes to make on Lemmy, especially on the moderation, management, and content filtering side of things (though apps have been thankfully filling the gaps on some of these issues). Niche communities still need more participation to get off the ground. I’ll see again where we are in a few months from now.
Hi, they aren’t. I browse by Hot on All or Local specifically to discover niche and active communities. The memes I see on Lemmy are actually higher quality compared to Reddit, mostly due to the older user base here. Bonus points that we don’t have extremely toxic communities like dankmemes yet. So overall, that’s much much better for me. Even if the content was dog water, I’d still be happy about the absence of toxicity and everyone enjoying a semi-lame repetitive joke.
Isn’t Lemmy suposed to be FOSS? I thought that was the main reason why people left Reddit for Lemmy was that and API changes. Wouldn´t other FOSS be of interestt too? Just a thought.
Reddit’s great strength was that it was big enough that niche communities could attract enough users to have interesting conversations and a steady flow of content, and if you are a Reddit refugee looking for those sorts of communities you aren’t likely to find them on Lemmy. I’ve more or less made my peace with that, but if you’re not the kind to stand on principle, a falling user count is bad news for the hope that the Fediverse might snowball into the sort of place that can support discussions about your passions and hobbies even if they’re not the sort of thing that is popular with a specific set of tech-savvy anti-capitalist leftwing activists (and I say this with love as a fellow tech-savvy leftie… but y’all got one-track minds and it shows in what communities live and die around here).
Yeah even a pretty unpopular car brand (Infiniti) has a pretty active sub due to the install base. I think I’m the only person here who has posted about it at all on lemmy.
Hey don’t forget about the other half of the posts, which are in a language you don’t understand. Seriously, my block list is long because language settings here mean nothing, and while I’m sure that’s quality content, uh, I can’t understand it.
Yeah the “All” in particular is pretty bad for the average person. They’re not going to enjoy a Star Trek meme, followed by a Arch meme, a Self-hosted post, a grad-student Science meme, followed by a privacy post.
I’m also convinced Lemmy’s “hot” algorithm is broken; I can easily find posts with ONE UPVOTE on the all feed. Hot is supposed to be a balance between acceleration and total vote count, but it seems like it just only acceleration. Go look at the front page of reddit. The difference is night and day.
We need a normie.world that has an “all” feed that doesn’t contain 70% niche communities. We have c/humor, c/news, etc but they’re completely diluted by overpowered niche posts.
I have a potentially contentious opinion. Normies are what ruined Reddit and the crowd attracted by normie communities are why Reddit is even more toxic than it used to be.
We don’t need to attract normies, we just need to attract more people like us.
I don’t hate normies by any means, but I don’t want to hang out with them all day either.
Then go use Reddit if you want all the normies around. There’s a site that already exists that meets your desires. I still use it for niche content, but there has been an undeniable increase in toxicity on Reddit as the user count has increased.
Your grandstanding is cringe. This is a forum, not a political movement. If you want normie content then go back to Reddit. When I want normie content I’ll use TikTok.
Nope, I just don’t want the place overrun by people who are mostly just around to flame and insult.
Pick up moderating a few large subreddits and you’ll see what I mean. Even on a small sub like /r/Infiniti, I’ve seen a massive increase in people just being pricks, especially after a cross post. Smaller user base makes it less likely.
Like I said in another post, I don’t like using the word normie because it’s not actually descriptive of the behavior I’m talking about, but it’s the word the thread is using.
Yeah I completely disagree. Imagine if a city/local gov wanted to use Lemmy in order to be self hosted (similar to EU govs switching to Mastodon) but the public just wonders why their local gov put their stuff on a weird circle jerk website that’s flooded with niche memes. “Why didn’t they use the normal thing (i.e. reddit)?”
We should be welcoming enough that, when someone wants to make a new subreddit, they make Lemmy community instead. And I don’t think thats the case right now.
If a person sees something they’ve never seen before, and turns around and flees, that’s a problem with them being sheltered and pathetic, not a problem with the new thing they haven’t encountered before.
Under a centralized system, bans are terrible. But federation is awesome because it’s perfectly okay for an instance to be ban-happy. Just join another instance. (I’m on lemm.ee because I want to see everything)
Not only is it fine, but I think we actually need a variety of instances; no-bans, some-bans, lots-of-bans, and excessive-bans. People should have the choice.
Gotta appeal to advertisers that want the normie eye balls.
I hate using the word normie, because these people truthfully haven’t done anything wrong. It’s the advertisers that follow them around like vampires that are the issue.
It’s called reddit and that’s why I left. Fuck the normies. They’ll import fascism.
That sounds unnecessarily combative so let me expand my argument.
There’s a book called The Authoritarians by a man called Bob Altermyer. Altermyer is now retired but he was a professor of psychology at the University of Manitoba. During his career he did a lot of research into authoritarians, both followers and leaders. In the book he describes for laypeople the experiments and the findings. If you want to do a deep dive into his statistical analysis you can because the whole thing is fully referenced but for people who just want an easy to read description that is also easy to understand then this is the book for you.
After reading the book redditors behaviour became a lot more easy to understand. I was less upset by what was going on but I stopped engaging because I now understood that reddit wasn’t a site for me anymore. It was a site for people that enjoyed being normal and doing normal things. And that’s ok, why shouldn’t they be catered for?
I use reddit and lemmy exclusively on desktop or laptop. So when the app business came up I didn’t regard it as my fight, however I thought that if I expected people to stand up for my interests if they are challenged I should show a bit of solidarity with them. So I didn’t visit reddit at all for the days it was blacked out. I didn’t like how spez reacted. I saw that people were crossing to the fediverse and I took a look for myself. I liked it. I posted. I wasn’t attacked for having a non-normie viewpoint. I liked that a lot.
The thing about normies is they don’t read scientific studies for fun, they don’t like long winded explanations about why the world is the way it is. They think they can see something in the street and extrapolate an entire social policy from it and there are chancers that will tell them, ‘You know what? You’re right. We don’t need experts telling you that you’re wrong, what do they know?’
So your Jordan Petersons and your Nigel Farages and Alex whatever his nameis, these people and reddit’s normie audience are made for each other. I’ll even go as far as to say this extends to the people that think the Democrats or the Labour Party are going to fix their problems, Team Liberal aren’t doing themselves any favours but my point is that if your goal is a massive website that caters to the largest part of the reddit audience you’re going to end up swimming in cryptofascist and sometimes outright fascist content. Been there, seen that, got the t-shirt.
Interesting, I think I’ll take a look. You sorta skipper over what ‘normie’ or reddit behaviour was mentioned in his book specifically. Was it the lack of reading scientific articles you mentioned in another paragraph, that alone can’t be it right?
Listen, just go and read the thing; it will be time better spent than listening to me precis it from memory. but if you do read it a feel like it hasn’t given you an insight into what drives a whole host of behaviour that one sees on social media or that I’ve misunderstood the book then do come back to me and I will refresh my memory of the book to have that discussion with you.
While I don’t entirely disagree, I’m a little confused by your description of the front page of lemm.ee, which we’re both on. My front page when viewing All here is mostly memes/shitposts/news/technology when set to Active sort, is yours not?
I’ve admittedly blocked a fair amount and have show NSFW/bot posts disabled, but the communities you mention aren’t affected by that.
Yeah I could’ve been more clear. I mean the All feed not Local. I went and updated my comment. And to be fully clear, I’ve got no complaints about lemm.ee. It’s exactly what I want, e.g. show me everything and I’ll decide what to block. That said, I know I’m not the norm.
Saying you blocked a fair amount is exactly what I’m talking about, so have I. A little bit of effort can really make the feed more palletable. We need to have a place where that is done by default. Maybe even an open source AI or even just an algorithm that tailors it to the user. I’m already glad Lemmy.world is much more moderate than lemm.ee, and we just need a place that goes all the way; NSFW blocked by default, several communities blocked-by-default (not defederated), and somehow prevents All from being flooded by niche memes. I love Linux and the memes (even if they get a bit repetitive) but we shouldn’t have 3 of the top 10 posts be linux memes.
I tried to get my lab mate, a PhD in computer science and Linux Mint user, to get a Lemmy. He took one look at the all page, laughed, pointed out the circle jerk stuff and asked how some junk posts even made it to the all page and then said “yeah, no thanks” and has never touched Lemmy since. He was already 4 times more likely than the average person, but even he was instantly turned off.
I gotcha. Fwiw I kind of agree, even beyond Lemmy I’ve been a little surprised some of these sites/instances haven’t done more to tailor themselves to accommodate more folks or focus on specific demographics.
That’s supposed to be one of the big perks of the federation approach, being able to create more distinct communities, but outside of a few, they largely seem to run the software as-is, maybe with some backend adjustments to help reduce the costs of operation or the like.
Yeah, and maybe that means I should try making such an instance. I don’t have the funds for something like lemmy.world, but I’ve got the technical background. So maybe that’ll turn into my winter break project
Lol, yesterday it felt like there was at least half a dozen posts about Firefox, mostly claiming that YouTube was slowing them down. Which seemed really bad at first, till I dug into it and saw it was probably an unintended bug with ad handling.
And why were there so many posts? Who wants to see the same post more than once?
That’s not lemmy, that’s all social media (albite divisive topics are a bit different among different communities).
This is a hot take, but I think humanity is slowly turning it’s back on social media because of it’s toxic nature. You can only open a browser and get your nuts kicked so many times before you finally decide you don’t like getting your nuts kicked.
Hmm, yeah I definitely see how I am biased there. I’ve been on social media since its inception, so my opinion is likely influenced mostly by people who have experienced social media for ~2 decades and are sick of it now.
I exclusively surf “top 6 hours” and I’ve actually noticed an uptick in niche community content, lately. Different kind of growth, maybe a sort of settling into itself, finally.
Oh yeah, the sort here kind of sucks. Also just using the site, you lose your place/sort if you click into a link or the comments. Like, if I’m on page 2 of Top 6 Hours, click a link, and then click back into the scroll… pretty sure I just see the first page of Active again until I either refresh or change pages.
Are you using any app, or just through a browser? On a mobile browser, I find the back button to take me to the previous page of posts (so if I clicked into a comment thread on page 3, hitting the back button takes me to page 2). It’s definitely odd.
I don’t think Voyager has this problem. Highly, highly recommend, both on desktop and mobile. The UI is slick enough that it’s kept me here. All I do is laugh at shit memes but it’s perfect
Bro, I noticed the same, it has been a long time since I played around with the sort types, I basically settled with Active and hid all seen stuff, now I feel I get different content with other kinds of sorts.
I subscribed to the communities I care the most about and sort by subscribed and new. That said, across 20 communities it’s probably something like 10-15 new posts per day so after I get through those and interact it’s off to all.
But I do try to engage in the communities I want to see grow.
Let’s look at some numbers and do some napkin math:
Currently, the top post of Lemmy can usually get a little more than 2K upvotes, which puts Lemmy at about late 2010 to early 2011 reddit level of activity, which is right before reddit hits its explosive growth phase in 2012 with SOPA, Kony, and the Obama AMA. While active user count has been going down, the amount of post and comments have both been steadily going up.
You also have to realize that in more than a decade, there was never a reddit alternative that has EVER hit this level of activity. (unless you count 9gag or the_donald for some reason.)
i am hopeful still. and i prefer this to be quieter and hence, safer, honestly. personally, i am not an active user because i’m the type of person that feels shame just for existing, but internet is helping me socialize. still not to the point of having something useful to say without wanting to delete it immediatly, but when i see these posts, i automatically get strenght to give my support. i am not able to maintain a community, be a mod, i don’t know how to code, i just can post supportive messages or be a helpful user adding resources and so. but i should be doing more, yep. i am ashamed of posting, but not contributing probably would be more shameful haha sorry people… hehe
My hypothesis is user account consolidation. I made several accounts across multiple instances (to deal with outages) but now only use a couple of them. So maybe people are not using their alts as much
You also have to realize that in more than a decade, there was never a reddit alternative that has EVER hit this level of activity.
That is a very important point that doesn’t get mentioned enough. Lemmy is the largest and most active reddit alternative around. All the other sites that tried to capitalize on the API disaster have laughable numbers of users and most posts rarely have more than 10 votes or interactions.
Kbin is doing pretty well, they are still holding on to about 6,000 MAUs. Lemmy still has around 32,000, for comparison. Lemmy peaked around 66,000 MAUs at the end of July, but a big chunk of that was probably alt accounts that have since gone dormant.
Kbin’s main developer had some major IRL events that coincided with the reddit exodus so he wasn’t really able to do much work on the code for a while. But now he is back, and another team has also made a fork of kbin called mbin.
Federation is still pretty janky with kbin, so I think that activity should pick up on both sides once we get some software updates and more intermingling of the kbin and Lemmy userbases.
OP is also spot on about this being the largest that a reddit alternative has ever gotten. I’m pretty sure alternatives such as discuit, squabble, tildes, etc have never even approached 10k MAUs, so we are already well past that. If not for the fact that this platform is federated, there would probably already be much more activity. However, the federated structure should become more and more useful as we grow larger, so it’s a worthy sacrifice even if it’s stunting activity for the time being.
It’s worth noting that Lemmy only had around 1000 active users for the first half of 2023. (Kbin had fewer than 40 active users until May 2023!) Currently Lemmy + Kbin have about 38,000 active users.
Exactly. There’s nothing out of the ordinary in that chart, just a quick growth, that led to an overshoot, and now it’s stabilizing In the next months, we will probably see a more stable pattern of linear-looking growth, with occasional peaks here and there.
for what it’s worth, it’s a small active community. Those that stay participate, like a pre-Eternal September internet. I’ve seen memes here before they made it to reddit, that’s a shift in “power” that can’t be understated in the landscape of the internets.
I think “the good ending” looks something like that.
We aren’t beholden to stockholders, so we don’t need perpetual growth. We aren’t driven by an egomaniacal CEO so we don’t need to be the biggest social network around. We just need to find our equilibrium.
I never even new lemmy existed until the reddixit and I never went back because I think lemmy is a lot less toxic. Also worth pointing out that this post alone has more than 800 likes When I firsf came around top posts had 100 likes tops
Yeah Reddit just sucks now. I don’t care much about karma, but it can be discouraging to type out a long answer to help someone and just get a downvote with no comment or anything. Over and over again.
The influx of people who don’t know how the site is supposed to work, on top of the usual toxicity, has just ruined it for me.
Internet in general is becoming boring and tedious. Don’t know if it’s because of my age (Started to use internet when I was 13yo now I’m 31) but the internet isn’t that exciting and curiosity inducing place to me.
Have you continued exploring, or found yourself settling in more?
For me any place stagnates when I start settling into it, so I try to find a new angle, a new question to ask of it, and eventually something gives way to something exciting and fascinating that was right around the corner the whole time.
I continued exploring it. But, aside of one or other interesting sites that catch my attention for long periods of time (e.g. TvTropes), I can’t find internet amusing as I used to do in my childhood/teens. Sometimes I pick a good site that keep me entertained while browsing CloudHiker, but isn’t the same thing anymore.
I literally bought a Lightphone II because I was spending too much time on reddit. Like, I’d stay in bed for an hour just scrolling.
I’ve recently slacked off and started keeping my iPhone (on wifi) next to me when I sleep. I loose interest in like 20 minutes.
I’ve made a point of not posting or commenting on reddit since the recent debacle, but it’s really frustrating when I have some OC that would be great for a niche community that just doesn’t exist in any real numbers on lemmy.
There’s nothing wrong with browsing your social media whereever that be Facebook or Instagram or messageboards like lemmy reddit or 4chan just as long as it’s not impacting your life. Could be a good way to catch up on friends and pass the time. Although “social media detoxing” can be really good for your mental health
I won't lie. I mostly don't engage with content I see here. I didn't do that when I was on Reddit either and mostly for the same reason: I don't really have much to say and, even when I do have an opinion, I don't usually want to engage in what's often a protracted debate about something that will probably just end up being frustrating.
That's not to say I haven't had positive experiences on the Fediverse - I've had more here than anywhere else - I'm just not particularly motivated most of the time.
I do most of my discourse on Beehaw which is protected in many ways. When I used reddit I would often have a comment typed out ready to post and think better of it since I knew it would only drive dismissive and antagonistic responses of the stupidest kind. It may be because of the protections or it may be because of the smaller community but I find a lot less posturing and a lot more actual conversation since I’ve been using this platform. This is what keeps me here rather than reddit. It might be worth engaging in conversations you wouldn’t have on reddit when you’re interested.
I agree… Beehaw is such a wonderful and special place on the internet. I have an account there but I try to keep it separate from my main Lemmy.ca one so that I better hold myself accountable to the server rules, in order to foster nicer discourse.
Well, I want to thank you for sharing your thoughts.
There are a number of thread topics on Lemmy that seem to keep going the same direction (Google, Musk, Gaza, Trump, Windows, etc.), and as you say, it can be frustrating and exhausting…
At the same tine on Lemmy, I had found articles that were worthwhile reading, updates to FOSS that I would have otherwise missed, no shortage of silly memes, and a handful of new perspectives that were positively thought provoking. Those let me look past most of the negative things and stuff that is pervasive on all kinds of forums, Reddit and social media on the whole.
I’ll happily participate with light-hearted content but otherwise I mostly feel like you when it comes to any polarising topics like politics, etc. I wish there were more content about my areas of expertise so I could participate in that but alas there’s mostly developer stuff only. Maybe I’m also not doing my best curating my feed since I tend to mostly browse all.
Yeah, “monthly active users” does not necessarily mean “unique monthly active users”.
I would much rather see activity statistics like posts+comments or something like that. As long as those are looking good, then new unique users will continue to join gradually.
the average lemmy user has 3 alts factoid is just statistical error. the average lemmy user has 0 alts. alts georg, who lives on linux.community apparently and has 20,000 alts, is a statistical outlier adn should not be counted
I completely disagree. What this place needs is a bunch of bot accounts that endlessly spam the top comments from when whatever’s posted was on the front page last week.
Gonna build spezify_bot which will do that, copy over comments and comment “this” and “finally someone said it!” below the top comments. Maybe even some “I came here to say this, too!” at some points?
lemmy still isnt nearly as good as reddit was by a long shot. niche communities suck, porn sucks, c/all content isnt bad but if you scroll once youll just repeat everything on refresh.
but god damn the reddit app is terrible now and the content sucks there now too it literally feels like its trying to be a tik tok clone.
this is a crazy take to make from my comment but i respect ur grind ig
but no, porn and jerking off is good for you abstaining has no benefits and never will. and i can confirm im much healthier and far more shredded than youll ever be.
Pro-tip: sort All by New Comments. Yes, if you refresh, you get repeat content, but you also find the unusual stuff and the repeated stuff is where the conversations are happening.
I miss the good ol’ days when everyone on the planet was free to make their own unique websites using JavaScript and HTML. Now all we have is google twitter tiktok instagram LinkedIn
The quality here is far better with the exception of maybe some user generated text stories. Posts don’t just get lost in a sea of posts. The users here may not be as many, but it appears to have more consistent engagement and far less people PM’ing me offering me Amazon gift cards for feet pics.
This really is a nice place. Even most engaged posts hardly get over 50 comments usually, but 48 of those comments are on topic, sane and unique even on a fandom community. Arguments are heated but mostly contribute at least some point of view rather than being rabid spoutings that either get upvoted (or awarded) to skies above or downvoted to hell unanimously.
We have way fewer posts, even fewer do in niche communities. However, the posts on the bigger communities are quite enough to pass the time. What we actually need is more people interacting with the seemingly dead niche communities of their fandoms and interests.
Big communities keep crossposting a lot of daily news or magazine-worth happenings, which kinda gets tiring after seeing the same post for the 5th time. Hiding crossposts per user settings would be nice to prevent the feeling of only same posts being posted for interested non-fediverse users.
It was founded by a Communist, and decentralization appeals to leftists. The non-Communist lemmy is Reddit, basically, or making your own instance or finding an anti-Communist instance.
It’d be cool to see hosted lemmy instances where people can pay for their own without having to go through the setup process, then curate their own feeds. Unless that already exists somewhere.
This is why Lemmy will never be anything more than tiny a niche platform. It’s a place for the far left by the far left. There’s nothing here in place for anybody else. I don’t just mean politics wise, I mean everything. There’s nothing for fandoms, shows, movies, sports, or anything really. You have to be privacy/tech nerd or some left wing extremist to really enjoy this place more than Reddit. Since the portion of the population that this platform is trying to appeal to is extremely small, this platform will always be small. There’s little to not attempts by the devs or the community to make this place appeal to everybody else.
There are few things the developers could do. For example, they could make the platform easier to use. Many people don’t even reach this place because they’re not that tech savvy or simple don’t care enough to figure it out. It’s much easier for them to just create an account and get started on Reddit or elsewhere. This leaves extremists with nowhere else to go and tech bros… which are the two groups that dominate this place. The process of getting on board and finding instances/communities needs to be easier. There needs to be something like centralized site/app that is easily accessible and shows all the different instances and communities in one place.
It’s not that complicated, go to an instance and sign up.
What actually dominates Lemmy are groups of people that value bottom-up organizational structures, decentralization, FOSS, and other general structural decisions made with creating Lemmy. This leaves people that like these principles, and actually care enough to move to an instance despite mass adoption of a more top-down, Capitalist site like Reddit.
Decentralization isn’t left wing or right wing, that’s just a moronic analysis. Decentralization has a wide appeal but unless it gets simplified and standardized it will never become adopted by the mainstream. Places like Lemmy which are littered with gatekeepers like you doom this place to forever being a niche. If this place ever hopes of rivaling reddit, it needs to appeal to more than political extremists and tech nerds
It depends on which instances you visit, the one I’m in is pretty chill, but slow. Though it does have a Chilean theme going on, so it might be harder for you to find something interesting.
The simple answer is that Communism does not in fact rely on everyone being perfect and unselfish. The complicated answer is telling you to go read Communist theory.
Why do you hold the belief that Communisn requires everyone be perfect and unselfish to function any more than Capitalism does? Can you describe the principle or structure that leads you to believe this?
Honestly, no I’m far from an expert in political or economic matters. I’m just yet to see a system proposed that could work in reality given how complex humans are and how “value” is almost impossible to define when everyone sees it differently.
Plenty of countries have tried though and none have made it work from what I’ve seen. This is possibly (probably) a gross oversimplification but ultimately someone (or some group) ends up at the top of the tree and unless that group is uncorruptable forever it ends with imbalance.
Asking everyone to share as needed and own nothing would be great if everyone wanted everyone else to be equally happy and nobody was trying to take more for themselves (and if everyone had the same idea of what everything is worth). I think at the very least we can agree that some people are more selfless than others and other people will always exploit that given an opportunity.
How deep of an understanding do you have of these supposed proposed systems? As a leftist, the vast majority of mainstream leftist tendencies have strong theory that specifically deals with what you consider to be their ultimate flaw: an assumption of human good. It’s hard to actually answer for every single leftist Tendency, because you haven’t really given any specifics.
As for your second paragraph, there have been remarkably few countries that genuinely have tried Socialism, and all of them were developing countries. Don’t take this to mean that I’m a fan of Marxism-Leninism, but there are two prominent examples of countries that most would consider did in fact “work,” those being the USSR and China.
Again, not defending the USSR or China overall, but asking for clarification on your definition of working, as they were and are economically strong.
Your point about the top of the tree is, bluntly, extremely bad. You offer no explanation why a Socialist or Communist structure cannot be democratically accountable to any lesser degree than Capitalist structures, and assume absolute power. This goes directly against all leftist theory, even Marxism-Leninism, which is centered on the principles of Democratic Centralism.
Your point about Communism being “sharing everything and owning nothing” is also entirely incorrect, and further proves my point. The entire final paragraph is so divorced from any sense of actual leftist theory, that it can only be a product of someone fully believing a right-wing pundit’s propaganda, and not the actual primary sources for leftist tendencies, to the point where I’ll break down each sentence.
Communism, principly, is a far-future status by which the whole of the productive forces can meaningfully provide whatever anyone wants at any time, and work is done for the pleasure of working, rather than for the necessity of being. As such, it must be built towards over a long period of Socialism, which is chiefly Worker Ownership of the Means of Production. Communism and Socialism are built on the idea of earning what you actually work for, rather than allowing individuals to own the products of other’s labor via ownership of the tools they use. You make the error of assuming immediate implementation of Communism, rather than gradual.
We can partially agree on your second point, but given the actual structures proposed by various leftist tendencies, it doesn’t matter for this conversation, and you’ve yet to prove why.
Sorry for the wall of text! I truly think that you should talk to leftists, actually read some Marx, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Lenin, Luxembourg, and so forth, and actually get an idea of what the various leftist tendencies are actually saying. You don’t have to be a leftist, but you absolutely should understand leftism before attempting to disavow it entirely.
Lack of acceptance for what? Leftism is a group of ideologies, and not necessarily one built around tolerating that which they oppose out of a sense of moral superiority.
I was just asking for what you’ve seen that points to Communism working in theory and not in practice, because so far you’ve explained exactly none of that.
I’ve found a good start for your lack of understanding, though! You completely misinterpret the definition and conflate private property with all property, when it is specifically referring to tools and industry, ie the Means of Production. You absolutely own things in Communism, like your house, toys, games, books, etc. You just don’t own Private Property, like factories, restaurants, etc. The definition of Communism is a Stateless, Classless, Moneyless society, and you make the error of pretending to know what exactly that entails by your own worst imagining of your own worst interpretation of said phrase.
Your next paragraph is also very enlightening, you assume Capitalist Mode of Production with Communist consequences! This is precisely what I’m getting at, you believe things like Companies would exist in Communism, when Communism itself is anti-market, and you’re again making the assumption that we can just turn on the big red Communism button and get there, when it must be built over a long period of time, with structures such as worker councils.
Your question about bullshit jobs has numerous solutions, actually. First of all, you’re assuming Communism in modern society, rather than the future, after lots of automation. Socialism would have monetary rewards, even lower stage Communism as well, for performing this labor. Eventually, it would be like your current life. Who cleans your house? You and your roommates, whether that be your friends, or family. In a Communist society, likely everyone would take turns, for whatever bullshit jobs haven’t already been automated away. In lower stages, they would be paid more money until this becomes possible.
Your points on the USSR and China are also wrong. In the USSR, wealth inequality was magnitudes lower than it is in their current oligarchic hellscape, and the Workers actually had a lot of say over how their life went, assuming they didn’t criticize the Politburo. This was referred to as Soviet Democracy, by which worker councils called Soviets decided things democratically at the local level.
No, I wouldn’t live in the USSR or modern day China, because they are developing countries with authoritarian leadership. However, you’ll find that is true across the board for developing countries. Perhaps if the USSR or China ever fully developed and became more democratically accountable, I would choose to live there, but for now you’ll find that quality of life follows development more than structure.
Both Maoist China and the USSR had far less wealth inequality than they have today, both doubled life expectancy, and the USSR had close to 0 homelessness with fully free education and Healthcare. They also lacked luxury goods and had an Authoritarian party controlling the state, but you’re demonstrably wrong about wealth inequality.
I am not a tankie or a supporter of the ML form of Socialism, if it needs to be restated.
If I point to Hitler’s Germany, Pinochet’s Chile, and Batista’s Cuba, does that mean that Capitalism is great in theory and doesn’t actually work in reality because it results in Authoritarianism? The answer is that you must state the why and how this came to be, so as not to repeat it.
Do you genuinely think the USSR and China are the only forms of Socialism that could ever exist?
Please, just read some leftist theory or watch some YouTube videos. All of your false preconceptions are easily debunked even by looking at historical records and doing some light critical thinking. I know you mean well, but you could genuinely have improvements in your understanding.
Wait lemmy is full of tankies? Fuck… When I left reddit and twitter, i thought i would never have to see the terminally online left again.
Oh, and before the leftists come at me, I hate conservatives more, and yall need to admit that joe biden is doing a great job and exactly what you asked.
Same, there’s this political circlejerk everywhere I go here, I may agree with a lot of people here, but different POVs on politics would be refreshing…
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