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/r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification

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Re: /r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification

#11

Post by causi »

Besticle wrote: post #5

It takes one bad experience to ruin a reputation. Guy went on Fox news (against the communities) wishes and made millions of people's first impression of r/AntiWork to be negative. In the modern world optics are EVERYTHING and that cannot be understated. Imho the first thing they need to change (which they have with their move to the new subreddit) is renaming it from r/AntiWork to r/WorkReform. Most of the sub (I'd…

In the modern world optics are EVERYTHING and that cannot be understated. Imho the first thing they need to change (which they have with their move to the new subreddit) is renaming it from r/AntiWork to r/WorkReform.

That was the biggest thing in my opinion. AntiWork was too open to the type of people who don't care about workers' rights and were just there because they think the world owes them a living. NEETs are horrible for the cause of labor reform.

Re: /r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification

#12

Post by wsb_mod2 »

belval wrote: post #8

> How exactly did it happen in /r/antiwork? Casuals found it. You know — the people who use the internet to laugh at funny memes rather than treating every post as a blow in a grand ideological struggle. That's the very force of the reddit hivemind. I have no interest in /r/antiwork nor their ideologies, but they kept popping up on /r/all, so they get a constant influx of people aligned with the reddit mean opinion,…

> but it never stays that way for long

It can stay that way, but it's a hard decision to untick these boxes: https://i.imgur.com/E2G9SUh.png

Too early and the sub dies, too late, and you'll wish it died.

Re: /r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification

#13

Post by goodpoint »

> The start of the answer lies in the simple truth of who Doreen Ford was: the person who almost single-handedly built the space, indisputably the single most accurate representative and the one most qualified to understand it.

A community, by definition, cannot be build single-handedly.

Especially a large subreddit, where hundreds of thousands visitors posted stuff, commented, upvoted and publicized the subreddit in other communities.

Re: /r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification

#16

Post by belval »

Besticle wrote: post #5

It takes one bad experience to ruin a reputation. Guy went on Fox news (against the communities) wishes and made millions of people's first impression of r/AntiWork to be negative. In the modern world optics are EVERYTHING and that cannot be understated. Imho the first thing they need to change (which they have with their move to the new subreddit) is renaming it from r/AntiWork to r/WorkReform. Most of the sub (I'd…

It's against the rule to say that you did not read the article, so I won't say it, but:

> In the modern world optics are EVERYTHING and that cannot be understated. Imho the first thing they need to change (which they have with their move to the new subreddit) is renaming it from r/AntiWork to r/WorkReform.

/r/WorkReform exists already.

> Most of the sub (I'd wager >80%) are Americans asking for workers rights that are the norm in western Europe. Things like paid maternal/paternal leave, greater work life balance and paid overtime, flexibly working and WFH.

This is the author's point, that before /r/antiwork realigned itself, their moderator was actually representative of the average /r/antiwork user, that through an influx of left-aligned users, it got "sanewashed". These new users were ashamed of being associated with the original mod, but that mod is still very much the one that was dicussing legitimate /r/antiwork ideas before we ever heard of their fringe community.

Re: /r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification

#17

Post by maerF0x0 »

A while ago I heard an adage about hiring, something like when you hire slow you can teach and grow your existing culture, but when you hire fast the equilibrium flips and the incoming culture is what your company will become.

This is what happened to antiwork. They couldn't disseminate existing ideas and absorb the influx of new culture fast enough, so their culture became the incoming culture, which was approximately that of reddit.

Re: /r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification

#18

Post by belval »

wsb_mod2 wrote: post #12
belval wrote: post #8

> How exactly did it happen in /r/antiwork? Casuals found it. You know — the people who use the internet to laugh at funny memes rather than treating every post as a blow in a grand ideological struggle. That's the very force of the reddit hivemind. I have no interest in /r/antiwork nor their ideologies, but they kept popping up on /r/all, so they get a constant influx of people aligned with the reddit mean opinion,…

> but it never stays that way for long It can stay that way, but it's a hard decision to untick these boxes: https://i.imgur.com/E2G9SUh.png Too early and the sub dies, too late, and you'll wish it died.

TIL, I didn't know that reddit allowed mods to opt-out of /r/all.

Re: /r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification

#19

Post by JasonFruit »

whatshisface wrote: post #9

I think this post may be, in its parlance, "sanewashing" workaholism. For example, let's take this post from the subreddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/lo6wov/my_dads_a_... > "My dads a “working class hero” I wanna punch him in the face, we wanted to visit this weekend, we haven’t seen him in 2 months due to covid, we have three kids and so does he (6, 8 and 9) his wife passed away 2 years ago, and he’…

I see 50 hours a week as work, nothing more. "Haven't seen him in two months" sounds, in that context, like dramatic hyperbole. Dismissing someone's hard work to support a family with an age-related slur doesn't breed sympathy for a position, either.

Re: /r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification

#20

Post by BitwiseFool »

belval wrote: post #8

> How exactly did it happen in /r/antiwork? Casuals found it. You know — the people who use the internet to laugh at funny memes rather than treating every post as a blow in a grand ideological struggle. That's the very force of the reddit hivemind. I have no interest in /r/antiwork nor their ideologies, but they kept popping up on /r/all, so they get a constant influx of people aligned with the reddit mean opinion,…

>"I have no interest in /r/antiwork nor their ideologies, but they kept popping up on /r/all"

The /r/popular and /r/all pages are intensively manipulated by a constellation of leftist activists. Have you ever noticed just how often the same "screenshots of tweets" submissions from people like AOC end up being reposted ad nauseum across several subreddits that basically share the same message - and most importantly - moderators and power users?

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