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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

#181

Post by JSavageOne »

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,…

Perhaps "casuals" are simply a product of the content they consume, which is determined by the algorithms of the platforms they consume.

Maybe there's something about Reddit's algorithm and mechanics that predisposes it to low effort neutered meme content. After all, the default Reddit homepage subreddits are all trash (by the way this isn't unique to Reddit, same goes for say Youtube).

This is why we need platforms where users actually own their data, and can customize their own algorithms and UIs (ie. what web3 hopes to solve).

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

#182

Post by gavinray »

JSavageOne wrote: post #156

I remember stumbling upon /r/antiwork a few years ago and being so happy I'd stumbled upon a thriving movement that so effectively criticized one of the core principles of society that everyone takes for granted - that everyone must effectively sell their labor to someone else (unless they're rich enough to opt out, or clever enough to create some business or invest their way out). To me anti-work is the recognition…

  >Universal basic income
I'm going to sound like I'm being snarky here, and I promise I'm not.

How exactly is this supposed to work? The government prints money and gives it away for free, nobody has to work?

I don't say this from a place of privilege. I grew up lower class trailer trash and have been homeless.

Maybe I don't understand the concept fully but it seems a bit absurd and unfeasible

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

#183

Post by renewiltord »

jdrc wrote: post #76

Why does no social medium try to tailor against gentrification? It doesn't have to be always exponetial growth, it's fun in the beginning but then entropy takes over. Communities with mechanisms to ensure they keep hovering around a midpoint are sustainable.

lobste.rs does. It's invite-only. At a bigger scale, Metafilter does. It's $5 to join and you can lose your membership after paying the money.

That's the thing with these things. They live and occupy their space and everyone else just says "Why aren't there any X?" because X exists but because it's not so big, no one knows it does.

For the most part, these communities are better because those who would idly ask "Why doesn't X exist?" don't know that X exists. Essentially, there are two requirements to joining the club:

- You should be able to find the door

- You should know why the door is hidden

If you're just like "I want what's on the other side of the door" but you can't meet these two conditions, then you can't have it.

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

#184

Post by Buttons840 »

JSavageOne wrote: post #156

I remember stumbling upon /r/antiwork a few years ago and being so happy I'd stumbled upon a thriving movement that so effectively criticized one of the core principles of society that everyone takes for granted - that everyone must effectively sell their labor to someone else (unless they're rich enough to opt out, or clever enough to create some business or invest their way out). To me anti-work is the recognition…

The memes won't form an organized political movement, but they will win mindshare for whenever that political movement forms.

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

#185

Post by tomrod »

JSavageOne wrote: post #156

I remember stumbling upon /r/antiwork a few years ago and being so happy I'd stumbled upon a thriving movement that so effectively criticized one of the core principles of society that everyone takes for granted - that everyone must effectively sell their labor to someone else (unless they're rich enough to opt out, or clever enough to create some business or invest their way out). To me anti-work is the recognition…

I feel like memes become dominants when negative communication starts to overwhelm positive contributions. Deep thought is costly; creating and re-using memes are effectual communication for ever-decreasing depth of thought in high noise environments.

Or something like that :)

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

#186

Post by jcims »

JSavageOne wrote: post #156

I remember stumbling upon /r/antiwork a few years ago and being so happy I'd stumbled upon a thriving movement that so effectively criticized one of the core principles of society that everyone takes for granted - that everyone must effectively sell their labor to someone else (unless they're rich enough to opt out, or clever enough to create some business or invest their way out). To me anti-work is the recognition…

The key to reddit is avoid any sub with >50k members. For really slow subs you can tack /comments on to the URL to see where the conversation is.

Just picking something at random, /r/goldmining hasn't had a story posted in 2 years, yet there is still some activity:

https://old.reddit.com/r/goldmining/comments/

(Doesn’t with with new layout)

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

#188

Post by smus »

pmorici wrote: post #48
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…

I happened upon the r/AntiWork comments section from time to time before that Fox News segment and it always struck me as full of people who were making every excuse not to take responsibility for their own circumstances and who have a fantasy that low skill jobs should some how pay enough to be life long careers instead of viewing them as stepping stones to bigger and better things.

You cannot structurally expect everyone to have a good career in the us. It is not currently mathematically possible. Please don't delude yourself into thinking the economy could function the same as it currently does without lifelong service industry workers

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

#189

Post by at_a_remove »

This reminds me of something that happened previously, wherein kind of an easy-going, free-wheeling site also got "gentrified" by the neoliberal left. It started with a "hey, maybe you should think a bit before you use that word" and the slippery slope tilted, now the place is all privilege/intersectionality and so on chat. Everyone walks on eggshells now.

They ran off the fun people first, the ones who did a lot of heavy lifting when it came to the attraction of the site. After a while, they started running off the people who were fun and even mostly agreed with them.

It's really hard to keep the spirit of a place the same, and as far as I can tell, it requires that moderators MERCILESSLY CRUSH that first person who says "hey maybe we should kind of cool it with the-" and bootstomp them right off.

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

#190

Post by jcims »

the_snooze wrote: post #106
BitwiseFool wrote: post #40

This reminds me of "Defund the Police", wherein supporters would try to convince others that the slogan did not literally mean what it says. Like AntiWork, It seems to have been started by those who genuinely wanted to abolish the police. But as time went on people joined who instead wanted to reform the police by dramatically cutting back what they were meant to respond to. But the slogan stayed, and was very mislea…

>Defund the Police That slogan was straight up political malpractice. If you have to explain your position, then you're already losing. Something like "government accountability" or "serve the people" probably could have gotten wider support than "defund the police."

These terrible slogans are the product of social media. A good slogan is only going to get juice from one side. A slogan that is supremely dunkable by one side yet scratches the itch on the other is going to surface like curds in spoiled milk.
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