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

That's a good one. Maybe even demanding "competent police" would be a good aggressive tack. If there's footage of police killing unarmed people in their homes or in broad daylight, then we should absolutely demand more competence and professionalism from them. That puts police unions in a tough spot of not being able to argue against that.

"Why was Doreen Ford, of all people, able to appoint herself as representative of a self-proclaimed movement 1.7 million strong?"

This shouldn't be a surprise. The news interviews many people about a variety of subjects. Either the network frames that person as wholly representing the group, or the viewers imply it. It's convenient, and perhaps even useful in some contexts, to assume that all the people in a group/movement have the exact same ideas and goals. But once a certain size is achieved that is rarely the case.

I work and don't support the antiwork movement, but have some sympathy for the anti-workers. I think a lot of this is about the perverse incentives. There are many jobs where the pay is low while the profits are high. I don't see anything wrong with the thread about easy jobs that was mentioned.

In my own job I have basically given up on trying to get ahead/promoted/whatever. I've been repeatedly screwed by the company, a company that has a reputation for being a best place to work and doing what's right. Why would I continue to work hard or try hard when my experience tells me that it won't pay off? I am looking for better jobs, but if this place is supposed to be so great, I doubt there are better places out there.

For those curious, what I mean by screwed over is that they violate their own policies and contradict themselves. Stuff like giving me a bad rating because the department requires that a manager pick a bad rating to balance out a great rating for someone else. And stuff like saying you can't go from a bad rating last year to a great rating this year, event though policy says the rating should only consider the current year. Or working as a tech lead and then a senior dev for a year each when just a midlevel dev but not being promoted. Being told that you would have been given a great rating, but you "slacked off" the last month, which was the month when you were on PTO for 2.5 weeks for your wedding and honeymoon and you put in extra hours before leaving. The list goes on.

Yes activism is hard, which is one of the reasons why social media gave rise to slacktivism instead. It's a low effort gratification that is reinforced by ones social network.

It's one of the issues with subreddits as they get larger. Low effort "look how great I am for standing up to my boss" posts win the day.

Circa 2016 Reddit became a political propaganda free for all with a ridiculous amount of shill accounts trying to incite others and diminish viewpoints purely on political lines. Serious money was invested by interest groups to eventually help shape Reddit into the hive mind it became. I watched this transition as a long time Redditor and I hated every second of it.

Reasonable, discourse seeking people left Reddit in droves, the effect being that there's then a distilled concentration of politicized accounts, gen Z, and trolls. A few subreddits buck the trend, but frankly I kind of hate Reddit and hope someone makes a new one for the reasonable masses.

According to my understanding of how Reddit works, it was the OG anarchist asshats who had mod powers, not the "liberal" noobs.

Occam's Razor says the OG's got seduced by their newfound popularity. In trying to square the anarchist/liberal circle, they flew too close to the sun. That's too bad. But that's the end of story in terms of a power dynamic.

Calling that "sanewashing and social gentrification" is incoherent. None of the noobs had mod powers. And there are plenty of examples of subreddits modded by irreverent types who would probably eschew a popularity bump in order to keep the sub pedantic. Try complaining about your job in lowercase on r/THE_PACK and you'll see what I mean. :)