Vote Brigading is the practice of mobilizing a campaign within an online community to promote or undermine a targeted page, user or belief en masse through the user-voting system. On Reddit, brigading is often employed as a silencing tactic by those who wish to undermine the presence of competing political agendas or opinions.
Sure, but if we’re after a completely direct contrast I’ve also been a mod at /r/socialism, and a number of other spaces. If we get into naming them all we start to enter territory that endangers existing accounts with mod positions though and as I’ve been banned dozens of times in the past and would be banned again and again we’re going to have to avoid going into too much detail. Let’s just say I’ve been prolific in the 10 years i’ve been on that site.
My position on brigading has never changed. I was there promoting it when we totally weren’t doing it as ShitRedditSays , I was there even before srs when we totally weren’t doing it as hailcorporate where we pioneered the subreddits as hashtags approach to advertising a subreddit. If notable reddit drama that pissed off the majority of redditors occurred I probably tried to have some hand in it, that’s how prolific. I take some pride in the fact that reddit is at least less shitty today than it was back then and that is directly the result of “brigading” and harassing the shit out of liberals until they start repeating the things that they’ve been harassed with countless times. Bullying works and calling it “brigading” is bullshit to try and prevent it because the shitbags that receive it know it works and don’t want that social change to happen.
I was there promoting it when we totally weren’t doing it as ShitRedditSays
Did you know that I was the one that started the initial revival of SRS from the dead before it brought fear in the hears of redditors everywhere? :D I’ve been at this game long enough myself. Don’t get me wrong, I am not against the kind of bullying you’re doing here in principle (even though I have my criticisms of the hexbear modus operanti). I am also in GCJ and a lot of other communities like it. But this sort of action requires a special kind of person and a special kind of community. Not everyone can be in that type of community or that kind of person, and that is fine as well.
If you think “brigading” is a worse term than “bullying” that’s fine. I think it’s just semantics at this point. For me the term “brigading” refers to the event, and is meant to communicate the information of “A community is sending their members into another to disrupt in some fashion”. “Bullying” as you define it, could then be defined as “brigading for good cause” in that sense.
I am perfectly aware of typical redditor shitlord gnashing of teeth about “brigading”, but I have also witnessed the flipside of the effects of brigading from a massively bigger reactionary community to a smaller and more vulnerable one and the need for the moderators of the latter to effectively communicate what is going on between each other and their community.
I think we ultimately don’t disagree particularly much. I think it’s a semantical difference where you define “brigading” as always bad (i.e. the redditor definition), where I define “brigading” as a neutral praxis, which can be used for good purposes, or evil ones. Of course, the positivity of a brigade is always in the eye of the beholder, where few communities would see an external force as “good” while the external community will all see themselves as “good” which complicates things, but this further reinforces the idea that “brigading” by itself is a neutral tool.
Brigading IS a worse term than bullying because it functionally gets used to prevent the action.
If the libs had to say “we feel bullied because the mean fempire criticises us for being virulent misogynists” they eventually have moments of clarity among themselves where they can’t help but realise they’re the fucking ones with a problem. But instead they do “brigading is bad and not allowed” which has no requirement to assess what the brigaders are actually saying, doing or criticising. This in turn results in a reduced amount of self reflection.
There’s a reason it caught on in the first place. Because it is USEFUL to the people that recognise it benefitted them. It is useful because it hides the purpose of the moderation behind layers of linguistic bullshit.
If we destroy the term through a campaign of calling it bullshit we functionally force both users and moderators to return to actually analysing what the “bullies” are saying and whether what they’re saying actually breaks any rules. If it does break rules they can be moderated (the fascists) and if it doesn’t break rules other than being an act of rightfully criticising racist, chauvinist, sexist, capitalist bullshit, then they will have to dance with that fact. If they moderate it anyway it outs the mods who are fans of all of those things and helps to cause agitation.
It is completely to our benefit to destroy this concept. Think strategically. If you game this out with enough things you’ll see that there’s very little to no downside for the left (or whatever you want to call those of us that aren’t anarchists) while it is actually very difficult for the right.
Sure, but if we’re after a completely direct contrast I’ve also been a mod at /r/socialism, and a number of other spaces. If we get into naming them all we start to enter territory that endangers existing accounts with mod positions though and as I’ve been banned dozens of times in the past and would be banned again and again we’re going to have to avoid going into too much detail. Let’s just say I’ve been prolific in the 10 years i’ve been on that site.
My position on brigading has never changed. I was there promoting it when we totally weren’t doing it as ShitRedditSays
, I was there even before srs when we totally weren’t doing it as hailcorporate where we pioneered the subreddits as hashtags approach to advertising a subreddit. If notable reddit drama that pissed off the majority of redditors occurred I probably tried to have some hand in it, that’s how prolific. I take some pride in the fact that reddit is at least less shitty today than it was back then and that is directly the result of “brigading” and harassing the shit out of liberals until they start repeating the things that they’ve been harassed with countless times. Bullying works and calling it “brigading” is bullshit to try and prevent it because the shitbags that receive it know it works and don’t want that social change to happen.
Did you know that I was the one that started the initial revival of SRS from the dead before it brought fear in the hears of redditors everywhere? :D I’ve been at this game long enough myself. Don’t get me wrong, I am not against the kind of bullying you’re doing here in principle (even though I have my criticisms of the hexbear modus operanti). I am also in GCJ and a lot of other communities like it. But this sort of action requires a special kind of person and a special kind of community. Not everyone can be in that type of community or that kind of person, and that is fine as well.
If you think “brigading” is a worse term than “bullying” that’s fine. I think it’s just semantics at this point. For me the term “brigading” refers to the event, and is meant to communicate the information of “A community is sending their members into another to disrupt in some fashion”. “Bullying” as you define it, could then be defined as “brigading for good cause” in that sense.
I am perfectly aware of typical redditor shitlord gnashing of teeth about “brigading”, but I have also witnessed the flipside of the effects of brigading from a massively bigger reactionary community to a smaller and more vulnerable one and the need for the moderators of the latter to effectively communicate what is going on between each other and their community.
I think we ultimately don’t disagree particularly much. I think it’s a semantical difference where you define “brigading” as always bad (i.e. the redditor definition), where I define “brigading” as a neutral praxis, which can be used for good purposes, or evil ones. Of course, the positivity of a brigade is always in the eye of the beholder, where few communities would see an external force as “good” while the external community will all see themselves as “good” which complicates things, but this further reinforces the idea that “brigading” by itself is a neutral tool.
Brigading IS a worse term than bullying because it functionally gets used to prevent the action.
If the libs had to say “we feel bullied because the mean fempire criticises us for being virulent misogynists” they eventually have moments of clarity among themselves where they can’t help but realise they’re the fucking ones with a problem. But instead they do “brigading is bad and not allowed” which has no requirement to assess what the brigaders are actually saying, doing or criticising. This in turn results in a reduced amount of self reflection.
There’s a reason it caught on in the first place. Because it is USEFUL to the people that recognise it benefitted them. It is useful because it hides the purpose of the moderation behind layers of linguistic bullshit.
If we destroy the term through a campaign of calling it bullshit we functionally force both users and moderators to return to actually analysing what the “bullies” are saying and whether what they’re saying actually breaks any rules. If it does break rules they can be moderated (the fascists) and if it doesn’t break rules other than being an act of rightfully criticising racist, chauvinist, sexist, capitalist bullshit, then they will have to dance with that fact. If they moderate it anyway it outs the mods who are fans of all of those things and helps to cause agitation.
It is completely to our benefit to destroy this concept. Think strategically. If you game this out with enough things you’ll see that there’s very little to no downside for the left (or whatever you want to call those of us that aren’t anarchists) while it is actually very difficult for the right.