1. You are being needlessly confrontational. Not everything is a fight and not everyone is against you.
2. I don’t see this as propaganda either way. You have a guy fed up with war having witnessed his friends violent deaths trying to get away from all the killing. It’s melancolic in a way that shows how we aren’t supposed to be doing this, and that we are hurting ourselves in this conflict.

I used to work for this major company, biggest in my country by far.

Whether it was going well or poorly, they tended to offer severance packages to “cut back” on their staff, to appease the grotesquely overpaid consultants that analysed their finances.

What tended to happen, was that the most qualified people, who had no issues finding another job (often better paying), took those packages (I took home a one year salary after having worked there almost three, then had two months vacation and started a better paying job), which left those who didn’t really have other options, those who did the bare minimum and had a lot of useless meetings.

I guess that’s what reddit is heading for. They are alienating those who contribute the most, the content creators, the mods and the ones who like to engage others. They will be left with their bots, lurkers, racists, reposters and porn-spammers.

Good riddance.

While I have to admit that I’ve been frustrated by the tankies during my short stay on lemmy.ml, I don’t think that’s a fair representation of their views.

Most I believe seem frustrated by a western world that seem entirely too content in accepting a narrative heavily biased in favor of laissez-faire capitalism and right wing narratives, to the extent that it has blinded them to the cruelty of regimes in China and Russia.

I think that in order to foster a fruitful discussion here and avoid the trenches that often form between differing political views on the web, trying first to understand and empathise with an opposing view is crucial. It’s been a good heuristic for me at least, except in those cases where there is zero intention of even trying to understand each other (where just ignoring works well).

Considering that Reddit’s capitalist shenanigans is what brought redditors here, having socialist devs is not necessarily a bad thing.

You’d probably also be shocked at how many communists are strongly involved in FOSS development, and just how nice and great people they are on average.

In any case, don’t worry too much about it, their software is open source so if they suddenly turn evil, a fork is enough to fix it.

Most I know are generally opposed to violence, with some exceptions allowed for any revolution or class struggle.

When it comes to countries like the US or China, using violence in the form of the military or police against your own population is such a big difference in power that any violence ought to be as minimal as possible.

Using tanks and rifles against a group of civilians is so far beyond that, that it’s not within what I think any of the IRL socialists I know would deem appropriate or acceptable.

Whether it’s China or really anything, I’d agree to being critical of any claims made without proper context, yet the context here is the massacre and subsequent cover-up perpetrated by the Chinese government following peaceful protests on the Tiananmen square.

Meeting that with whataboutisms and vague excuses is disrespectful towards the victims full stop.

Being a socialist should be easy, because truth is on our side. It should be easy to point to Tiananmen square and say “this is what happens when the ruling class feels threatened”, just like you can say the same thing when the US government busts their unions or murders their black citizens. Being an unquestioning supporter of either of these regimes is not what socialism is to me, and it never was. I just don’t understand how anyone can reconcile these opposing views in their heads.

Having been a life long socialist myself, it’s a bit mystifying to me how anyone can believe that the atrocities commited by the US somehow makes the PRC or Russia in any way deserving of praise.

For sure I’d like more people to call out the American genocide of its natives, or honor the heroes that fought for their emancipation during the time of chattel slavery.

But I’ll be damned if any of those atrocities will make me defend the human suffering caused by the Chinese or Russian regimes. To me, being a socialist means standing up for the little guy, judging a society by how we care for those who have the least. The only us vs them struggle there is, is the one between the working and the ruling class - not the one between east and west. Idolising Zedong only puts another Emperor on a pedestal. I say fuck them all, western or eastern rulers and billionaires, they’re the real enemies of a social and equal world.

There are some subs that I’d rather see dead, and some that are just amazing, just based on their moderation and communities. r/fantasy is a shining beacon of light in an otherwise dark world, and with it a lot of the sister communities like WoT, Stormlight_archive and similar. They all have a positive feel, including and fair with just enough moderation without becoming heavy handed.

So in a sense it’s not so much the content, but rather the community itself that I’d love to see persisting beyond reddit.