criticalresist.substack.com

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5635902 > twitter went wild because the guardian published an essay with the headline "we each have a nazi within us" and this is my response to that article (from aaron maté's dad no less)

chapotraphouse CriticalResist8 • 6 days ago • 100%

criticalresist.substack.com

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5635902 > twitter went wild because the guardian published an essay with the headline "we each have a nazi within us" and this is my response to that article (from aaron maté's dad no less)

GenZedong CriticalResist8 • 6 days ago • 100%

criticalresist.substack.com

twitter went wild because the guardian published an essay with the headline "we each have a nazi within us" and this is my response to that article (from aaron maté's dad no less)

ProleWiki CriticalResist8 • 2 weeks ago • 100%

We're very open about our stats because we don't have anything to hide. In fact, openly publishing (curated) analytics about website visits is actually helpful to gauge the impact ProleWiki is having, where it's going, where it can improve and where it's expected to change, etc. Current stats on the English-language instance, which is by far the most lively: **On daily visits:** * around 1000 daily visits * this amounts to 30k visits per month! * Unique visits represent 2/3rds of the above figure, which means very few repeated visits _during the same month_. * \>100k pageviews per month * Comes out to around 3 pages viewed per visit (not necessarily homepage -> search -> final page) **On geographic provenance:** * Almost half (but below half) of all visits come from the USA, though virtually all countries of the world are represented over a yearly period. This makes sense as the English instance mostly interests English speakers, of which the USA is the most prominent country of origin on the Internet. * The only countries that did not originate any visits this year so far is the DPRK, Turkmenistan, Niger, Chad, Sudan, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Central African Republic, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea. 2 Asian countries and 8 African countries. Every other state/country/territory (we use a wider map than the 196 UN states) generated at least 1 visit this year. This is still only for the English-language instance. **On charting evolution:** Since we started tracking visits (anonymously and with non-proprietary, self-hosted software) some 695 days ago, we see an increase in daily visits by 1.09 per day. This seems low, but consider that: 1. We still register almost 1000 visits per day, the 1.09 figure is the durable increase over time. 2. It's a positive increase, meaning the website is becoming more popular regardless. 3. This amounts to 30 extra daily visits by the end of the month. By the end of 2024, if this trend continues, we would see a durable increase of 121 daily visits, going from 1000 to 1100 daily. * We finished 2023 on December 31st at 959 thousand pageviews. * We expect to reach 1 _million_ pageviews for the year in early October. * At this same rate, we will end 2024 with 1.163 million pageviews. * This is a 121% difference from 2023. **On the pages visited:** * Without surprise the most visited pages day after day are the index/homepage and the recent changes page. * After that, the most visited content pages generally revolve around patsocs. Pizza index has been popular recently because of Iran's retaliation. Whatifalthist is also a big one because he keeps saying dumb shit on Twitter. * This shouldn't be too surprising especially as these visits mostly come from Google searches. This means we rank generally well for these terms. * Overall, over 850 wiki pages are seen each day. These can be any content type: library books, plain wiki pages, special pages, categories, etc. * While many pages only register between 1 and 3 clicks per day (the vast majority of our pages in fact; over 80% of all visits go to those), these are still important: it's information that we were able to provide to readers that they otherwise wouldn't have read on ProleWiki! * We see that specific pages also receive interest which correlate with wider news. Claudia De la Cruz's page for example was a contender for top-visited for a few days in a row when she announced her candidacy for presidency of the USA. Hope you found this interesting.

ProleWiki CriticalResist8 • 3 weeks ago • 100%

   (yes I also wrote one lol) You can request an account here: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Special:RequestAccount

GenZedong CriticalResist8 • 1 month ago • 98%

all whities (the so-called Romans) ever did was grill their meat in the circus when they were watching a gladiator match and then afterwards drink watered down wine. At least they knew that you should cook food before eating it. Aqueducts?? They didn't even know about germ theory. What would they need all this fresh water for? (To power underground nuclear plants aliens gave them the blueprints for). Sewers?? They shared a single sponge to wash their ass with. They didn't even know about pants ffs, are you seriously implying this bunch of femboys conquered the Celts in skirts? Get real. Aliens took pity on these pasty crackkkers and beamed them some basic 101 tech that other greater civilizations had figured out CENTURIES prior. All their pantheon of like 100 gods are the different outer space aliens that came to visit them at various points in history -- nobody needs 100 gods, let me tell you that much. "Phoebus" pulls the sun with his chariot?? Yeah right. That's an alien that came to them in a spaceship (the chariot) and taught them not to stare at the sun. Then they stole a story from the Greeks because all Roman culture was stolen from other places and counterfeit and gave it a different name to represent their alien and explain it to their pagan asses. How come Phoebus doesn't burn when he's pulling the Sun around?? That's because he's an alien and had advanced technology to combat the radiating heat of the Sun, which modern humans still don't have. Now Iran, that's a real civilization. At least they knew about soap.

I recently cracked my 3ds (which is super easy to do now that they've stopped updating it) and you can use it to play any previous generation games (up to PS1). Wish I knew that before I bought a purpose-made console lol I have a huge catalog of games but since I'm switching out my SD card for a bigger one, I'm looking to basically just download whatever seems interesting. What's your favorite 3ds and nds games? (Please don't say Pokémon)

Comradeship // Freechat CriticalResist8 • 1 month ago • 100%

Self-promotion is seen on the internet as underhanded and suspicious but I really don't mind it when it comes to creating links between communists. What's the difference between self-promotion and other promotion? Submitting a link to your own work is bad, but asking your friend to do it is good? That doesn't make any sense. This is why I've been pro-self-promotion for years, and allow it in every community I've moderated as far back as antifastonetoss on Reddit. There we even worked with antifascist artists to promote their work on the subreddit. The only limitation I would put on it is that you have to interact with the questions and comments to some extent. But that's about it. This creates trust and is the basis of social media: interaction (it it only went one way then you'd act more like a TV or radio channel). Stamping down on self-promotion only shows that you're scared of being one-upped or eclipsed as a mod. We rarely have had issues with self-promotion, and if it helps other comrades boost their work, then that's great. Reddit is terrible for this. Most subreddits hate self-promotion of any kind and will remove your posts over it, or even ban you from the start. Why? Your community doesn't care that someone posted their own work. They will open the post, comment and vote on it by themselves. Why do you need to be so controlling? It's ludicrous to remove a post that has say 15 upvotes, signalling people like it, just because you want to control the flow of information in your subreddit. I've honestly rarely had excesses. Excesses are hard to define but like I said, I do expect you interact at least a little bit with the community. This lets us know a little bit more about you and vet you organically. I've had on Discord a person who only wanted to recruit for their party and never interacted with anything outside of that. They would only talk about their party and post links to their newspaper, ignoring any question pinged to them that wasn't about their party. That was fine for a long time and we didn't really moderate on it either, but eventually other members started feeling like they were just using us and weren't interested in the work we were doing. When we brought this up to them they simply stopped using the server but remained in it. In this case yes it can feel suspicious, like you're just using an existing community. But it also allowed us to learn more about their party and their work. And we've had self-promoters who didn't really interact on Lemmygrad too, but eventually the community organized to discuss what to do with them, forcing them to reply. Like I said the only limitation I would put on self-promotion is that you at least show you're not just spamming everywhere. But even then people will end up discussing your posts regardless of mod involvement. They will ask questions under the post and others will reply. So what's the actual problem? That the OP is posting and not interacting? Why does that matter? Really the only thing that should matter is why they are posting and where to. We had someone here who posted to a sort of incel blog if you remember and eventually took action against that. If it's a website I don't know then I might ask questions and need an answer from OP, but if it's a source I know then what's the harm? Basically think of it this way. In lib spaces people willfully and readily post to the New York Times, Wikipedia, CNN, etc. We don't ask them if they're self-promoting. These organizations have a huge contingent of fans ready to post their links everywhere at a moment's notice. When you don't have that, you have to do it yourself. The first one is apparently not a problem, the second is almost always seen as one. This is the contradiction most places, especially Reddit, find themselves in. They create large communities and it's super easy to get noticed on Reddit because the work of creating a following has already been done. But they are able to create this community because people post in it and interact with it, leading to more people joining it. Without these members posting, they would have nothing to moderate. It then leads to another contradiction between moderatorship and community as they have opposite interests. This is also why we rely on community self-management on Lemmygrad and often take time to respond to controversies on the platform, to soften that contradiction. We can't make it disappear, but we can soften its effects.

Communism CriticalResist8 • 2 months ago • 97%

When we think of "criticism and self-criticism", we often think of criticism we've been brought up to live with: the kind that simply seeks to destroy, or the kind that's naturally antagonistic. It took me a while to truly understand what criticism means for communists; incidentally, working on ProleWiki helped me a lot with that. Criticism is through other words the process of struggle (again a word that seems strong but that you might be more familiar with). Criticism is not necessarily meant to be aggressive or even *find faults*. This, in my opinion, is actually counterproductive and even a deviation from what criticism is for us communists. You might know this better as constructive criticism. Likewise, self-criticism is not necessarily you belittling yourself and listing all your bad traits. I think we look at the pictures of struggle sessions in the early PRC, and we look inwardly at what the word "critique" means to us in late-stage capitalism, and we kinda form a nebulous idea of what that is and run with that. After all, "communists ruthlessly criticize all that exists", right? I think however that criticism can be done with care, and is more productive that way. This is because the purpose of criticism isn't, like I said earlier, to necessarily find faults with what you did or what your org does. A mistake I see often is to think of criticism as your chance to start blasting whatever woes you can think of, and the other party has to sit there and take it because you're doing it marxistly. Criticism has to be productive and lead to action; it breaches from theory to practice. Practice then makes good on the criticism, changes the state of things (dialectics, if you are not at the stage you can tell readily yet), and then further criticism can happen. The **point** of criticism, the whole reason we are doing struggle sessions in the first place is precisely to enact the best praxis we can, and do so quickly. We are not in a position right now as communists that we can build a party in a hundred years. We need to build it now, and for that we need effective praxis. This is the whole point of doing struggle sessions and crit and self-crit. This is something both parties in a struggle session must first understand and mutually acknowledge. The critic is not here to disparage your efforts, but to help them reach their higher potential. You are not here either to shield yourself from all criticism on the basis that you're too proud to hear it or that your successes outweigh your shortcomings -- I prefer *shortcomings * to "faults" or "issues". I also prefer *challenges* instead of saying something is impossible; a challenge can be overcome. Some criticisms we've dealt with on ProleWiki for example was super simple. It wasn't even a disagreement, which can happen sometimes and doesn't mean your idea is necessarily wrong or misguided, just that it's perhaps not fully realized. Sometimes, we offer up ideas and then debate them in what I think is the ideal struggle session. Nobody necessarily disagrees or thinks "it's a stupid idea, why did you even bring that up, this'll never work": that would not be criticism, that would be cathartic bashing. A criticism has to offer a solution or, at the very least, seek improvement selflessly. I myself have often debated ideas editors proposed not because I thought they wouldn't fit or we shouldn't follow up on them, but just trying to help them make sure they've covered all their bases and have thought about all questions before they proceed. **Thus the goal is to reach the full potential of our ideas so that we issue the best praxis once we get down to work, saving time and effort.** I'm talking about very practical critic self-crit here because that's mostly where I employ it, but this works also in more theoretically grounded struggle sessions, where you discuss strictly theory and which line is correct. By my own conclusion of what criticism is however, criticizing a party line that the party refuses to change (and calling attention to that fact) would not be criticism, but I think it is -- it is the most important criticism we can make as marxists, in fact. So remember that this is a model and not the final analysis. The process of criticism **acknowledges, weighs, analyzes**, and then **acts. ** Acknowledge criticism that applies. The point is to make you stronger, even if it hurts to hear (it shouldn't if you follow the basis that it's done in good faith). Then, weigh it: is this something we were aware of? How dangerous is it? How difficult would it be to overcome, and is there something more urgent we need to look at first? Analyze before acting: what can we do about it with our current resources? Is it realistic to? Propose some solutions to the problem that was brought up. And finally, deploy all of that to *act* on the criticism and improve. I guarantee you in one year, you'll have forgotten people made the criticism, but you'll remember forever that you did improve with it, and that you are in a much better position after it than before.

Communism CriticalResist8 • 2 months ago • 100%

The dialectic between teacher and learner is one of great importance but is often misunderstood or, perhaps in more weighted terms, is not brought to its full potential by the teachers. This permeates in the marxist environment, which is the only one I'm concerned with currently, where teachers do not realize their role and full capabilities as such. It remains by and large -- in my experience only -- as not a dialectic, but a unidirectional conveyance. The teacher speaks, and the learner listens. This is the metaphysical model. But are we not all being taught, and thus learning, at any time? From discussions I've had where I started in this metaphysical "authority" role of the teacher (a role most people, me included, subordinate themselves to rather easily as what they think a learner should be) and ended up learning more than I taught. I may know dialectics well. But I may not know economics well. A learner is a fluid thing, it goes through stages back and forth. I teach dialectics to someone, and I learn economics from them. By asking their questions, they help me refine my understanding -- and capabilities to teach -- of dialectics further. The teacher should explain, promote, make considerations. The learner should retain, evaluate and analyze. This requires for the learner to understand that their role is not simply to nod along and retain everything from the authority, and for the teacher to be open to changing their mind and methods. The dialectic (contradiction) is resolved when the session gives birth to a new third thing, in this case similarly to the "original" Ancient Greek dialectic, and both parties come out with a third new idea that did not exist previously. The learner has learned and taught, and the teacher has taught and learned in a way they both further their understanding of the topic. It can then repeat with the learner being able to become a teacher (in any capacity) and the teacher having refined what they will say (and how) to the next learner. I see the complete opposite too often; marxists that would rather confirm their biases, eschewing their own capabilities as teachers (and learners -- many think of themselves too highly to still be "learners") and completely smothering any potential their interactions may have had as a teaching opportunity, at least dialectically. You see this most often on social media, where the order of the day is to make cheap jokes, quick "stream of consciousness" quips, and confirming one's own already formed beliefs. In this role, they are being metaphysical (or at the very least undialectic). It's not bad for the sake of it and me being able to use the jargon; it's a malformed process because dialectic cannot take place, and cannot make things advance. Thus they remain stuck where they were exactly before: further confirming their belief that their tendency/ideas are the best, and working not to *advance* that tendency or idea, but to _disprove_ that any other is good.

ProleWiki CriticalResist8 • 2 months ago • 100%

**A:** >Imperialism is the highest stage of the capitalist mode of production, in which monopolies and cartels become the prevalent economic force of society.[1] > >Lenin is often credited for having synthesized a Marxist analysis of imperialism with the publishing of his pamphlet Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism in 1916, most notably on the foundation of the earlier work of John A. Hobson entitled Imperialism: A Study. Beginning with the first paragraph of his pamphlet, Vladimir Lenin wrote that rapid growth of industry and concentration of production in growing enterprises represent the key characteristic of capitalism.[1] > >Multiple theorists have updated, deepened, developed or critically engaged with the classical analysis of Imperialism. Other theorists developed different conceptualisations, including most notably Kwame Nkrumah, remaining situated within the framework of scientific socialism. Most recently, the concept of neoimperialism has emerged in the work of Cheng Enfu. > >The development of imperialism in the global economy also reinforces a dialectical relationship between core-periphery countries, mainly dependency and subordination of underdeveloped countries to imperialist economies. In conjunction with these developments, new theoretical models were proposed to understand developments, such as dependency theory and world-systems theory. **B:** > Imperialism represents the highest stage of the capitalist mode of production, where monopolies and cartels dominate the economic landscape of society. > >Lenin is widely recognized for synthesizing a Marxist analysis of imperialism with the publication of his 1916 pamphlet, "Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism." This work builds on John A. Hobson's earlier study, "Imperialism: A Study." Lenin begins his pamphlet by asserting that the rapid growth of industry and the concentration of production in expanding enterprises are key characteristics of capitalism. > >Numerous theorists have subsequently updated, expanded, and critically engaged with the classical analysis of imperialism. Notably, Kwame Nkrumah contributed significantly within the framework of scientific socialism. More recently, Cheng Enfu has introduced the concept of neoimperialism. > >The evolution of imperialism in the global economy reinforces a dialectical relationship between core and periphery countries, highlighting the dependency and subordination of underdeveloped nations to imperialist economies. This dynamic has led to the development of new theoretical models, such as dependency theory and world-systems theory, to better understand these global economic relationships. For the purpose of this question you can only choose between A or B. Please explain your reasoning.

ProleWiki CriticalResist8 • 2 months ago • 100%

If you didn't hear you can now edit ProleWiki without requiring an account, but you can't create pages that way. In this thread you can ask us to create pages for you and then with the anon edit feature, edit them yourself. To avoid your edits being rejected, please note that: * Your IP will be published if you edit anonymously, use a VPN or similar if you don't want that. * Read the [editing guidelines](https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/ProleWiki:Editorial_guidelines) and * Read our [Principles](https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/ProleWiki:Principles). * We also require every claim to be sourced in some way. We have citation templates that you should use and fill out as much as possible. As for requesting a page, please provide the title you want for it _spelled exactly how you want it_ as the wiki is case-sensitive. I'll probably do a look-over first anyway to see if we already have a page for it.

chapotraphouse CriticalResist8 • 2 months ago • 100%

criticalresist.substack.com

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5045414 > Follow-up to last week's article about how feudalism is misrepresented in a certain game.

Socialism CriticalResist8 • 2 months ago • 100%

criticalresist.substack.com

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5045414 > Follow-up to last week's article about how feudalism is misrepresented in a certain game.

GenZedong CriticalResist8 • 2 months ago • 100%

criticalresist.substack.com

Follow-up to last week's article about how feudalism is misrepresented in a certain game.

One day -- it had been perhaps months since I'd been travelling with the Orcs -- I saw Jebediah about to speak up, with the now familiar glint in his eyes as he looked at me, the glint I learned to recognize all too well in my time alongside him, that let me know he was going to make fun of me once more. I cut him off. "And you - You're too proud, too _conceited_ to accept that Elves may be good people too! You think you're better than me, but where has your revolution gotten you? You make grand speeches, sure, and you rally people, but what have you *achieved*? You speak of a time past, of your people lost, but worry about the present for once! You think I can't help you, you say you don't need me in the revolution, but you've achieved more with me at your side here in months than you've done in years by yourself!" I yelled out, right in front of him and the council. Jebediah looked at me for a moment, but he showed no emotion. He endured my words. Then he breathed in, and for a moment I thought he might lunge at me for my transgressions. Instead, he calmly turned to one of his friends and motioned for him to bring forward his musket. "Are you going to pick it up?" "What do you mean?" "If you want to prove you have our interests at heart, that this is your fight too, then pick up the musket and join us fully." I looked at the weapon. It's not that I'd never handled a weapon -- I'd used a bow plenty of times before to hunt back in my homeland, but... a musket was a whole different thing. Jebediah challenged my gaze. "I thought not," he said. "You claim you want to help us, you say you are on our side, but when it comes down to what matters, you would never die for us. You will go back to your cozy life in the glades, while we sacrifice our own down in the ditches. And that is why I believe you, but I don't listen to you."

GenZedong CriticalResist8 • 3 months ago • 100%

I’ve been playing that game Lords&Villeins a bit and the description on Steam says it’s a “feudal economy” where “villagers runs their business and trade in the free market”. You might have seen this pic on Twitter  And yeah, it has nothing to do with the feudal mode of production at all, but not actually because of that description. I’ve been thinking of writing an article about this game delving into how this type of games incentivize you to actually care about the collective outcome as well as what the feudal mode of production was actually like, but I have no idea if this is interesting to people and in line with that they expect of my writing. Is this an article that you'd like to read?

ProleWiki CriticalResist8 • 3 months ago • 97%

If you remember one week ago we rolled out a feature on ProleWiki so that any reader could edit without an account (we now call it anon editing internally). I've been keeping detailed stats on this feature for one week and to be honest I'm getting too tired of this to do it for another week, so here are the 1-week results that I'm gonna stop at: ``` **Contributions so far:** 28 sent in total, of which: 21 approved 7 rejected ------------------------ **Rejection reasons:** Sources issues (3) Possible wrecking attempt (1) Trolling (1) Duplicate edit (1) Null edit (1) already merged (1) ------------------------ ``` Note that these stats count each individual edit sent to the moderation queue as a different instance. For example, if a reader submits an edit that is rejected and then fixes the issues and resubmits, and the second one gets accepted, it will count as 1 rejection and 1 approval. However I didn't count edits that were approved and then undone, which allows us to notify the editor of the rejection reason through the changelog. These count as 1 rejection only until the user makes another contribution that's approved. I don't know if that makes sense. As you can see, we approved most edits (75% of them). The most common reason for rejecting was due to source issues of any kind (missing, incorrectly filled, not entirely filled, etc). We've had one troll (probably a liberal. Spoiler alert: it wasn't even a funny joke), one possible wrecking attempt that we preferred to reject, and otherwise the rest was just technical quirks. Null edits for example are when you commit an edit to the wiki, but without having changed anything. Yes, you can do that for some reason. I think it's a testing feature. I didn't keep logs for the approved contributions, but they were largely made by 2 users whom I believe had requested accounts in the past. Many contributions were very small in size (correcting typos or grammar, which is always appreciated), but some were also a bit lengthier -- one or two paragraphs worth. One reader asked for a page to be made on a video game (Crisis in the Kremlin) and filled it out despite not having an account. The longest contribution filled out the entirety of the page on the PRCF (Pole révolutionnaire communiste français), but unfortunately we had to reject it as it had very few sources. If sourcing applies to our editors it applies equally to our anon contributors! All contributions are valuable though, and it's great that we've had not only 21 in just one week (an average of 2.5 a day), but also that they were there at all! This is now content published on ProleWiki that we didn't have one week ago, so all contributions are valuable and appreciated. This pilot project also allowed us to gather some data and refine our relationship to anon edits. One thing I want to show the anon editors is the documents we send to every new editor before they start editing, so they can see what makes a good edit and how to make it. That way we could also avoid sourcing issues and overall fewer rejected contributions. Gonna have to think about how to do that. Being able to talk directly to the anon editors would be cool too, but no idea how we could make that possible. The system as a whole isn't really set up for that. Their best bet is to join our Discord, maybe we'd make a channel specifically for regular anon editors. Though at this stage you're probably better off just joining as an editor. ### What's next? We're totally going to keep the anon edit feature up. I can't guarantee we'll always go through them quickly and that we might not disconnect it sometimes for reasons, but it's becoming a permanent fixture of ProleWiki. We're hoping to be able to open it to the library and even to creating pages, but no word on that yet as it depends on what we are able to make this thing do. ### Should you still request an account Yes, you totally should! It gives you greater access to the community, no more moderation log, and allows you to participate in shaping ProleWiki's direction. But in the meantime, you can help share your knowledge without having to go through a long vetting process.

Privacy CriticalResist8 • 3 months ago • 36%

criticalresist.substack.com

Let me know if this isn't relevant to privacy-minded people but it seems on topic considering the org AND not getting caught up in honeypots for your own security.

ProleWiki CriticalResist8 • 3 months ago • 97%

Read the release here that explains how this all works: [https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Essay:ProleWiki_is_allowing_its_readers_to_edit_pages!](https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Essay:ProleWiki_is_allowing_its_readers_to_edit_pages!) We'll be running this as a pilot project from 1 week to a month to collect data and assess the feature, and then either keep going with it or pause and reiterate. Feel free to ask questions --- some stats after the first weekend: 10 edits approved 5 edits rejected We log the reasons for rejections, and so far they are: Source issues (3) Possible wrecking attempt (1) Trolling (1) Duplicate edit (1) So only 3 real edits were rejected and 2 of those improperly sourced edits were fixed by their author afterwards. 1 was rejected literally just a few minutes ago so it’s still ongoing. Edits that were rejected and then approved once fixed count as 2 edits (1 rejected, 1 approved). Overall not so bad for the first weekend, definitely a good amount of proposed edits, 15 in total so far. We are also refining our stance towards anon edits with this pilot period, allowing us to understand how they can fit within our model and how we relate to them.

GenZedong CriticalResist8 • 3 months ago • 98%

Update: they have ascertained that Parabola was Wisconcom lmao. In that light, if correct, it's more of a wrecker doing what he does than the project failing. We still don't have a lot of info though. They've written about it here: https://wiki.leftypol.org/wiki/Leftypedia:Community_hub Earlier today, the new rendition of Leftypedia finally imploded. Going off the [block list](https://wiki.leftypol.org/wiki/Special:BlockList?wpTarget=&blockType=&limit=500&wpFormIdentifier=blocklist), it's a real mess. Leftypedia was brought back from its last incarnation in early 2023. If you remember (or not), it had issues with Wisconcom then who latched onto it. The problem is because they had no active admins and couldn't find them, they couldn't ban him indefinitely. Eventually, they did find new admins who kicked the project back into gear, or at least they tried to. Earlier today though, it seems there has been a split and one of the admins (Parabola) basically banned all the others as well as several other users. Where it gets weird is that another admin (Aussig) then banned Parabola, but didn't undo the bans Parabola issued. Aussig also banned me and Forte's account, which we used back when Wisconcom was on there, for "ideological deviations", but Aussig calls themselves a Marxist-Leninist on their user page. From what I understand there was a split between the different tendencies. So anyway that's how the "left unity" wiki is going lol sorry but this is funny.

ProleWiki CriticalResist8 • 3 months ago • 100%

This was a while ago if you remember, we advertised a crit-self-crit form everywhere and collected submissions. and the reason we didn't publish the criticisms we received yet is because, to be honest, they were pretty tame! Which is pretty cool, it signals that our readers (and editors, as both were allowed to use the form) don't have deep problems with ProleWiki. We were also discussing the submissions with the editorship and the idea was to collect basically everyone's opinions on each submission, and then make a unified statement out of these. This is still in progress. In the non-editor submissions we note 2 reactionaries who just wanted to rant anonymously (real brave), and otherwise received the following: * let non-editors edit (we've looked into this before and are looking at possible solutions, but yes we were already aware) * making it easier to create an account, which can be interpreted in different ways. I assume they meant the vetting questionnaire, or at least included it in their request. Unfortunately we depend on this form only to decide whether to reject or approve an account request, so it has to be exhaustive. We're aware that this can turn away some users, at the same time, if you're going to be writing on an encyclopedia, writing a vetting form shouldn't be much of a hurdle. At least that's how we see it. But we're always thinking about ways to tweak it. * a couple requests to add or edit some pages. We can't really force the editors to write on stuff they don't want to (no mechanism for it that we want to enact). But I think we took care of one of the requests since it was a simple page edit? Idr entirely, it's been a bit. * someone just said "keep up the good work" thank you :) Mostly I was disappointed that our biggest detractors, anonymous people on Twitter and Discord speaking in the safety of their own community, did not show up in this form! We specifically made it anonymous and advertised it as far as we could, but like I said, all criticism was very tame -- as you can tell from the non-editor list above. Where were the maoists decrying us as dengists? The ultras decrying us as trotskyists? And the hoxhaists decrying us as revisionists? This was your chance to tell us to our face without repercussions!! I can only conclude that they actually don't care all that much and just want to rant. I did add some of the criticism I came across online myself here and there to the form just so the editors could discuss it, but it's not the same when someone has to relay the words versus the person actually explaining the issue in their own words. The editors were actually comparatively more incisive. Relatively speaking. They made up the bulk of the submissions and mostly wanted better tools to do their job more easily or had ideas to improve our processes. Still, like I said, they were comparatively more direct with us, knowing that this was gonna be shared with the entire editorship also. Some of the submissions (only the interesting ones and removing my own): * we don't check account requests in other instances (not that there are many) and sometimes a request might sit there for a month before we notice it. Definitely a problem. * Improving the discoverability of Library and Essays works, compared to "main" (wiki) pages. * Getting more people involved in agitprop work. * One editor criticized their performance, saying they're not as active as they'd like to be. * Figure out a way to make people who might not qualify for an account still be able to participate to some extent (that might have been mine, or not, I honestly don't remember) * Focusing more on the library (personally I feel it's really starting to look like something! But I would like to simplify it, what I feared would happen is starting to happen and it's starting to become difficult to navigate) * One editor made a whole host of suggestions that all follow each other, kinda difficult to summarize but basically all strategic-level plans for the long-term. * Someone suggested we make debate pages, there's even a plugin for this. This would allow people to hear both sides of a struggle session and make up their own mind following the arguments. * Moderate the discord more actively, which we've started doing. Some people start feeling too comfortable on that platform. * Make more obscure (or less famous let's say) content accessible, including writing pages on topics that are not necessarily being talked about. Like everyone has material on China for example (the problem is you have to know about these obscure topics T_T) * Organize weekly get-togethers in voice chats to work. Like a study group if you've been to college, but for working on the wiki. So like I said, comparatively more direct and deep, which is good. I would have loved for readers to open up more, but it's also good to see that editors feel comfortable enough to raise this (some even left their name despite not being required) We will probably open a more permanent crit-self-crit form and keep that one linked somewhere so people can more readily reach out; the one we opened for this session was closed after a month or two (I think it was 2) after submissions had stopped coming in, so we could review what we got so far. And remember, **you only have to fear self-crit if you have something to hide!**