Steel bands tighten around my heart. My knees knock and my vision wavers. But then I remember I’m not on Reddit, and metacanada has not yet replaced the moderation team with pod people.
What measures are in place to ensure the continuing security of our moderation team? If it won’t compromise them to tell us.
Are you saying I can subscribe to this community without negatively affecting my blood pressure? I’m slightly skeptical but I’ll give it a try.
I think, oh shit where did onGuardForThee go?
Then I realize that over here not everyone is a NatPo columnist like it seems to be on the Canada subreddit hehe.
I’d say the best way is probably to post and comment stuff you’d want to see. Participate actively.
It’s harder to change a community’s vibe after its been established, so now is the best time to get some social inertia and make this into a more pleasurable space than /r/Canada.
It might be hard, but they did it. /r/Canada used to be a great community. It was attacked, invaded, and destroyed. This post is tongue-in-cheek, but if there is any significant Reddit migration, I don’t doubt that the community really will be attacked.
I observed that crazy transition too. I think the big question was whether it was coincidental/series of unfortunate decisions/mistakes that led to it, or if it was a concerted effort by a group.
It isn’t coincidental. I’m afraid I don’t have much of a source for this, but back in the day I lurked (out of morbid curiosity and misplaced sense of “know your enemy”) on stormfront, one of the earliest and biggest neo nazi online communities.
There I saw a lot of talk about how to specifically target and subvert local subreddits. Their plans were detailed and long, involving very slowly transitioning the subs content further and further right. Local subreddits tend to be easier to subvert than typical subs of their size because they tend to have a less “online”, critical audience and everyone is in the same time zone.Lots of people who only show up once a month or so.
The impact of propaganda on a local sub is also much greater than when it is spread out over a more general international community.
/r/Canada was definitely a successful target of their hate and even though they have faded now the damage is still done.
No doubt, I appreciate someone bringing this topic up because as you say, right-wingers will try to sabotage any healthy online community. They do seem to especially target local, provincial/state and national subreddits, which can be fertile grounds for propaganda. I’m pretty active on /r/newbrunswickcanada where there are definitely a ton of right-wing shit-stirrers trying to establish their perspective on issues.
But while moderation is important, the community has to be actively involved in making this space into what we want to see. A big reason /r/Canada sucks isn’t only the presence of the /r/metacanada types, it’s the absence of reasonable people. I also remember when /r/Canada was decent, and I didn’t leave when I first starting seeing fashy takes, because you’ll see those everywhere on the internet. I left because eventually I realized most people I could enjoy discussing with were leaving/had already left.
The more one participates in an online community, the more one can attract like-minded people to that community.
I dunno, I think we’ve come to a point where we really do have to distinguish between potential conservative allies, and outright fascists.
I think in the interest of building a healthy community we can acknowledge that the problem is not “people with right-wing views” despite whatever other problems might be fair to blame on them as a block. We’re talking about aggressively anti-social people who don’t really believe in governance and humanism at all. They appropriate right-wing politics when its convenient but they aren’t really political in that sense. They’re just assholes.
I know the feeling…/r/Canada was and is an embarrassment. Everyone here seems reasonable so far and I really hope it stays that way.
What’s pod people
Someone who looks and acts like a human being but is in fact a malevolent alien that has killed and replaced the original human being. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pod_People_(Invasion_of_the_Body_Snatchers)
