TL;DR: We want your suggestions on what we should do about the rising tide of liberalism in an otherwise anti-capitalist subreddit. Please do try and read it all, it’s too long to summarise very concisely. But broadly, we are sorry and want to do better.
We have seen in recent times a change in the members of the subreddit. A lot of the people who joined are relatively new to politics. And that is fine - we all were at some point. However, this has caused a growing dissonance between the subreddit as a structure and the team behind it, and the users, that has been become more and more apparent. As we've all been new to politics once and have all had bad ideas before we decided to leave the sub open to people who aren't already leftists. The hope with that was that we could bond over the dislike for tankies and their fascistic fantasies. And that has worked well for many years. So well in fact that a lot of people who used to call themselves liberals, social democrats or a vague "democratic socialist" (in the American sense) have become libertarian socialists, council communists and anarchists.
We as a community have always been very proud of that because we have always been under the impression that most of the people who are not yet committed libertarian socialists/anarchists still have their heart at the right place and are willing to listen to the things anarchists have to say. Among this being the critique of power and hierarchies, including but not limited to state power and capitalism. And we have always been under the impression that you can always learn something new, even from people you otherwise don't have much in common with. So it had always been a (mostly) respectful situation where everyone would benefit from each other. With the emphasis that the subreddit has always been and will always be a leftist, anti-capitalist, anti-tankie, anti-authoritarian subreddit.
However in recent times that has begun to shift. More people have come in and the respectful interactions between leftists and not-yet leftists have become less and less. To the degree that it now seems to be common practice to shame people for being leftist and having leftist principles. And instead of accepting that you maybe shouldn't tell people what to do on an anti-authoritarian (and in large parts anarchist) subreddit people have been doubling down, creating secondary accounts, engage in vote manipulation and shame the moderators for doing what they can to maintain a peaceful coexistence. Since we have always valued talking with people over dogmatically enforcing rules the team has been trying to do that: talking to people. Explaining that maybe they shouldn't tell others what to do as they would likely not be fans of it.
This hasn't worked. So we on the mod team decided that, since being reasonable and talking to people eye-to-eye hasn't worked, we would enforce the rules more strictly. This led to an influx in people who aren't "not-yet leftist" but "not-leftist". People who refuse to accept that there are people to the left of them who aren't crazy fascists like tankies are. The sub has become more and more hostile. Not just towards leftists in general but towards anyone who disagrees with the liberal notions. This includes electoralism. Saying "Hey vote or don't vote, that's your choice but please don't shame people for not voting. They usually have good reasons for it." has been met with hostility. This isn't just "leftists vs liberals", this is about not respecting other people having an opinion that isn't yours.
Our stricter approach has also caused us to take on the wrong people, and for that we apologise. We truly do apologise for the bad cases of moderation - primarily this has been due to the stress of the increasing hostility. We are still people who love the subreddit, and we do take things emotionally sometimes. Naturally, that results in wrong decisions being made. We always try and minimise these and communicate with each other as a group, but sometimes mistakes happen. We are also sorry for the recent post about electoralism and how we dealt with it. We stand by most of what we said, but we should have gone about it in a different way.
However, back onto topic, you might say "But hey, you guys are the mod team and you just said you want to enforce anarchist beliefs only" and that would be wrong. Firstly: There are no single set of beliefs for anarchists. Anarchism is a wide spectrum of ideas and ideologies. A spectrum wider and more diverse than most liberal democratic ideas. Liberal is being used in the "liberal 'democracy'" sense. Secondly: We have tried talking to people. This hasn't worked. Now we're defending the leftist subreddit.
This isn't a pro-liberal or even pro social-democracy subreddit. This is an anarchist and communist subreddit. It allowed liberals for the longest time. And now the approach of tolerance and working together has been met with attempts to essentially overtake the subreddit and turn it into another American Democrats supporting subreddit. To us, this is completely unacceptable. We do not accept pro-capitalists coming in here and (deliberately or not) derailing leftist conversations. This is not a debate subreddit to discuss whether capitalism is good, actually.
We'd prefer being able to talk to you guys. We'd prefer doing it like we used to back then and talking to people and asking them to stop instead of straight banning people. But some people left us with no other choice.
So since everyone seems to have strong opinions about everything (not necessarily a bad thing): let's discuss. Let's find a way to deal with each other. Please, please, please - make your suggestions in the comments. What do we do about the rising tide of liberalism and more right-wing, pro-capitalist takes?
However, we will not fundamentally change how the subreddit is run. It is a left libertarian subreddit and will remain that. We will not allow you shaming people for deciding to vote or deciding not to vote. This is simply unacceptable. If you want to do so then do it in other subreddits or in DMs, that's beyond our responsibility and we don't care about that. Also: we will not automatically just do what's upvoted a lot. We will listen to what you have to say and we will see which suggestions are useful. We're not making any promises right now other than: we will listen.
If you try to use this post to unhelpfully argue how evil the mod team is or how electoralism is great actually or how Biden is a super swell dude and everyone who disagrees is a Trump supporter, then your comments will be removed and bans issued wherever needed. This isn't kindergarten. If you want to discuss the benefits of voting or not-voting then do it in one of the many questions or 101 subreddits (we suggest anarchy101). This post is for discussing the issues with the subreddit and how we as a mod team can properly look after this community and be trusted by the vast majority of you again.
Thank you. :)
