No.11839
This is a rough analysis of leftypol from a political perspective. Not a lot of time was spent on thinking out the details of this analysis, so it lacks any proposed solutions. It needs critical feedback in order to be fleshed out properly.
The assumption being made here is that leftypol ought to be a discursive platform in support of a left-wing political movement. From this perspective, there are two main issues with leftypol:
- threads tend to surround disconnected topics and events, involving discussions that are low-effort and bereft of value
- leadership drives poor quality discussion by creating irrelevant boards and wantonly censoring posters by highly subjective standards
From this perspective, leftypol ought to have the following characteristics:
- threads should focus more on analysis and critique; organization and practical activities; and reporting of politically relevant events
- posts should be serious and thoughtful, made by users with a sincere desire to pursue the goals of the movement
- leadership should encourage discussion directly connected to the movement, where each board exists to categorize threads by a purpose
- moderation must strictly follow a set of clearly-defined standards which follow from the principles of the movement
Leftypol lacks these qualities because it is not in support of a movement with a political programme in any meaningful sense, and because of the nature of imageboards as a discursive platform. The absence of a programme results in a lack of purpose that engenders reactive rather than proactive engagement, which tends to be driven by superficial posts crafted to generate strong reactions, posted quickly to be nearer the top of the thread and thus among the first to be read. In turn, threads tend to receive more engagement by staying near the top of the catalog by being bumped, creating a feedback loop where impulsivity is rewarded, favoring quantity over quality. While high-quality posts and threads do exist, they tend to be rare and are often tainted by the degenerated culture of the platform. Apart from the imageboard as a technology, the history of imageboard culture arguably plays an equal part in how the platform as a whole is structured.
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No.11840
This might be a blind alley, but let's take a quick and dirty look at how for-profit platforms work. Take Twitter/X for example. Most(?) of its revenue comes from advertiser fees and the sale of data. To this end, advertisers need clearly defined audiences to target, whereas the value of data relies on plentiful and consistent user engagement. The platform supports this by encouraging the development of communities surrounding cultural products and specific personalities. Nearly all content revolves around some form of personality marketing or cultural production. Users are given numerous ways to superficially engage with and curate content. They are served content through an endlessly scrolling feed interspersed with advertisements, and the platform uses various limitations and nudges to encourage content creation which can be consumed with minimal cognitive load. Moderation is oriented towards securing communities and advertisers by policing speech, and eliminating junk content (though what counts as "junk" is pretty much arbitrary at this point).
Other platforms with a developed business model tend to follow the same pattern, driving the process of market concentration and degeneration ("enshittification") that defines a lot of social media, but this could change over time. Smaller cultural producers would prefer a simplified version of decentralized platforms similar to Mastodon, since the lack of such a business model puts less pressure on the platform's developers and maintainers to interfere with content consumption, as well as allowing for interoperability between a multiplicity of niche sub-platforms that can organize in ways that better serve their specific needs. Since existing platforms are under immense financial pressure to maintain their existing business model, it's likely we'll see the development of sophisticated services that help users automatically collate their data across multiple platforms and export them to another one.
With this in mind, as long as we're still assuming that leftypol is supposed to be political, it really doesn't make any sense for it to be structured like other imageboards considering the business model that the most prominent ones operate under. However, simply altering the structure of the site wont help if it still lacks a clearly defined political movement to drive the kind of engagement that is needed.