YOU are speaking!

As many are aware, there has been a lot of site drama in the past week or so. This is NOT a post to discuss that, and I ask that you keep all serious discussion about it on the pinned posts it belongs in. What I am looking to do here is ask the community what they would like to see from c/agitprop going forward.

There have been ongoing discussions on Hexbear regarding making more serious posts, having a place for effortposting to get noticed (and thus incentivizing more to be made, nobody likes spending hours working on en effortpost for 5 upbears), and having a more focused place for less casual/more academic discussion. The nature of this comm, or at least what the intended purpose was supposed to be upon its inception, was to give Hexbear users a place to produce and find agitprop for use in everyday discussions. Given these two statements, last week I made an impromptu U.S. Election response/commentary resource Megathread here on c/agitprop. I figured that perhaps this was the place to open up to users for less casual/more serious analysis and discussion regarding the U.S. election, like… for actual traditional agitprop purposes.

The post was a huge success, and the community received tons of high-effort posting from individuals into the Megathread posting their own takes on the U.S. election, many references and direct links to highlight other Hexbear user’s great effortposts elsewhere on this site, and good resources from outside of Hexbear. In my opinion, this post/style of post could be a useful and engaging format for effortpost generation/congregation of larger news events in the future.

Now finally for the purpose of this post: What would you like to see from c/agitprop going forward? Feedback on the U.S. Election response/commentary resource Megathread is of course appreciated, and I’d love to hear any ideas regarding how it went/if you (dis)liked it/holding a similar thread in the future, but please do not limit your input based only on what you have seen so far from this comm. This community is, of course, only what we make it, so any and all feedback is greatly appreciated and goes a long way towards improving everybody’s user experience.

Below I will list a few ideas I have seen floated by the community for c/agitprop in the past. Additionally, I will try to keep this list updated with any ideas that are provided in the comments of this post as well in order to highlight them for discussion.

•Effortpost Megathread for larger news events (frequency/guidelines for “larger” TBD here)

•Agitprop Megathread running parallel to the Weekly News Megathread for more nuanced discussion/analysis to be used both on Hexbear and elsewhere

•Ongoing Agitprop workshop/resource thread to organize the Hexbear community’s many skills and have relevant, ready-to-go agitprop for current events ready for dissemination outside of this site

•Reference guide for left/left-adjacent spaces to crosspost agitprop material to

•Agitprop field report for returning to Hexbear (potentially contest style) and seeing where agitprop is reaching the widest audience and receiving the most engagement

•”Quick Draw” style + up to date archive of good agitprop in order to quickly debunk common talking points

•Keeping on top of current events by preemptively posting Effortpost Megathreads for known upcoming events (Major elections, for example)

•Keeping a calendar of known upcoming events to help prepare agitprop ahead of time

•Highlighting past major events or public figures to conduct a postmortem effortpost analysis

  • ReadFanon [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    2·
    8 days ago

    I was reluctant to ping you haha. I didn’t want to be like “Come look at the praise I’m giving you, now agree with me and support my take” because it felt awkward to me to do that.

    If you were a topic of discussion rather than just applause I would have pinged you, if that makes sense - your recent efforts are a lens through which I analysed recent experiences and it shaped my perspective on our collective readiness to deal with big moments in politics but it was more about what your efforts catalysed in my thinking than it was about discussing you or your efforts directly.

    I still don’t need credit, honestly. I didn’t do much. It’s just that I thought it wouldn’t be right to not address the credit thing upfront because the risk is injuring your reputation unintentionally all because you respected my wishes. If it weren’t for that consideration I wouldn’t have brought it up at all but I didn’t want to stir up rumours or drama with people assuming you don’t credit others. You respected my wishes and I owe you the same respect by ensuring that there’s no fallout that will come from down on you from this. Kind of ironic that not wanting to draw attention to it has paradoxically put me in the position where I needed to draw attention to it, but my choices are what led me right to this place so I gotta own it lol.

    • Cowbee [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      2·
      8 days ago

      Haha, no worries! Sometimes I search my name on Lemmy just to see if people are talking about something I posted, and that brings me to interesting places sometimes, haha.

      And no worries on pinging or not! Though I will say I missed the webfishing ping, I think the @Hexbear part needs to go after my username or something because I missed it. I am out of town today anyways, but thought I’d point it out for next time if I can join izutsumi-idea

      • ReadFanon [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
        2·
        8 days ago

        Oh thanks for letting me know, I’ll jump on my computer and fix it up in a minute.

        Honestly I’m very, very green at this whole thing; I’m just an effortposter who decided to overextend themselves lol. I’ve only just started using emojis after being here for over a year so I still feel like I’m learning how it all works.

        I’ve been pinging everybody when we go live in a comment under the post so even though you can’t make it this time, you should still get a ping if I’ve managed to do everything right.