u/Long-Anywhere156

The main body of this came from some lengthy messages I exchanged with a user I temporarily banned and I'm vain about my writing and it annoys me that it will only be seen by one person if I don't share it so I'm putting it here too.

Why are we even here? For many of us it's just a diversion and something to look at while we're in the bathroom avoiding work, and that's fine. For many of us, we're just interested in uncovering buried truths around occurrences like the "pilot rescue operation" that are impossible to talk about with people who don't have a similar baseline level of left wing conspiracy beliefs. But some of us, probably foolishly, probably take this fairly seriously and will put real time and effort into posts. Why?

For me, the key to posting efficacy is knowing that we are performing for an audience. As a mod I bear witness to basically every stupid petty argument that devolves into people calling each other liberal retard bots or whatever, and to me it shows a basic lack of understanding of why we are even here.

If you go into posting interactions with the attitude of "I am going to defeat this dumb person" you have already lost. On this site, probably a very high number of people are literally bots, paid shills, or so stupid and brain rotted that they're functionally indistinguishable. If you let them actually make you mad at their unwillingness to listen, you've already lost. When you see bad but not repugnant takes, let's say "This wouldn't have happened if we had a Democrat president" you don't need to go in thinking "I will show this fool how stupid they are." Instead, see it as an opportunity to educate the audience reading in the future.

It's like this. If someone says "We still need to vote Democrat to prevent the worst!" for example, and gives some reasons why, and you respond "fucking redact yourself stupid liberal piece of shit" then people who don't know better will read that interaction and say "damn that guy is a dickhead" and move closer to the OP and associate our beliefs with being an asshole. If you present a thorough, articulate argument against the liberal instead, you never know what 15 year old reading it might have their life changed by reading it.

For every power user whose name you remember, there's a hundred people who pop in and out casually, and for every one of those, there's a hundred lurkers who read stuff sometimes but never actually post anything themselves (good for them). They are the people you should be thinking about. You're almost certainly not going to actually convince some idiot to change their beliefs. If they're already deranged enough to post their opinions online at all like some degenerate, they're probably already a deeply stubborn and sick person, or else literally a bot. But there's a thousand less stubborn undecided people reading at any time, and you need to have them in mind when you make an argument.

What I'm saying is basically, don't get stressed and angry about this posting shit. Either have fun with it, or treat it like an intellectual exercise in out arguing your enemies in order to educate and persuade invisible onlookers, or else just take a break. It's silly to get genuinely mad on Reddit dot com. And for another thing, when you post angry shit at people, you'll probably get reported and shadow banned by the big boss admins. I've seen a massive increase in the number of people getting shadow banned by site admins lately, so be careful out there.

Most people do not believe what we believe, or know what we know. If that is to change, you're going to have to argue and educate relentlessly and patiently for things that seem like absolute moral and logical common sense to you, because the user base here is a bunch of people coming from the most propagandized society in the history of the world. This is a site with a massive user base where if nothing else we can send out opinions and knowledge out into the world. The algorithms are against us, and for every one of us there's a hundred bots or de facto bot people. The algorithms overwhelmingly favor fascist content and will put that in front of people's eyes as much as they can, but nonetheless, if people are just reading two sets of words going back and forth, at a certain level you can't brainwash people into not reading them and making their own opinions. There's massive audiences of uninformed schmoes who could go either way that read what we say, and we must keep them in mind and comport ourselves in a way that makes us seem intellectually serious and good hearted and like people who have beliefs that they want to learn more about, despite the fact that actually we're mostly losers and lunatics shouting into the void.

And don't forget to have fun!