/r/50501, the democratic protest subreddit, gets the /r/antiwork hostile takeover treatment after grifters pounce on it.
Original post: https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1k7qj5j/r50501_has_been_locked_and_restricted_due_to/
And this update post after the admins replaced the mod team:
LMAO they think Russia did it! Classic lib brain. Not like reddit is staffed by "former" US intelligence employees, no siree.
I like how one of them is blaming the KPD for Hitler. I don't even think I can say what should happen to them here, but goddamn it should hurt.
Figures. I went to the LA Hands Off rally anticipating liberal cringe, especially after reading their list of goals. Saw plenty of it in the attendees, but was actually surprised at how many of the speakers called out Democrats in front of a crowd full of mostly "blue no matter who" types.
Good, fuck that place. Dont know if Ive ever seen such a concentration of smug ineffectual libs before. They went to one protest that was really a parade and they declared mission accomplished.
You have seen it before, because from 2016 to 2020 it was called “the Indivisible movement”, and it was the same people with the same messaging doing the same thing
Indivisible is actually structured and has older more connected organizers. At least in my city. 50501 is a bunch of kids trying to be edgy and have no leadership or structure.
I cant wait to see how many mirrors get set up on lemmy now :/
"hostile takeover" lmao
It's DNC NGO spawned. It was born compromised. It was never anything good
That's not to say they weren't compromised from the beginning, only now they're reddit admins LARPing as democrats instead of democrats LARPing as antifascists. It's doubly compromised by tech libertarians who are directly aligned with Trump.
good lmao, hopefully they'll learn a lesson (they won't)
I can just start up my own non profit and solicit donations? Interesting.
I'll call mine 50502. Same idea, but we're the second movement.
Damn I sometimes wish I had the greed, lack of morals, and ambition of all those grifters out there.
Whoa whoa whoa hold the horses and donkeys and critters. You're proposing two days of protest? Two (2)? I'm as left as you but one day is already a lot of time sacrificed wearing my Captain America costume for the revolution. Two days and I might get sweaty.
Do it.
Take money from liberals.
Feed it into communist movements.
Where is their money going anyway? They're going to give this money away to absolutely useless bullshit. Don't feel shame about taking their money. Use it in organising that is worthwhile.
If you're organizing on reddit in the year 2025, you already failed
if you are organizing libs to wave ukraine flags and Putler is gay for Drumpf signs then you've already failed
It's always been that way. You shouldn't be using any social media to organize other than to announce a food drive. It's bad opsec and all of it is controlled by ghouls.
Reddit is a wild place and no shit someone would try to snatch up the branding created by earnest dupes. I had a non-political sub once and it was pretty low activity, just me and 3 or 4 others posting. Then some "artist" with a brand that sounded similar to my sub name messaged me and asked if they could post their work there. I told them they could as long as it was related to the subject of the sub. About two months later they opened a takeover bid with the reddit admins, claiming I was an absentee mod.
Reddit is not a content aggregator, it's an advertisement/marketing sales site. You go make a sub about your niche hobby or subject and eventually someone will try to monetize it. All these online marketing courses tell you to go create a presence on reddit and other sites.
To be totally fair, I already thought 50501 was a paid democrat thing. Nothing on reddit ever really feels grassroots anymore.
In retrospect I'm reasonably certain the guy who took over /r/snackexchange was an admin shill account. When the moderator blackout protests happened, I was bored of the generic tactic and turned the subreddit into the Democratic People's Republic of /r/snackexchange. Since Spez phrased his ratfuckery as wanting to empower users, I empowered the users. Every day all of the rules and stylesheet were erased and there was a democratic centralist vote to completely change every single part of the subreddit. My userbase was essentially totally supportive of the protest- like a 98% upvote ratio on the posts leading up to it- and everyone understood the joke for one time on that website. The only replies were to reinstate all of the original rules and stylesheet or joke suggestions that I took seriously. Voting for the moderators was also part of that daily purge.
This guy was the only person throughout a week or two of the protest who didn't understand the joke and refused to when I explained it across multiple messages. He was insistent on becoming a mod and continuing the subreddit normally when all of my other mods across my other subreddits were on board with the protest. The moment he voted himself into power as the most limited kind of mod, he started pushing me to let him make a branded website he controlled where users would have to submit photo ID before posting in the subreddit. For over a decade everyone who moderated had been so concerned about personal information that we hated when users sent us their unredacted shipping labels as proof they had sent a package. There was never any interest in even setting up a gmail account to do that, let alone a website with all of its security vulnerabilities.
As soon as he was made a moderator, he went to the admins and said I was an absentee mod because I was protesting. They didn't just replace me with any of the existing active mods who had been there for years, nor any of the power users who had spent hundreds of dollars on packages across those years, but this guy who had only posted one time a decade prior. Otherwise it was a very underused account that only posted generic comments. The userbase again universally hated him for opening up the subreddit as normal with the intent to soon harvest the names and addresses of every account posting there, so the admins backed off and replaced him with an existing mod who supported the protest but kept it open as normal. That account then stopped posting entirely.
Something was really off about him. A few years prior a new mod in /r/fifthworldproblems tried doing a similar branded external website and they had similarly weird energy so it might just be grifter energy, but this guy may as well have been giving the admin line word-for-word. Across maybe a couple dozen messages I couldn't convince him of a single reason why the website was becoming something really bad, even where it concerned his self-interest as someone who wanted to be a moderator.
As soon as he was made a moderator, he went to the admins and said I was an absentee mod
Someone tried that on a shitty little comm I ran, running to the admins because I didn't give a shit about reddit rules and generally let people go hog wild bullying the chuds that occasionally wandered in before banning them.
The moment they made an appeal to remove the hidden mod team (read: me and my sock puppets) for inactivity I banned them to prove the mods were active on the sub.
This hadn't happened months ago?
I was under the assumption that these protests were largely liberal and brunch adjacent, what's the point of doing cointelpro on them?
I'm active in the 50501 scene locally. 50501 was a bunch of people on Reddit with (afaik) no irl organizing experience. Out of this has grown a mostly-grassroots organization of whatever people in a given local area declare themselves to be "50501 organizers" and plan the events on the Days of Action that are, as far as I know, decided on by the same group of redditors who started it. It's all very local.
So in some areas, the protests will be organized by Indivisible, a Democrat-aligned group that also has a lot of local variation. Sometimes they'll be organized by the DSA, or the PSL. Sometimes it will be wholly unassociated people.
It's a broad coalition and the best way to seize the momentum is to be a part of it.
real organizations have started showing up
Can't let a vanguard end up in accidental leadership so they have to hard takeover leadership themselves.
Reddit did the same to /r/snackexchange and installed some really weird guy who had never moderated before/only posted in the subreddit once a decade prior. His entire thing was wanting to do ID verification on his own personal website, something I had explicitly not done for infosec concerns since creating the subreddit. Even if it's apolitical, the admins are extremely strict now about maintaining stability and they don't tolerate any kind of subreddit closure. With a political subreddit like this, the CEO is a libertarian who lets Elon Musk be co-chair and the top content cop worked for either the state department or CIA. It's so incredibly captured even compared to a few years ago.
there are certain tradeoffs when you decide to ignore the past century of organized class struggle and instead decide to meme your way into overthrowing the imperial government with nothing but a string of numbers as your central organizing principle. this is certainly one of those tradeoffs.
Every five years there is a new group of kids who are like "actually the entire last 100+ years of labor and class struggle is all old shit, and old shit is bad. Let's do this really easy thing instead because I saw protestors in a movie once".
I'm glad young people still feel the need to get in the fray, but their refusal to look at the history of civil disobedience and direct action is why it's one step forward and two steps back. Just because fascism isn't dead and buried doesn't mean that the tactics our forbearers used weren't effective. There will never be a situation where "it's over". We need to beat it back down and stand on its neck forever. The second you let up, they will take a cheap shot.
But for a brief moment between being the accomplices of fascism and its victims, they got to hold up some silly signs with their friends and then tag their faces in it on all of the social media platforms aligned with Trump. Maybe the real revolution is friendship.
Lmao, they also have an instance too, they defed us and lemmy ml
Anyways
Edit: found this thread of it on lemmy
Not even the only one. Have seen a few comms that are just mirrors
edit:
You can feel that peaceful protests are useless, but trying to convince other people of that perspective isn’t in the scope of this community. We are exclusively peaceful, so if you want more “direct action,” consider looking up a different group, such as Antifa or Anonymous. Violence will never be tolerated in 50501.
lmao
"Violence will never be tolerated in 5051"
Always nice to announce in advance to your opponents there's nothing for them to worry about.
"Please don't say no even though we want to assure you if you do say no we won't do anything"
lol. lmao, even.
Who knew communists were onto something when they said the only solution was revolution? Surely the Black Panther Party would have worked out better if they never allowed violence.
Of course peaceful protests are useful! Wait, we're talking about peaceful like the October Revolution, right?
they defed us and lemmy ml
i'd like to think i had something to do with this; i subscribed and made a few comments and then they defederated not longer afterwards. lol
You're the JD Vance to their Pope Francis
And where did that bring you?
Back to me
Lol, guess the soft takeover attempt didn't work so they pulled out the big guns
From that reddit thread
we should go with we the people instead of stop trump
They're really just there for the signs/trying to be witty.
The soft takeover sparked the whole crisis for them. They received a
after repeating the exact same pattern of every other decentralised movement in recent history. When it's a slogan without an org behind it, anyone can register an nonprofit with the name and start grifting. Luckily for them they defederated from the scary tankies who have maintained the same message more coherently in orgs like PSL since the first Trump administration.Hmm, I expected to see some chatter in their Lemmy instance, 50501 dot chat, but that place is a ghost town. (don't bother, it's dead and has some crypto-miney blockchain anti-ai bullshit blocking access)
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