r/antiwork seems to be back (was it really gone?)
tl;dr IDK what happened before, but r/antiwork is public now (again?).
I just stumbled across this tildes thread from 2 weeks ago [EDIT: crap ... 1 year and 2 weeks ago; mixed up my "current year" setting] ... which is right on the border between "keep posting in that thread" and "it's too old, start a new one" ... so here we are.
I'm familiar with the ideas, but never heard of that specific subreddit before. Looking through the Fox interview, I must be missing something, because I don't understand what all the fuss was about. What "mistake" did the mod make in the interview? Why did everyone suddenly hate her? etc. Seemed perfectly innocuous to me (apart from, why even bother with Fox).
But that aside, the previous thread indicates that r/antiwork was effectively bullied into going private. Looking at it this morning, it is not private. I am assuming that they just recently de-privatized it?
On a side-note, top comment on the thread is about not supporting r/cringetopia ... which ... that subreddit is private. Is that also new? It had me confused for quite awhile this morning, trying to figure out which subreddit was actually under controversy and forced to go private.
What happened?
Rage bait in all directions.
The appearance on Fox News was to get eyes on Fox News, from the Fox News perspective.
It was to staunchly defend their points from the /r/antiwork side, but they picked somebody who had no business representing them (the points they made were made poorly, at least if the goal was to relate to the viewer). I would also say this wasn't going to be the win they wanted anyway because it's Fox News.
I don't see why being a dog walker was such a big deal, either, but the mod in question tried to rely on theory that worked in the /r/antiwork echo chamber *, but couldn't back it up rhetorically when confronted. To be fair, this wasn't going to happen as a guest on Fox News unless you're exceptionally skilled, and you still lose.
From there, the rage happened. People got mad at /r/antiwork and started /r/workreform, which was, gasp started by somebody having a hard time as a banker making a bit over 100k (as I understand it). /r/antiwork went really radical and ragey, and had a little bit of a reform (became more about the values it represented than anti /r/workreform). Observers on all sides felt they had skin somewhere in the game and went looking for places to stick their hands, feet, and noses.
*This isn't meant to negatively characterize /r/antiwork, but reddit communities as a whole. Most subreddits tend to default to a small handful of things being "The Truth," be it the right kind of consumer products, to the right way of thinking about a process with any number of resolutions. When things go into the political sphere, I'd say that it's my experience that discourse rapidly devolves unless you not only buy into the ideas of a subreddit, but the specific talking points. In this space pithy quotes of political theorists take precedence over the discussion of what they mean, and their practical application. This was what was projected on Fox News.
From what I remember it was almost unanimously agreed that the interviewee did a terrible job, and the community was very unhappy that someone was chosen to represent them without any input from the subreddit at large, especially since many of them (with the benefit of hindsight, to be fair) said they would have been staunchly against sending anyone at all, especially someone with no media training. Because of the amount of brigading they were getting from outside, the mods probably didn't have the resources to be very nuanced in how they handled the internal drama, so they just banned comments criticising the interview and announced that all of it would be treated as bad faith abuse. This was obviously controversial and just caused even more negative comments. It escalated until they locked the sub.
Meanwhile, members got embarassed by the bad publicity and sick of the infighting and started jumping ship to r/WorkReform, which many people felt was a more marketable slogan that better reflected their views. WorkReform to my knowledge has never achieved the same level of public awareness as NoWork had at its height, probably because of lockdown easing.
I've been reading and following /r/antiwork since it originally started gaining popularity and it was only private for a short time, maybe 2 days. They did a big restructuring and rule change after the whole dog walker fox news interview fiasco.
I think that thread is a little older than 2 weeks :p
Haha. Happens with best of us. Last 2-3 years really faded fast.
Can we please not go digging into the history of a recently unbanned user to bring up items that undoubtedly led to action that caused the user's ban in the first place?
Did you post in the wrong topic? This one is about a subreddit which went private but is now public again, not a banned user, or anything that lead to their ban (AFAIK).
This post is an obvious link to this response in the user's most recent post.
It was? That's news to me. AFAIK the ban was almost entirely a result of their last, since removed, /r/tildes post. But it was admittedly a long time ago, so I could be forgetting things that lead up to it.
The removed post was largely in response to the linked post about the reddit drama and perceived slights/moderation or lack thereof. There was buildup, but many a reply in the drama post were straws that broke the camel's back to lead to the removed post.
Fair enough. I don't remember that being the cause of the topic that ended with the ban, but I'll take your word for it. In any case, I don't see how this topic is inappropriate, even if it did make reference to that old topic, and is tangential to it.
For my part, I don't know what you're talking about. I didn't even know he was banned, let alone have any kind of clue as to why.
I found an interesting tildes thread, that I thought was from 2 weeks ago, thought he'd been commenting on it already after his return. If that thread had anything to do with his original banishment, there is no indication of it anywhere in that thread, and my posting this thread certainly had nothing to do with him or the banishment.
Just a heads up, if the user you are mentioning is Gaywallet, they use they/them pronouns.
That would be believable if you hadn't made this thread not 30 minutes after making this comment where you specifically thanked someone for providing context as to the user's ban.
I know I should just leave this alone, but I'll try one more time.
I meant before that thread. That was the first I'd heard of their ban, and whatever reason there might have been for it.
This thread is about r/antiwork, and has nothing to do with the unbanned user (PS: welcome back; did you miss this?).
You are the only one here trying to make a connection between them.
And now I am done with you. Go troll someone else.
IIRC mining users' comment history to make points does not follow Tildes rules.
BUT this is a messy situation; the user you are responding to does appear to have rather boldly lied, you do appear to be correct, and I'm confident you saw the comment over in the other thread shortly before this thread was created, so it is hardly mining comment history.
At some point the time record of when things were posted gets crunched, so for posterity, AugustusFerdinand is accurate wrt the time.