| By

Off the keyboard of RE

Follow us on Twitter @doomstead666

Friend us on Facebook

Published on the Doomstead Diner on October 4, 2015

r/globalcollapse

Discuss this article at the Frostbite Falls Newz Table inside the Diner

About 5 months ago one of the Diners turned me on to a Reddit "Sub" focused on Collapse issues, r/collapse. Subreddits are User set up on the topic of your choice for other users to then go and drop on links from around the web. So it functions as a Newz Aggregation site, which the Doomstead Diner is as well, although with a different format and software setup than Reddit.

Since we here at the Diner are also interested in all things Collapse and also often post Links to many articles from around the web, I thought it would be a good idea to synergize with the folks running that forum and join in the party of posting collapse links on r/collapse Reddit! 🙂

So I started posting links from all around the Collapse Blogosphere and MSM on topics I felt were "Collapse Worthy" Newz. I posted a LOT of them also, as EVERYBODY KNOWS, I am very prolific in anything I do on the web that is collapse oriented. I write very long analysis articles, I drop 10s of thousands of comments on forums and I do podcasts and vidcasts which can go for hours and we have to chop them up into parts so they are within reason for most people to listen or watch.

So, no different on r/collapse, once I got started participating, I would drop on about 5 links/day, which I thought was pretty modest. I could easily have done 10/day, I have rss feeds from about 50 different collapse related sites I monitor, each of which can have 4 or 5 worthwhile articles on them in a given day. However, 5 good ones seemed like a reasonable amount to me. Unfortunately, this did not seem so reasonable to the Mod Staff on r/collapse, either in terms of number or in terms of choices I was making either! Basically 3 Mods I was dealing with here on this shit, Great Pumpkin, Eleitl and Stumo.

Over the 5 months I participated, I got banned once briefly and argued my way back on, and I think 4 more "Official Warnings" that I wasn't posting up Collapse Worthy material and if I continued I would be Permanently Banned. I got complaints from Stumo that I was taking up too much of his daily moderation time to decide which of my links he wanted to WHACK, which was about 1 out of every 4 I dropped on. LOL. He spent even more of his valuable time arguing with me about these choices, and so did Great Pumpkin. I wasted plenty of my valuable time arguing with them as well.

When I got the most recent Official Warning, I decided that enough was enough, these guys just do not have a comprehensive enough view of what is or is not collapse worthy, and it was a waste of all of our time to keep going with this. So, rather than waiting for the inevitable BAN HAMMER to come down, I resigned from posting links to r/collapse. In the words of the Captain, "Some folks, you just can't REACH".

It was a FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE.

Fact of the matter here is though that the Reddit system for User Link posting is quite good, and I like it as a means to bring the Message of Collapse to more people. So what to do about this?

Answer: Stand up a NEW Collapse Sub on Reddit, which I titled r/globalcollapse! 🙂

There are disadvantages of course, first off r/collapse has been around quite a long time and has a significant number of subscribers that a new sub will not have. It also has the most simple and basic URL for a collapse sub possible, whch will turn up easily on a Search on the subject. Like with any other type of website, be it Facepalm or Soundcloud, whatevah, it takes a while to build a readership base. In the case of Reddit also, you have the issue of getting up enough content for it to be worthwhile to visit. So launching a new Collapse Site on Reddit is not as EZ as just standing up the sub.

Fortunately however, the Diners are Collapse Newz Hounds and post up many links already here on our Newz Channels, so it is not much more difficult to also copy/paste links to Reddit. As a result, in just a couple of days we already have a few pages of content and increasing all the time. Subscriptions also are doing well for such a new site, so overall it has been a successful launch for r/globalcollapse.

Now, overall I would have preferred to simply work in synergy with the Mods over on r/collapse rather than standing up a new sub on the same topic. However, these guys were just impossible to work with and have an incredibly narrow view of what is or is not collapse worthy material. So editorial policy is one issue I wanted to address in setting up another sub.

Far as r/globalcollapse is concerned, if YOU think an article is Collapse Worthy, it is. We're not going to delete submissions just because we might not see the same thing you do in terms of collapse relevance. At the moment, the only links that might get deleted are links to explicitly pornographic or racist websites or product spamming.

In order to resolve the problem of too much clutter on given topics, we set up Link Flairs to categorize the links by sub-topic. This way you can Sort for sub-topics that are of interest to you whenever any particular one is being focused on at any given time. The User Flairs allow you to categorize your own personal spin on Collapse, ranging from "Cornucopian" (a person who believes this is just a temporary phenonmenon and eventually we will go Star Trekking and/or have Unlimited Energy from Cold Fusion etc) to "Extinction" (a person who believes Homo Sap will be Extinct in the Near Term of a Century or less).

As a result of differing editorial policies, you will get a different selection of Collapse Links on r/globalcollapse than on r/collapse. That's a good thing in terms of having more information available to read at your fingertips, but a bad thing in terms of the problem of so many different sites covering collapse. We are trying to overcome this by creating a Global Collapse Portal which will allow the web surfer to gather information from many sources. It is still a work in progress though.

The big problem with trying to unify the Collapse Community is that there are serious Divisions & Factions within the community of how things will play out and what is worthy to focus on. In the commentariat of a given blogger on the topic, if you do not agree with the spin of the blog and persist in challenging the blogger on it, your ass will be BANNED from commenting on the site. I have a long history of being banned from such websites. It is why the Diner exists in the first place, the only place I cannot be banned is my own fucking website! LOL.

A good example of this systemic problem was Karl Denninger's site of Market Ticker and the Ticker Forum, which I believe he has now shut down. Karl simply couldn't stand "Troofers", AKA posters who would drop on 9-11 Conspiracy Theories and so forth. In one shot, Karl banned 100s of comenters just for the Sin of posting up 9-11 oriented threads. I escaped that purge because I don't focus myself on 9-11, but I got banned later there for being too Anti-Capitalist for Karl. LOL.

So, this bizness of trying to unify the community is pretty tough to do with so many different spins out there, and each Blog or Forum proprietor or mod having their own spin they want to promote. collapse.global and now r/globalcollapse as well are our efforts at trying to do this, and it remains a work in progress.

This remains the MOST IMPORTANT ISSUE OF OUR TIME, and probably the most important issue of ALL TIME, for Homo Sap anyhow. The information needs to be disseminated outside of the relatively small community we currently have globally, which I estimate is no more than 50,000 based on my observation of the website traffic to numerous locations. I study the stats for all sites, it's my hobby and I know how to do it. Been at the web game since before the current internet, I ran a message board on the old Arpanet while I was in college in the 70s. We're all Preaching to our own Choirs at the moment, and this is not Good Enough. Everything you can do to reach out to more people is a good thing. With that general philosophy in mind, r/globalcollapse was born. 🙂

Far as Great Pumpkin, Stumo & Eleitl are concerned here? Take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut with your concept of what is Collapse Worthy. GOODBYE TO YOU! 🙂