BO Resignation
I am going to resign from the BO position very soon and give control over the board to one of the current volunteers. I sent a message about this to the volunteers who were active about a month ago, and have been discussing with them since. If there are any volunteers who resumed activity recently and want to be considered for the position, please PM me with info about how often you are usually on Zig Forums, how you would intend to run the board, and so on. You'll get equal consideration on those grounds. As well, all interested volunteers please PM me with your Tox ID and times you will be able to get in a group chat (next three days preferably).
I made this board almost five years ago. At the time I knew very little about communism or anarchism, and I was a vague leftist. My main goal in running the board was to create a popular place for any kind of leftist discussion. The fresh OC, unique memes, shitposts, arguments, and perspectives were really fun and often educational, and I thank users here for spamming the "read a book" memes, which actually did make me (and many others on the board, I imagine) read a lot of books. During this early period, I wholeheartedly contributed to the OC and culture of the board like everyone else, and it's a minor point of pride for me that people still repost OC I made daily.
There were downsides to the naive/hands-off moderation approach, such as the massive promotion and shilling of one big US military base in Syria, Bernie, Nazbols, and similar trash that took place. As I read books and educated myself, I realized what a mess I had created. Maybe the existence of a board like Zig Forums was inevitable on Zig Forums, or things could have turned out differently with people going to /marx/ or /anarcho/ instead. In any case, I tried to discourage and get rid of the worst posters, which turned into a protracted fight and even a board split, with a lot of people complaining. Zig Forums still has ups and downs in spite of general improvements, but I think the abysmal quality of Zig Forums shows it was the right choice. Some posters have accused me of never visiting the board, only logging on to ban people. I still post here daily. Some of my favorite threads to post in have been the DOW thread, Cockshott generals, DPRK general, "questions that don't deserve their own thread," and others. A lot of people here don't share the view that Zig Forums actually could be harmful if people were allowed to post imperialist propaganda here, either because they think Zig Forums is just too small (it never has been, as there are a lot of lurkers on top of the 3-day IP count), or people aren't impressionable to what's posted on imageboards or the internet (with the way things are going in politics in general, I don't know how you could seriously believe this). I hope that there will be a smooth transition when I resign, but in the end it will be out of my hands.
Zig Forums in general is a cesspit. The site admins are fascist scum who cooperate with US law enforcement, and the codebase is so wretched that it's almost certainly backdoored by the feds ten times over (it was even hacked by some rando). The interface that's presented to mods is incredibly antiquated and slow. Imageboards inherently make people act like they have ADHD. Trying to maintain quality on Zig Forums is frequently a sisyphean task. The only upsides to the site from a leftist perspective are that you can easily post through VPNs, you have some degree of anonymity, and it's better than reddit. Communists who post here or on similar sites (reddit, twitter, etc) should ask themselves if it's really OK that they waste so much time on re-hashed, "ephemeral" arguments, and whether it's possible to create a better platform for propaganda that is really educational and liberatory. I think a better discourse is possible and I want to eventually work towards that, but I can't do that while simultaneously moderating Zig Forums. The amount of time before we are all permanently fucked by fascism and global warming is really limited. Make the most of it.
