I was wondering why Marxism was still a thing and this placed seemed to be filled with Marxists. So, why? Didn’t the fall of USSR teach us anything? Do today’s Marxists think that USSR did something wrong? In other words, will they do anything different than the dictators of the soviet union? Also, some here seem to admire Stalin. I would really have to try hard to find a community that would admire Hitler but apparently admiring Stalin, another mass murder seems to be perfectly fine!
And that’s the problem: I didn’t want to watch it. And I agree with it.
There’s more to rhetoric and convincing people than merely being correct and well-cited. Those are important, and I love those, but understanding your audience is critical if you want them to even begin reading, let alone continue.
I personally believe that a good approach is to post the shorter material that directly answers their written arguments in the body of the post (like the “USSR failed” and “mass murderer” points) and then say the rest, like “to understand the other reasons why people support Marxism, see these:”.
The image you posted in https://lemmy.ml/post/218208/comment/150132 gives an excellent counter-argument to this claim.
It doesn’t go into depth, it leaves that for later now that you have their interest. You’ve provided the introduction at the beginning of the book, a quick snippet of the benefits the USSR brought to its people and the impacts of taking it away. They didn’t need to read Capital Vol. 1-3 to understand that 0% unemployment was achieved. And now that they see that, you have their interest, and your links come into play with a more in-depth explanation of why Marxism was responsible for this and able to help achieve it.
I do get what you mean, so point taken there, even though I still believe in consuming a piece of media in its entirety before coming to a conclusion.
A huge part of this problem I think is also the culture surrounding informative pieces in general. I highly doubt “a review and defense of X paper on the economic effectiveness of socialism” will get even a fraction of the views. It’s so bad that even actual academic papers are making things like “visual abstracts” (infographics) and stuff because otherwise people, including other researchers don’t get interested in reading it. Apparently reading a one-paragraph text-only abstract is too much to ask now.
That post was also downvoted to hell, even more than the “link dump”. I suspect because people just assumed that it’s all BS even though sources are found at the bottom. I mention this because I see this happen every time, particularly on places like Reddit. Something like this:
This is why I’m hesitant to use this format.
Yeah, it’s a terrible thing how marketing techniques have found their way into research, especially when they should be the most motivated to tolerate dryiness.
+12 / -4 isn’t really down, but yes you’re right that the ‘link dump’ is being better received. Point taken, I was a bit quick to bite.