Stuff along the lines of Luigi-posting. CTH was much more of a proper “all the left” community with everyone from soc dems on up that was largely just filled with anti-establishment shit posters. But, we loved John Brown etc.

It’s actually old hat. Users on r/cth (where hexbear came from) were catching admin bans for upvoting the “wrong” posts years ago.

https://www.versobooks.com/

Explicitly lefty publisher, but the ebooks are DRM free and they include them for free alongside any physical purchases. (They do tag the ebooks with your name and email though.)

I’m pretty sure this is who they’re sourcing for the claim retracting it, but it’s been telephoned a fair bit: https://x.com/tshugart3/status/1813332364761968959

deleted by creator

It can also be used as a form of semi-covert harassment. For example, in an early instance, every bit of content posted by or in support of transgender people would get hit by a barrage of downvotes from brigaders using otherwise inactive accounts. Hard to moderate that without just disabling downvotes entirely.

They also originally thought they’d have it update in real time which was a bit of a mistake. When you’re running a small test instance it’s kinda neat if comments and posts pop up as they’re made, but the reality of that is a scroll jacking nightmare.