Historically, I’ve perceived Reddit as slightly left leaning, with strong pockets of conservatives. Recently though, a vast majority of comment sections seem to excuse violence, such as in this thread (TW: police brutality), where people say things like
TW: Supporting violence
The students didn’t hurt the bullets, right?
They paid to learn so… You go learn today
Um…good?
And I’m seriously wondering when Reddit got so bad that the hivemind supports calls for violence. Are these humans? Are they bots? Why does reddit allow this conduct?
Probably just your average Russian Trolls/AI bots. May I suggest simply just not subscibing or browsing political/news subreddits/communities? You’re ragebaiting yourself for no reason. Just ignore those areas of the Internet. Your mental health will thank you.
This is the sure-fire solution. Before I left Reddit when the API bs went down (RIP RIF), I had already filtered out all the popular and simipopular political and adjacent subs. It change my Reddit experience and overall frustration levels immediately and all for the better. I still got the news I wanted here and there but without that dumbass antagonistic shithole that’s the comments section. Anyway, good riddance, Reddit.
Lemmy has the same doomscrolling ragebait political bullshit though. So make sure to hide those here too.
Yup, I’ve seen enough posts where bots are clearly reposting (huge) comment chains from older posts to know the place is absolutely crawling with them
Subreddit Simulator wasn’t an experiment, it was a proof-of-concept.
Spez is a fascist, dude allowed nazi propaganda on his platform in the name of “free speech”. Users are disgusted by what’s on r/popular so the nazi population percentage grows. Add to this the complete eradication of mod tools and you get bots and extremists invasions.
Imo, community-wise, reddit is on track to become another 9gag. Which is to say, a crypto fascist cesspool.
Yeah, I’m still active in the formula1 and NBA subs because politics there is practically banned. There was some drama lately because trump said it’s his merit if Lando Norris won the Miami Gran Prix…
If it wasn’t for reddit supporting /r/TheDonald, there is a good chance MAGA might not have ever happened, at least not in the way it manifested.
Trump was able to get a significance amount of grassroots support early on, and it almost all came from /r/TheDonald. This was before anything was really happening on other social media. People that were disenfranchised with Obama pretty much went with either Bernie or Trump. It was a warzone on Reddit. Both Bernie and Trump did AMA’s and this blew them up popularity wise.
What Bernie didn’t have that Trump did was an army of russian bots supporting him.
idk, I disagree that /r/TheDonald’s existence was what sparked MAGA. Russia had such a heavy hand in the creation and support of MAGA that they would have found another place to start the fire. TheDonald was just the largest pile of kindle available… with many more around it. I could imagine they would have focused even harder on facebook, or news coverage or whatever else.
Regardless, I do agree with the rest of your point that TheDonald had a huge influence on MAGA
This should be the paragraph in text books.
In hindsight it was pretty fucking obvious when TD was regularly inspiring terrorist attacks and was allowed to thrive while CTH got banned for saying 17th century slave owners deserve death
I knew about TD but didn’t know about CTH.
Nah, if you want to point at the thing that made all this happen…then its not MAGA.
it was Gamergate.
Gamergate was the prototype and test run for the foreign provocateurs, right wing extremists and other hate mongers to see how successful such a large scale attempt at manipulation of narratives and communities could be… and it proved quite successful, and the same tactics and methods were scaled up even further to lay the groundwork for Trumpism and what we have today.
Gamergate was the Trinity test that lead to Littleboy (general uptick in rightwing extremism/fascism/alt-rightism and approval of such) and FatMan (Russian “Useful Idiots” who came to power, or threatened to, with Russian backing, not just in America, but elsewhere)
I was so confused by gamergate.
you are very into something but the whole thing was so just, incoherent. Like I still don’t really get what gamergate was because it was like a Russian nesting doll of gaslighting.
It was whatever you wanted it to be. I had one friend who bought the line that it was about “ethics in journalism” (imagine me doing a concussive eye roll here). He was on the redpill path at the time (luckily pulled back from the edge since). Anyway, I think the melange of ideologies to sample from gamer gate were appealing to people who felt victimised by society, but didn’t want to acknowledge their role in their victimisation, let alone how capitalism/fascism/patriarchy actively hurt them and retarded their aims (aimless though these types tend to be).
It’s classic cruel optimism.
I think the melange of ideologies to sample from gamer gate were appealing to people who felt victimised by society, but didn’t want to acknowledge their role in their victimization, let alone how capitalism/fascism/patriarchy actively hurt them and retarded their aims (aimless though these types tend to be).
Great way of framing it. I just stayed very clear of the whole thing because I couldn’t even identify coherent ‘sides’ at the time.
It’s taken me years and reading the explanations a dozen times to figure out what anyone involved even thought it was about.
it was a test run that was more successful than the puppet masters ever anticipated, Which is why the only real coherent message out of it was the right wings downright contempt for women.
and those same tactics, and hell, even topics, are still being used today with Trumpism, Right Wing Extremism, and the Russian Puppets push for fascism in western countries.
Wasn’t Steve Bannon involved in that too. Mr get paid by fascist government to travel around the US and after the 2016 election he traveled around Europe to spread the fascist seeds.
We all left. Who are the people that stayed behind?
Also bots.
Yeah, last time I went back to survey the landscape the more anticorporate/progressive subs I knew were noticeably diminished, while subs that get off on the futility of activism and immutability of power structures were going strong.
I straight up see top comments calling for the death of all black people on front page subs lmao
The last natural, human, popular subreddit to arise on reddit was r/antiwork
After that, the site got swarmed by bots and censorship.
If you try and post something even remotely progressive in a popular subreddit, it will get deleted and you will probably get banned.
So sooo many bots now
Conservatives have a lot to gain by building bots to antagonize and convert naive young (and old) people by plastering their dumb ideas everywhere. It’s marketing, if you’re cruel and dumb they want you on their team.
Why do they allow it? Many reasons I’d guess… engagement , capitalism, shared-beliefs.
Controversial things generate engagement.
Engagement generates profits.
Many of the decision makers are narcissistic conservatives who think the same thing, but instead of saying it they just enable it, indirectly achieving the same goal as hate-evangelizing.A surprising amount of people want to watch the world burn, as long as they can do it from a balcony.
Conservatives have a lot to gain by building bots to antagonize and convert naive young (and old) people by plastering their dumb ideas everywhere. It’s marketing, if you’re cruel and dumb they want you on their team.
Because their opinions are unpopular as fuck, even amongst their own base, so they have to resort to paying propagandists and social manipulators to spam accounts and posts about their shit to make it seem more popular than it is, in the hopes of converting some of their idiot base by making them go “WELL SO MANY PEOPLE (BOTS) ARE TALKING ABOUT THIS, IT MUST BE POPULAR, THERE FOR I MUST LIKE IT OR I FAIL CONSERVATISM”
A surprising amount of people want to watch the world burn, as long as they can do it from a balcony.
I do believe I’m going to borrow this one.
A surprising amount of people want to watch the world burn, as long as they can do it from a balcony.
“I never thought the
leopards would eat my facefire would spread to my building!”Exactly, my theory is they are too narcissistic to realize that fire will spread to their metaphorical balcony… idk. My own theory seems dumb to me, how could they be so shortsighted?
My own theory seems dumb to me, how could they be so shortsighted?
There are countless events in human history where that question could be asked. Thinking long-term about the health of the environment and the species just doesn’t seem to be within human capability.
It’s also so, so, sooooooo easy to post right wing bullshit because it’s always emotional shallow and without any nuance.
So if you say immigrants are stealing all our jobs and committing crimes all over our country! People are already getting riled up, while I have to spend 5 minutes explaining that while we have to secure our borders immigrants aren’t the cause of all our woes.
And while I’m in the middle of my 5 minute explanation debunking your first horseshit point, you interject “Gays are over running our schools and molesting our kids!”…
So yea… The truth has a huge disadvantage in the online space because it’s so easy to spread lies.
The bullshit asymmetry principle.
It takes far more text to disprove bullshit than spout the bullshit itself.
Then, to prevent your followers from reading the debunking, introduce, “Lol libs sure do write a lot, they do that because they are dumb and triggered!”
And, “I love the poorly educated” (because they haven’t been taught how to apply reason to arguments so they can’t see through my historically well-known hate tactics because they don’t read books.)
But they do understand, “Sleepy Joe!” “Crooked Hillary!”
So yeah, you’re encountering bullshit asymmetry, it sucks and our job is hard, but hey, since we are on the topic of slogans, let me paraphrase a famous one. “We do this thing or that thing not because it is easy, but because it is hard.”
The decision you always have is knowing when to fight and when to walk away from someone who isn’t ready to listen.
Fascism’s quite profitable until they start rounding people up.
And even then, it’s profitable for the “right” sort of people… :-P
Helping keep track of who to round up was very profitable for IBM, and it was for Facebook in Myanmar.
Reddit still trends liberal overall, but anti-police sentiment has been on a decline for awhile. To me, it feels like the anti-establishment crowd basically died out completely over the pandemic. Reddit also tends to trend anti-hamas and pro-israel, the newer users don’t really understand that you can be against both so if it hurts the one they don’t like, it has to be good.
It simply grew too big and corporate. Reddit is not a niche social network anymore. It’s Facebook.
It was never a niche social network. In the beginning, Spez used sockpuppets to fake engagement, later on advertisers and state actors (In 2016, they forgot to scrub the bots from their statistics, and posted that Eglin Airforce Base was the most reddit-addicted city) generated engagement.
Reddit also harbored trading rings for CSAM. It took a CNN report about r/jailbait for it to be removed. There was also r/picsofdeadkids. r/creepshots.
What it absolutely was a niche network to the point where if reddit was mentioned in mainstream media it made big waves. Dudes even had secret greetings like when does the narval bacon or smt like that I don’t remember. But reddit was super niche and that’s what made it special imo. The first secret santa exchanges were trully amazing, unique experiences that will never be replicated again and the platform was full of these niche little gems that are forever lost now.
I said, “when will he die already”, referring to Trump? And was permanently banned. “Inciting violence.”
I said, “He should be shot” to a picture of Reagan. Who was shot and lived for two decades after that and was banned for y days.
If I can’t say ridiculous things on the Internet where the fuck else am I supposed to say it?
I would say this is just AIPAC astroturfing.
The record just wasn’t correct
When people are scared or worried, they tend to move towards conservatism.
And people are worried a lot about their finances.
Anyone worth a shit left already. It’s full of normies and bots now. The “reddit is a psyop” guy is starting to make sense now.
Right around the time America turned fascist?
ever since occupy wallstreet scared the elites, reddit and other social media had a target on its back. Even 4chan. Itsbombarded by noise now.
Anecdotally, about three years ago is when I started to pick up on it.
Has Redditc become more right wing or have you become more left wing.
