Yeah I know people on Twitter and Facebook and everything are ignorant too but what specifically about Redditors makes them obnoxiously liberal? The average Facebook user is like 65 and they grew up huffing lead and being told they were gonna get nuked by commies so obviously they're gonna be psychotic and the cringiest Twitter users are usually some type of bougie 40 year old.
I would like to reiterate my support for the good teens
Ya, r/teenagers has had a lot of good takes recently, especially compared to the rest of reddit
I feel like the downvotes and smug superior attitude have something to do with it, but I'm trying to figure out how it's all connected
they have the most obnoxious lib tendency of "I read NYT, FT and New Republic, I like to take every view before I form an opinion."
that's where the smugness comes from. They overlook the ideological battle. Anyone who says something that's out of touch with their ideology is just ignorant because they havent been marinated in liberal ideology.
There's also viewing those sources as representing the full spectrum of opinions on a subject, too.
they probs dont even read from one outlet on a regular basis. you dont have to read shit to be a liberal, consuming entertainment and ads is enough to get the whole thing down.
the obnoxiousness is in that attitude. someone tells them something they disagree with, they respond with "read more." the more honest response would be "consume more."
votes and reacts allow a narrow consensus to form without any discussion actually taking place. anyone who disagrees with the mainstream opinions of a given subreddit can just be downvoted and hidden from view. that's not to say that other kinds of message board systems are more intellectually "real" or "meritocratic" (they still favor the most dedicated posters after all), but at least a position's presence in a thread encouraged people to consider and respond to it, because there wasn't a little negative number next to it that indicated it could be ignored.
they still favor the most dedicated posters after all
a dictatorship of the postertariat
Every now and then I go back and check any non-niche sub and it is painful. I also have a masochistic urge to go and check in on SRD every now and then and every damn thread is shitting on "tankies" (tankies here meaning anyone to the left of Tony Blair).
Tankies are really antagonistic towards people for no reason. I saw people on I think r/therightcantmeme saying that AOC isn’t a real leftist. It’s like how are you gonna attack one of the most left leaning politicians in the US for not being able to do much? This is what happens when you don’t know enough about politics I guess
:kermit-pain:
It is kind of true that a lot of lefties are overly abrasive when they're talking to liberals. I definitely understand that it's frustrating and can't fault them too much though. It would be nice if people were better at propagandizing at the same time. I honestly blame Twitter for most of it, since it fosters "dunking", "clapbacks", and whatever other equivalent of a virtual political bumper sticker is. It's all incredibly toxic and has nothing to do with actually getting people to understand what you're about.
Part of this "overly abrasive when talking to liberals" thing is not knowing whether a person on the internet is persuadable, unpersuadable but at least earnest, or just outright fucking with you. Another part of it is the lib habit of treating incivility as a sin, but treating reprehensible ideas as somehow necessary for the existence of a free society.
not knowing whether a person on the internet is persuadable, unpersuadable but at least earnest, or just outright fucking with you
I'd say that figuring this out is tricky, and a valuable skill. I think that if you want to be effective at getting through to people (this isn't everyone's objective of course), it's better to drop conversations than get hostile, unless you've already started to "win the crowd" so to speak. If you're talking to libs on their home turf, there's absolutely going to be a lot of bs to contend with. The way I see it, the key is to be tactical and get people to eventually move on to a space (could be Hexbear.net or otherwise) where you can really push them a bit harder.
The best thing that can happen is that you win over the "voters" which will make you look good to the "lurkers". The person you are directly replying to is almost irrelevant to the whole thing.
The best thing that can happen is that you win over the “voters” which will make you look good to the “lurkers”. The person you are directly replying to is almost irrelevant to the whole thing.
Hard to stress this point enough.
It's the Whiteboy Confidence that comes from living in a world where their views are rarely challenged
You go on reddit to have your biases confirmed; and to have an outlet for screaming at other sweaty dweebs, who don't confirm your biases, without getting your head staved in by a brick.
Ya, the whole sub thing. You're just surrounding yourself with like minded people.
I got banned for telling a person defending henry kissinger to drink bleach lmao
Literal nazi propaganda is OK but saying mean words to someone defending a war criminal is a no no
Unrelated, but I check my horrid shitlib sister's Twitter account when I'm depressed. It's good to know that her being snarky to everyone comedy routine did not take off.
Leaving rules-lawyering assholes untouched but banning the good strong posters who call them assholes is a reddit classic.
Reddit is something like 1/3 bots now. Reddit forms a central role in making opinions among its users, and they're not going to waste an opportunity like that. They learned well from allowing The_Donald to run wild. Never again.
the vote system conditions people to make posts that are low effort and pandering.
Because most of Reddit's top posters and moderators are hot couch guys.
Because they're largely normie dumb asses who have their mouth on the tit of capitalist propaganda.
sometimes i browse around there on the undelete version of the site and it's kinda scary to see the sheer level of manipulation going on. before you even get to the fake vote totals a lot of the time 20-30% of the conversation is deleted.
On any reddit thread, replace reddit.com in the URL with removeddit.com and you'll be taken to a site that shows you the thread's deleted replies.
you have to figure that on a lot of these accounts, they're just sockpuppets. And a sockpuppet person might have to operate 5, 12+ simultaneous accounts. it's hard to be clever when you need to put out that much content!
