or
dated reference
*continued dated reference* *the joke still isnt funny* *this is still going on* *can you believe the first time you saw this was almost 9 years ago?* *and they're still doing this like it's funny*My opinion
WITH THAT SAID,
Everyone else's opinion is stupid.
:yes-honey-left:
Did the mods add a poetry function or did you space that by hand?
Like people just assume every reply they get is a debate
This is definitely true! Whenever I saw I had replies on reddit, my first thought was always oh fuck who did i piss off this time. Here, I'm genuinely happy and interested to receive replies because the mood here isn't so combative.
My favorite one of these was when someone posted the Parenti quote from Blackshirts and Reds about the Ford plant in Cologne, Germany that Allied bombers were instructed not to hit; I think it was in /r/ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM or some similar radlib-adjacent sub, and one of the replies was someone demanding sources and insisting that they were going to fact-check Michael goddamned Parenti. lmao
I don't think we can have that simultaneously with no downbears. People (not you) need to know when they had a bad take!
Oh same. My first read of every reply I get on reddit is hostile, I just assume I'm about to get in a fight with some brainwormed lib or literal nazi. I really should stop checking it
All the china rhetoric started flying and then people started saying things like
"I'm as bleeding heart liberal leftist drum circle kumbyah as the next guy, but we should fireboard every Chinese person"
It's the ratchet effect in full motion. They don't believe in anything aside from beating republicans, so their rhetoric keeps moving to the right, because they think that the best strategy is to become a republican to beat them.
They don't see political parties as tools to change the views of the population, they see them as brands that must market themselves within whatever the existing views are to "win" and THEN change the country after winning.
Socialists on the other hand do battle to change the views, opinions and culture of the population itself.
"I don't hate Palestinians, but they're all terrorists that deserve to be domed by the IDF"
The China narrative has actually been really disrupted, in nearly every thread about Uighurs either the top or the second top comment will be calling out Adrien Zenz
This is good to remember. Reddit does suck and has sucked for a while, but a large part of the userbase is at least open to moving to the left of the Democratic Party. That's how CTH got so big on there in the first place. You can pretty easily find left criticisms of Biden on /r/politics, too.
This place writing off the whole of reddit is like libs writing off red states.
I was in a thread of public housing in china and people were like "man, that would be so cool in america, why can't we do that? ... fuck china though"
Like, I'm an anarchist, but sometimes I can say good things about China without qualifying it. It's like the word "fuck" is a little caboose following around China in their brains.
Like, okay, watch this: China preventing famine in the DPRK is good.
Did you see that? No qualifiers!
The people who say China shouldn't provide famine relief because it props up N. Korea piss me off. Like, you're okay with killing thousands in order to replace the government you don't like with a US proxy? What the fuck is wrong with you?
I mean I think the explanation is pretty obvious, they deplatformed all the leftists and left with no obvious place to hang out, they all left the site.
I think a large portion likely just logged off, thats why its important to ban fascist hangouts, the technique works.
They don't even need to organize, they already have the cops, military, etc. that'll do their bidding. They just need the numbers for a critical mass for it to happen.
Yeah, youre right theyre already super organized, into the police.
Reddit has certainly gotten worse and most of this community has also gone much further left even since the site launched.
Same, as much as I want anarchism to spring up, there’s gonna have to be some authority to challenge the state’s authority
What almost bugs me more is the excessive advertisement. The ads in the comments are just too much. Like they weren't making enough with the awards and subscriptions.
Glad I'm using the old layout. And an adblocker.
(if you're using mobile, use Apollo, I haven't used the official Reddit app in years but I'm sure it is much better than the default)
Reddit, like Digg before it, historically was a combination of a loud libertarian minority with a liberal, progressive leaning base. That’s just a fact of demographics - it was mostly 15-35 year old tech nerds, and that’s their politics (it certainly was in 2007-2015). Plus, the Overton Window simply didn’t allow for those discussions in the mainstream, so it was OK for them to jerk each other off on their little chat room.
Reddit got a lot of attention in 2016 because of both the Sanders campaign and the Trump campaign (and Trump winning really set that into overdrive). That’s when the spooks really started to take a look because real things they were concerned about were actually a threat. No one gave a shit when a bunch of tech nerds were down with OWS, now that social media was ruining their precious elections, they had to do something.
All the cool people got drown out by astroturfing, then bots, then bans, then they got replaced by neoliberal dorks and the general public looking for BuzzFeed style content that Reddit wants to provide.
Very normal that /r/neoliberal gained something like 1000's of subs per day for awhile.
Real spooky shit was biden sub in 2016, where image of biden in aviators would get 20k upvotes with 30 comments :sickomogus:
Should we give AI the right to vote?
Wouldn't they outnumber us rather quickly?
The CTH sub was quarantined the day before the "Trending Communities" feature was implemented.
It was such an obvious hit job.
Is it that strange? Neoliberalism's the prevailing ideology in the west, especially among the sorts of people who go on tech sites.
It had sat under 4-5k for years and then exploded.
Yet not many new users actually contribute to discussions.
Looks like someone bought users for a subreddit.
Do you really think someone would astroturf one of the main social media hubs of the US empire for a mainstream political candidate? I really hate these sorts of conspiracy theories.
I'm fascinated by how places like reddit and 4chan end up catching the attention of spooks and stupid think tanks operated by the children of billionaire ghouls. They're, like you said, mostly full of scatterbrained and internet obsessed tech nerd young men, so the sites are full of everything they like. Memes, anime, programming, little tickytacky hobbies, self-aggrandizing posts about stories that never happened where they seem cool and reasonable, stupid nerd shit like marvel and star wars, and so so so much porn. Mountains of porn. Outright sexualizarion of minors not too long ago.
And it's someone's job to wade through all that to trick these guys into aligning their brains with American foreign policy.
I'm also fascinated by just how internet centric a lot of their politics are. Anything that restricts or combats what they do online is the worst possible moral outrage, probably one of the reasons they talk about China so much.
yea like they take that kind of thing so deadly serious and with such vigor instead of you know like rampant homelessness
Rich people have a lot of free time, so some spend it on the internet posting. A lot of those children of spooks/journalists also go to the same colleges, or run in the same elite circles as the tech bros on Reddit as well, so they learn about these things.
Also, these sites only really caught their attention when they started interfering with real life. No one gives a shit until you make noise (recent elections, Wall Street Bets, etc).
I met Violentacrez, the r/jailbait and r/picsofdeadkids guy, at a meetup in Dallas. You'd never assume it's him. Totally normal middle-aged accountant, less socially awkward than I am. Nobody seemed to care, although that was before he was banned.
I can only speak about the subs I still frequent - I think overall you’re more likely to see more lefty pushback against certain narratives spread on the site since the CTH sub blew up. Anime and gaming subs have never been as accepting of LGBT folks for example. It’s still dogshit, but at least you can expect some upvotes for posting “trans rights.” :yea:
Since the ban though I feel like all the places that already were hostile or at least unwelcoming to Chapo posters and broadly left posting became even more lib/reactionary.
KiA and MRA subs and shit were always beyond help, but places like Gamerghazi became unbearable. That sub specifically recently added some mod that’s all in on the Corbyn/Labour antisemitism thing. And forget about Politics. You can still see a nice article about Sanders or Ocasio occasionally, but those nerds are full on blue MAGA and parrot everything they hear from MSNBC.
places like Gamerghazi became unbearable
Their policy of instabanning anyone who doesn't toe the US state department's line on China didn't help, either.
forget about Politics
Yup. Anything that is actually on top or popular these days is just people jerking about "Orang Man Still Bad" or how just one dem senator is holding up literally everything. Or how Kamala/Joe did some wholesome, meaningless gesture. Then you flip to controversial sort and find articles with actual meat talking about how much of a clown Joe/Dem establishment are for various things.
Like for instance, today it was Kamala EMPHATICALLY telling Latin Americans not to come to the US
Oh yeah, and the Biden admin subpoenad journalist's calls
And they have kept Trump restrictions on Cuba, despite saying otherwise. And shit, that's just controversial today lmao. Meanwhile, top 5 of this week, for r/neoliberal2:
Sanders Reminds Americans not a single R voted for 1400
A lot of Dem voters didn't vote for that either, they voted for 2k
Big corps celebrate pride after donating to anti lgbtq politicians and orgs
The duality of mega-corporations
Nevada governor expands mail in voting
Oh god I'm gonna VOOOOOOOTEEE
Texas AG says trump might've lost Texas if they had mail in ballots more readily available
ORANG MAN BAD
JPMORGAN stops donating to GOP legislators who tried to overturn election
'Good' capitalism in action. So, 2 voting, 1 good capitalism, 1 on the 'promised' checks, and 1 about how megacorps are in it for the money. In summation: nothing remotely new, informative, or significant to anyone with a frontal lobe.
Texas AG says trump might’ve lost Texas if they had mail in ballots more readily available
ORANG MAN BAD
Swing and a miss on this one, comrade.
Otherwise, good summary.
Maybe; I always feel like with r/politics, the presence of anything in the last election cycle not attributable to Biden is there because of Trump. To me, this was massive to them in the context of 'blue wave' and all of the 'Texas is finally gonna go blue' rhetoric, especially because they wanted it only as a repudiation of Trump and his politics (and nothing to do with helping the people of Texas or even necessarily the broader idea of electoral manipulation).
Maybe that's too cynical of me though
Gamerghazi always kind of sucked. Ess users are very active and a lot of punching left.
I believe I remember reading that right before Chapo was banned, Reddit was taken over by CIA ghouls
2 people? I don't remember either of them.
EDIT: Scratch that there's like 6 or 7? I still don't recognise any of them.
Every time a power user gets banned I am closer and closer to having the oldest account 🙃
Having an older account is like being Proudhon, eventually it’ll be your turn, but your heart is filled with pride
Tech companies and the security state have had a revolving door between them for awhile now. It's not a take over, it's business as usual.
Right? The CIA's venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel (if I made that name up you'd tell me it was too on the nose) regularly produceses tech products, including the big data predictive policing program Palentir, which guesses your likelyhood of being a criminal based on your metadata, purchasing history, contacts with people in the legal system, credit score, etc.
The CIA is a tech company.
I only hang out in a few subs but it's gotte vocally anti-tankie. It's grown to the point that the Iraq war and Palestine are now talked about in "nuanced" discussions. It gets old fast
What nuance, even pretended nuance, is there to be had in Iraq War 2: The Butchering of a Nation? US invaded and destroyed completely a country under false pretenses, then continued to occupy it and off anyone they deemed unworthy of living.
These people say things like "the war was a mistake but getting rid of Saddam was still a net good"
There is nothing nuanced about the Iraq War. Every last person in America involved with that conflict should be shot.
I think it's a combination of always being bad and the leftists that hung around r/CTH have dispersed/spend less time on reddit. I know I use it very sparingly now.
tbh with you i think reddit has always been pretty fuckin shit. the best way, in my opinion to use reddit is to actually block a large amount of the default subs and other content farming subs. you can always just browse with r/all if you feel like checking out that slop. but if you curate your feed and join smaller communities it can be still okay. Reddit is a melting pot afterall, and there will always be shitheads and fascists and bigots everywhere on the internet. Obviously without a central place for big tent leftists to hang out and just shitpost seriously cripples the enjoyment a lot of us can have on the site. But I just stick with maybe 5-6 subs I actually read comments in and sometimes participate. I don't usually end up closing the site in disgust like I would without serious curation and just avoiding the popular slop. DEFINTELY avoid all political subs that are specifically leftist. I hardly even check stuff like r/ShitLiberalsSay and all the socialism subs, but i'll occasionally go and check the top posts of the week there and see if there is anything worth reading. If you curate it well enough your feed is disgusting and just don't read comments on most posts unless it's something cool. If you like debating obviously this outlook may not suit you but this is how i use reddit
Yeah there's no real left unity subs anymore of the same style. r/shitliberalssay is as close as it gets and they're a dunk-centric sub.
Seems like folks either logged off or went to sectarian subs like anarchist or ML ones. r/genzedong has the energy of r/moretankiechapo though a bit less intersectional.
And in that vacuum of leftist subs hitting the front page, you get the rest of Reddit: a confused mishmash of American propaganda and racism.
I think it's not so much that Chapo getting banned made Reddit worse as it is that Reddit has been getting worse for a long time.
Did this change in opinion of yours possibly also correspond with you going from child to adult? Reddit has always been shit
