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.
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.
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).
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.
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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).
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