I'm having a hard time determining whether the environment has been on the decline since then and social media was jut less ubiquitous or if things have actually gotten worse. I guess I'm just having trouble gauging the state of things and wondering if everything has been amplified by the internet and is still somewhat the same as it was 10 or so years ago. But what do you think

  • sooper_dooper_roofer [none/use name]
    ·
    3 years ago

    No, they were not common, outside of far-right 4chan circles. And even then they were based on some fictional anti-semitic government takeover, not global warming (which most denied)

    https://i.imgur.com/2qR8PCM.png

    I started getting into r/collapse around 2017 or 18, which has a measurable uptick compared to the 2016 days. By 2019 I was browsing it a lot, and of course COVID made it go mainstream.

    So the answer is no, the collapse stuff started around 2016 for the extremely early adopters, then gradually grew through 2019, then exploded post-COVID

    Interestingly, the subreddit only exploded after April of this year, it was mostly cool during 2020.