I remember seeing tankie being used only a couple of times when I was a lib, then eventually as I was leaning ever more left, I joined r/196 and that's when I started seeing it being used a lot more and started understanding what it meant. By that time I didn't even know much about socialism, let alone communism, so I just thought that the folks there were probably right in "attacking the tankies" since they probably knew much more than I did.

Well, was I wrong, lol. Good thing there's a lot of good ML content on youtube, otherwise I probably would still be a lib by now.