Every few months I go dip my toes back into posting on reddit for some reason. Maybe it's because I'm a bit of an idiot who never learns, but to my credit it's never overtly political stuff or concerning current events. Don't want to give myself an aneurysm, after all. Usually it's just a mix of hobby stuff and a variety of subs for tv shows I'm watching.
Commenting isn't too bad for the most part, but for some reason posting really sucks. Maybe I'm just sharing a thought I had, a cool idea, maybe a theory for an ongoing tv show, posted in a friendly and conversational way that is by no means signalling I'm looking for an argument. Then I hit post and within a few minutes I'm instantly reminded that reddit isn't a shithole just because of its politics, but also because its userbase is full of scumfuck, pedantic assholes.
My posts always gets downvoted to 0, and I suddenly have like three or four users picking apart everything I said in the least generous way possible. Comments don't seem to have this problem, which makes me think the new filter on subreddits is populated disproportionately by the worst of the redditors. It is these people who disproportionately decide which posts blow up and which posts don't.
I'm convinced well over 50% of Reddit is bot posts. It's designed to make people feel angry and frustrated, and give up on resisting power. After all, Reddit was one of the main reasons for the Trump disaster happening. Never again.
What's beautiful about reddit isn't just that there are sophisticated bots that attempt to act like humans. The humans dumb themselves down enough to appear bot-like. There's a convergence point, and almost every post and comment on that site has reached it.
What? That's ridiculous.
You forget that r/The_Donald dominated /all day after day after day. The memes were devastating and the corporate media was caught in lie after lie. The establishment was utterly blindsided by the internet. After the election, they got serious about information control. Coincidentally, that's when the censorship push got going in a big way.
<10% of Americans use Reddit on a monthly basis, it's not clear what percent of them were aware of TD, swayed by it, or voted at all. I appreciate the election was close, but to say it's a significant reason seems a bit of an overestimate.
If it wasn't important, it wouldn't have been censored and broken up after the election. QED.
The FBI goes after 5 person mutual aid groups. Repression does not indicate efficacy.
That's a piece of evidence to consider, but it's definitely not QED. Perhaps more like it was just alienating current users and causing Reddit as a corporation strife, so they stopped it.
A lot of races are won by a few thousand votes
Literally just yesterday on one of the "China wants it's spy balloon back" threads there was like 10 straight posts when sorted by new of "Finder's keepers" or something to that effect all posted within minutes of each other and all identical. Definitely feels like bots
sounds like yankees, 5 yanks in a room see a way to shoehorn a (really obvious) cultural touchstone they'll stumble over each other to say it
i've made the [obvious joke comment] second quite a few times even here lol
Honestly, agreed. No one under 50 talks like that in real life, except for a certain kind of university student whose brain has been fried by the same media
EDIT: And guess what? That persons favorite pastime is usually making people mad!