I'm reasonably sure the sub predates the CTH sub by several years. If anything, it was created in response to the Ron Paul bros that flooded the site back in '08.
Yes and no. It was originally created and run by a certain mod for several years before becoming popular but was largely dead. The modern subreddit started when people in the r/badeconomics sub decided to make a subreddit for memes, so they reached out to the mod of r/neoliberal and gained control of the subreddit. The original community for the modern subreddit came from people posting on the r/badeconomics megathread and consisted of people who self-identified as neoliberal, largely had academic experience with orthodox economics, and, due to being young, college-educated PMCs, held otherwise left-of-centre views on social issues. Basically the “fiscally conservative but socially liberal” type except instead of their fiscal conservatism being the boater kind, it was the shitposting memes based on what they learned in econ classes kind. Consequently they didn’t really identify with libertarians, and especially the ancaps, who tend to be more crankish from the perspective of orthodox academic economics and would join in on making fun of them for buying heroin at walmart and the NAP and particularly their obsession with gold. They also didn’t get along with conservatives due to their position that “welfare queens are good actually”. What they wanted was a free market neoliberal economy, erring slightly on the side of technocratic intervention where “necessary”, and undergirded by a generous welfare system, with no regard to the political economy of how neoliberalism always accompanies austerity in practice, since their entire worldview grew out of shitposting economics memes. All of this had the effect of making them appear to the average redditor as more moderate and reasonable than libertarians (they were not), and more progressive than conservatives (they would certainly think that of themselves) while still being anticommunist and different from “those dumb socialists on r/CTH that don’t even know basic economics vevuzela”. And so a large part of the growth of the modern subreddit was driven by a reaction to chapotraphouse
tl;dr: it was a dead subreddit for a long time, then revived as an economics shitposting sub, and then grew in popularity partly as a reaction to r/CTH
edit: it may even be the case that the founders of the modern subreddit envisioned it as a direct response to r/CTH. It’s been a while so I don’t really remember
Good question. That part I’m not so sure about but I think it came later, although I remember that early on they did reach out to some think tank for cross-promotion but (to my knowledge) they weren’t really involved. A significant turning point though came when the original group of mods started talking in their chat about how much they wanted to kill palestinians with drones, and then the head mod, the one who had rebooted the subreddit, sent screenshots of that conversation to the mods of r/chapotraphouse in an attempt to provoke them into some kind of shitposting war. The mods of r/CTH then just publicly posted the screenshots, which caused the mods of r/neoliberal to resign and a lot of the original power users to go back to r/badeconomics. The next wave of mods had joined the subreddit after it had been rebooted and were more like the lanyard type so I think that’s when the think tanks started getting involved.
"The Neoliberal Project" eventually partnered with a thinktank called "The Progressive Policy Institute", but it was already part of something called "The Center for New Liberalism", effectively the parent company.
It is accidentally a great commentary on Neoliberalism how there's this incestuous clusterfuck of psy-op non-profits that make it hard to track who does what.
I'm reasonably sure the sub predates the CTH sub by several years. If anything, it was created in response to the Ron Paul bros that flooded the site back in '08.
Yes and no. It was originally created and run by a certain mod for several years before becoming popular but was largely dead. The modern subreddit started when people in the r/badeconomics sub decided to make a subreddit for memes, so they reached out to the mod of r/neoliberal and gained control of the subreddit. The original community for the modern subreddit came from people posting on the r/badeconomics megathread and consisted of people who self-identified as neoliberal, largely had academic experience with orthodox economics, and, due to being young, college-educated PMCs, held otherwise left-of-centre views on social issues. Basically the “fiscally conservative but socially liberal” type except instead of their fiscal conservatism being the boater kind, it was the shitposting memes based on what they learned in econ classes kind. Consequently they didn’t really identify with libertarians, and especially the ancaps, who tend to be more crankish from the perspective of orthodox academic economics and would join in on making fun of them for buying heroin at walmart and the NAP and particularly their obsession with gold. They also didn’t get along with conservatives due to their position that “welfare queens are good actually”. What they wanted was a free market neoliberal economy, erring slightly on the side of technocratic intervention where “necessary”, and undergirded by a generous welfare system, with no regard to the political economy of how neoliberalism always accompanies austerity in practice, since their entire worldview grew out of shitposting economics memes. All of this had the effect of making them appear to the average redditor as more moderate and reasonable than libertarians (they were not), and more progressive than conservatives (they would certainly think that of themselves) while still being anticommunist and different from “those dumb socialists on r/CTH that don’t even know basic economics vevuzela”. And so a large part of the growth of the modern subreddit was driven by a reaction to chapotraphouse
tl;dr: it was a dead subreddit for a long time, then revived as an economics shitposting sub, and then grew in popularity partly as a reaction to r/CTH
edit: it may even be the case that the founders of the modern subreddit envisioned it as a direct response to r/CTH. It’s been a while so I don’t really remember
TIL. More Reddit Deep Lore than I'm familiar with, certainly
I was, unfortunately, there for the early days so I experienced this all first-hand
How does this connect with the Neoliberal Project thinktank?
Good question. That part I’m not so sure about but I think it came later, although I remember that early on they did reach out to some think tank for cross-promotion but (to my knowledge) they weren’t really involved. A significant turning point though came when the original group of mods started talking in their chat about how much they wanted to kill palestinians with drones, and then the head mod, the one who had rebooted the subreddit, sent screenshots of that conversation to the mods of r/chapotraphouse in an attempt to provoke them into some kind of shitposting war. The mods of r/CTH then just publicly posted the screenshots, which caused the mods of r/neoliberal to resign and a lot of the original power users to go back to r/badeconomics. The next wave of mods had joined the subreddit after it had been rebooted and were more like the lanyard type so I think that’s when the think tanks started getting involved.
"The Neoliberal Project" eventually partnered with a thinktank called "The Progressive Policy Institute", but it was already part of something called "The Center for New Liberalism", effectively the parent company.
It is accidentally a great commentary on Neoliberalism how there's this incestuous clusterfuck of psy-op non-profits that make it hard to track who does what.