It’s been like that since 2016. You’re saying it’s gotten worse? Oh well.

Besides. Belligerent conservatives have always been a core component of reddit. Doesn’t anyone remember much the left leaning atheism type of users were ridiculed. What I find more interesting than anything is how everyone even leftists accept the default view that reddit is center to left. While everything right leaning is a minority and an aberration. They’re not seen as actual reddit for some reason. Spoken of as if conservatives are outsiders. It’s bizarre. Old reddits favorite politician was Ron Paul. They were a bunch of Ayn Rand loving pseuds. How the hell does anyone get the remote idea that reddit is historically anything but at least right of center.

By the way Musk bots have been on reddit for a long time. Once upon a time the mods of /r/technology tried to limit the amount of musk posts on that subreddit. Otherwise they would be flooding the top posts of the subreddit all the time. The musk bots caused quite a scene. I think it led to that subreddit getting removed as a default. I might be remembering wrong though.

This quite a historic geopolitical paradigm shift. It’s been implicitly assumed that the two countries are forever allied out of mutual interest.

It did happen before the IPO. It’s been happening for several years. They have not been doing mass bans all at once. They’ve been surreptitiously taking down subreddits over the years. Mostly smaller ones that woujldn’t draw much attetnion. Looks like they went for the bigger targets now.

This isn’t a sudden change to ideologically align with the current US administration either. They have been at this for a long time.

When you can’t win, accuse them of cheating.

It’s schrodingers social media platform. Simultaneously had an impact on the zeitgeist and none at all. Objectively speaking it did. The thing about reddit is it’s the one that everybody uses but nobody talks about using. So people have developed this strange cognitive dissonance. Where reddit seems to exist but also did not… because it’s required that reddit was peoples secret hideout so it can’t have been too popular because that would ruin its historical cachet.

And now the phenomenon has morphed into some other strange beast. Where reddit is right now undeniably a popular platform so that dichotomy can’t hold up anymore. Now people refer to reddit in the third person while being redditors themselves. Lately it’s very obvious seeing on reddit the users referring to “reddit” as if they aren’t themselves a part of it. This post is a very example of the phenomenon. Conservatives screeching about a fictionalized “reddit” in their head that is some kind of far left caricature. A thing that never existed. This kind of thing cuts across all kinds of intersections. People using “reddit” as a label for whatever the other side of the argument they have in their head with zero self awareness that they are “reddit” themselves.

The reality is that reddit is a sibling platform to 4chan. You cannot separate /pol/ from 4chan any more than you can separate the far right parts from reddit. To say reddit is left wing is as delusional to say 4chan is left wing. One can point to the lgbt board on 4chan and say, “look it’s the lefties”. Some how that is more digestible than selectively picking some lgbt subreddits as proof that reddit is left echo chamber.

The venn diagram of reddit, 4chan, and any given social media platform is a lot closer than people want to admit. Because apparently reddit is a secret that everyone has but nobody wants to cop to. And it’s also everyone’s favorite strawman. Except when it comes time to talk about the impact its had on the world. Then poof it doesn’t exist at all.

The next several years are going to be very violent.

Dear Penthouse Forum reddit, I’m a 20 year-old college student and I never thought I’d be writing to the Penthouse Forum reddit, but…

It’s the lowest common denominator of smut entertainment. The tech companies have managed to veil it all in prestige. It should be called gossip media or something.

Instead people think there’s some kind of real human connection. Some kind of deep discussions happening.

Yeah obviously we’ve completely lost the plot a long time ago. Nobody even remembers when tech was bands of ragtag nerds making something out of nothing. Now they are the rich whose only purpose to is extract more wealth. Tech what? Who even knows anymore.

That includes the average tech workers. If that angers you then you’re lost too.

Nobody has noticed that there’s more bragging about compensation than accomplishments. It used to be the other way around. Nerds eagerly showing off to anyone who will listen about whatever thing they cooked up. It’s been this way for the past long time long before this LLM AI era.