Historically, I've perceived Reddit as slightly left leaning, with strong pockets of conservatives. Recently though, a vast majority of comment sections seem to excuse violence, such as in this thread (TW: police brutality), where people say things like
TW: Supporting violence
The students didn’t hurt the bullets, right?
They paid to learn so....... You go learn today
Um...good?
Follow the rules of the people who own the property. If they ask you to leave then leave. Don’t interfere with people’s incomes or you’ll end up finding the fuck out
Got it. The next time I stand on a private piece of grass that I paid 200 grand for the privilege of using, I should expect to be shot at like I deserve. I'll keep that in mind.
When the owner of the property wants you to move on? Yeah. Move on. Or don’t and find out.
And I'm seriously wondering when Reddit got so bad that the hivemind supports calls for violence. Are these humans? Are they bots? Why does reddit allow this conduct?
Spez is a fascist, dude allowed nazi propaganda on his platform in the name of "free speech". Users are disgusted by what's on r/popular so the nazi population percentage grows. Add to this the complete eradication of mod tools and you get bots and extremists invasions.
Conservatives have a lot to gain by building bots to antagonize and convert naive young (and old) people by plastering their dumb ideas everywhere. It's marketing, if you're cruel and dumb they want you on their team.
Why do they allow it? Many reasons I'd guess.. engagement , capitalism, shared-beliefs.
Controversial things generate engagement.
Engagement generates profits.
Many of the decision makers are narcissistic conservatives who think the same thing, but instead of saying it they just enable it, indirectly achieving the same goal as hate-evangelizing.
A surprising amount of people want to watch the world burn, as long as they can do it from a balcony.
June 30th, 2023. There were always subreddits like r/thedonald that used violent right wing authoritarian cult-like political rhetoric, but after the users and mods who gave half a shit left when they banned third party apps and sided with advertisers over the people keeping it from becoming 99% bots and bootlickers.
Well, you see in June last year, Reddit decided to make some greedy corporate changes. So in response, tons of principled leftists departed the site. What did yall expect? Same thing happened to Twitter.
This shit is spreading everywhere, even to non-US subreddits. I regularly saw anti-muslim, homophobic comments on supposedly non-political subreddits like /r/indianboysontinder.
Even self-proclaimed feminist subreddit like TwoXIndia has their members posting BJP talking points when duscussion turn to politics
Two things are happening simultaneously Russia/China are trying to spread discontent, and Trumps followers are being told they no longer have to abide by social norms that keeps societies civil.
I believe the uncivil thing just always comes in waves as the people that don't like change are forced to change and get resentful. Some kind of event happens and resets the floor, or all the people that don't want to change die off, and things settle down.
And this is the mental framework through which I see the world.
I think you have AI to thank. Bots are going to take over everything, and I worry that soon comments of anything on the Internet will be rife with garbage like this.
I assume it happened around the time most of us left for other places. The fascist community there probably hasn't grown much in numbers, but as a percentage it increased because the decent people left.
It's flooded with bots as well as karma farmers. You can tell by the way they write down their comments.
For better or for worse, you'll often find real people at the reddit comments when sorting by controversial. Often for the worse, but sometimes for the better.
Friendly reminder the "block user" function is available on all your favorite platforms. Much like we had to invest the time in filtering mail back in the day, so do we have to do the same for comment threads now.
My theory is that if you were really principled, you would have got out of there a long time ago. So what you've got left are people who are ok to put up with a shitty status quo, so long as they get their fix. You know, moderates.
I don't go on reddit anymore, but if it's full of people who put up with shit, then it's only natural that the shit started rolling in.
I've been using reddit since 2008 and the idea of any conservative bullshit on there would have been really surprising before 2015. Overall though the amount of generic person stupidity has increased in the past few years. Not that all sports fans are like this, but often i get the stupidest reply from someone - like, close minded, blithely cruel about whatever topic - and look at their profile and the ONLY other thing they've commented on is sports.
I left reddit for good 4 years ago for just this reason. I suspect it was well before that, like when someone tracked the IPS of reddit users and discovered that the most redditors were in the town where Eglin Air Force base is located. Now there's more bots but they used to have more people just doing the same shit. Lots of large police forces have big social media teams I wonder what they do. And the most prolific mod and poster of their time was likely Ghislaine Maxwell. Oh and their CEO made their career in the CIA before coming over to Reddit, which from what we know about people who left the CIA to go into media, is that they never really left
Reddit still trends liberal overall, but anti-police sentiment has been on a decline for awhile. To me, it feels like the anti-establishment crowd basically died out completely over the pandemic. Reddit also tends to trend anti-hamas and pro-israel, the newer users don't really understand that you can be against both so if it hurts the one they don't like, it has to be good.
It's so wild to me that the same people who espouse the second amendment to the constitution completely ignore the first part, where freedom of speech and freedom of assembly are.
If you love the constitution so much, why aren't you supporting those who are actually exercising their rights?
Probably just your average Russian Trolls/AI bots. May I suggest simply just not subscibing or browsing political/news subreddits/communities? You're ragebaiting yourself for no reason. Just ignore those areas of the Internet. Your mental health will thank you.