Reddit

We all left. Who are the people that stayed behind?

Also bots.

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.

It simply grew too big and corporate. Reddit is not a niche social network anymore. It's Facebook.

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.

Everywhere is shit. Lemmy has those folks too

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.

Anyone worth a shit left already. It's full of normies and bots now. The "reddit is a psyop" guy is starting to make sense now.

Probably a bit before The Donald was flooding the entire feed.

Reddit admins straight up love Nazis. That's not hyperbole. It's a long and recorded history.

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.

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.

I said, "when will he die already", referring to Trump? And was permanently banned. "Inciting violence."

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.

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

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.

just a feature of engagement algorithms, they promote mad and stupid shit, and fascist takes are exactly like that

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.

Historically, I've perceived Reddit as slightly left leaning, with strong pockets of conservatives.

Yes, in international subreddits. The national ones were often right leaning (e.g. r/Canada, r/Mexico).

…with strong pockets of conservatives.

Being loud, disrespectful and obnoxious is frequently an attempt to mask weakness and insecurity.

I get what you mean, though. I avoid that cesspool as much as possible.

Fascism's quite profitable until they start rounding people up.

Anecdotally, about three years ago is when I started to pick up on it.