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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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I would love a new and better Reddit.

The problem with Reddit is that it is so incredibly easy to game and astroturf. /r/thedonald did it in 2016 and they were wildly successful. Then the admins put their fingers on the scale and banned them. Today, left wing shitlibs are doing all the same stuff but get away with it. The front page is all just low rent political memes now.

Major subreddits that used to have milquetoast funny content are just left-wing bot farms now: https://old.reddit.com/r/AdviceAnimals/

And leftist activists have taken over abandoned subreddits and then game the rules to get their posts on the front page. One trick: if a subreddit has a post with an outsized number of upvotes it gets promoted. So, if a sub with only 10,000 users has a sub with 10,000 upvotes, the algo sees it as a valuable post. This must be the most important post in the history of this subreddit! Except it's just some Kamala is Brat meme on a subreddit supposedly about economics.

In any case, there are good subs out there. Slatestarcodex is still decent. Redscarepod is good. But mostly it's a wasteland. Bots and activists rule the day. It's a tragedy that anyone is exposed to this stuff.

https://old.reddit.com/r/AdviceAnimals/

I don't have the stomach to open these, but I can't get over how much text there is on the thumbnails.

Just living up to the stereotype that leftist memes are giant walls of text (that also utterly fail as memes).

I'm old enough to remember when Stephen Colbert was funny and it was the right-wing's attempts at humor that were cringe.

So add that to the party realignment I guess.

Those are decoy memes. The real ones are the successful ones that everyone believes, like "ABC/NBC/CBS/CNN Trustworthy, Fox bogus". Or "climate change means we have to do everything the left wants", "inequality", "the rich are that way because they take from the poor" etc.

Sure, leftists control nearly every aspect of society. But can they add text to an image and make it funny? No, they cannot.