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Why is "the nation" relevant? It's not too far to the left of the subset of Americans that are very online.
Another way to think about is that if you look at the crosstabs the last election by age and compare with the average demographic of Reddit's readership you'll get the idea.
The front page of Reddit is not representative of any group within the United States, even the extremely online.
It's evaporative distillation at its finest. Reddit leaned left from the beginning. Conservative views were downvoted. The conservatives left. Then centrist views got downvoted. The centrists left. Etc...
This is not just "young people". It's people who are at the tail end of a long selection process. It's actually similar to how the views of academics are so insane.
The entire internet leaned left from the beginning.
I think you’re right that in the decades hence, self-selection has narrowed and polarized it much further .
Erm, pardon me for quibbling, but my sense of the early internet was that it more consistently leaned libertarian, which is to say, pro-freedom, rather than straight left. The rise of social media in general and Facebook in particular is what made the move leftwards inevitable in my view, compounded by smartphones and the accompanying push notifications designed by the literal Devil himself.
It was libertarian and anti-authoritarian back when being pro-liberty was pro-left and back when the right had some semblance of power. Back then naughty song lyrics and books with gay themes were sticking it to the man, now the man twerks to it in the corporate gay pride parade.
You can pardon me then for being cynical, but it seems pretty clear that it wasn't the kind of principled David Frenchism. Or at least that the real internet libertarians were a small fraction of the populace.
that.dune.quote.jpg
The Ron Paul fanaticism on the internet of 15 years ago was real, not calculated.
Sure was. Just wasn't the majority or even plurality.
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Not just "the nation", the world. It's a global website.
After they've banned everyone that disagreed, they've found that everyone agrees... Not particularly surprising.
What makes you think you've got the direction of the causality right here?
Well, I was confining myself to the anglosphere. I have no idea what the Chinese zoomers are doing on their social media (which isn't reddit anyway).
If you think there's a causal relationship here, millennials born in 85 were already 20 by the time Reddit launched. It seems much more parsimonious to explain their moderation policies as approximately reflecting the population-as-weighted-by-online-time than to claim that the moderation policies moved millions of people 1SD politically.
EDIT: I should add, the population-as-weighted-by-online time is not a uniform sample. The more well-adjusted aren't spending hours and hours online, especially not volunteering to moderate. It's a bit like Trace's wikipedia bit -- the platform belongs in a large sense to those willing to put in the work/effort.
The world consists of a bit more than the anglosphere and China, and even the anglosphere is not a monolithic blob.
I don't see how. Reddit literally bullied one of it's CEOs away from their position, for being too censorious, and even though the CEO left, the vibe shift she represented was still being cranked up. I've seen no evidence that their decisions were driven by popular demand of their userbase, and like I said the causality is just as likely (or more!) to be going in the opposite direction.
Putting in the work/effort to become moderators and ban all opposition is not the same thing as being representative of population-as-weighted-by-online time.
I think you’re mixing up two things. I agree there wasn’t a lot of pro-moderation demand or sentiment. But most of the users were still left of the median Democrat and were mostly ok that the weird maga crowd got booted.
I never said anything about a pro-moderation sentiment, and I don't think I'm mixing up anything, one is just the explanatory mechanism for the other. The majority of Twitter was also left of the median Democrats, and were mostly ok with the weird maga crowd getting booted, until Musk unbooted them. The booting is how they become a majority.
The left-of-median-democrats were already a majority on Reddit/Twitter before the bookings.
That's kind of why the user base as a whole shrugged -- even though they wouldn't have agitated for ejecting anyone, they weren't going to get riled up over this particular instance.
That doesn't make them left-of-median-democrats, that makes them apathetic, and yeah, this is exactly how it works, and it only proves my point.
And the point about Twitter is that isn't it funny how it doesn't feel so majority-left, the moment people got unbooted.
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