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Someone once said that the great question of modernity is, “how do I get management to take my side?” I’m not sure that’s entirely correct, but it’s an interesting framing.
Right now major subreddits like /r/nfl, /r/nba, and countless others, which as recently as this morning had front pages covered with Twitter links, have all decided to ban links to X/Twitter.
Making this little stunt go viral was incredibly effective at getting management to take one’s side. Whether or not anyone was convinced of Elon’s Naziism as a result of his gesture, the fact that it was being discussed made it socially acceptable to bring up that Elon is a Nazi and demand something be done about it.
Those posts are all heavily astroturfed—in many active subreddits, these are literally the top posts of all time. There were obviously a ton of bots.
Of course, reddit being reddit, they'd lean that way anyway, but there was plainly an organized campaign to do this at once across many subreddits, with bots involved.
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The cost is that those subreddits are largely composed of Twitter links and screenshots. Unless the whole ecosystem can coordinate a move to BlueSky they'll be left with little to offer their users. On the other hand coordinating a move to BlueSky is already clearly an item on the establishment agenda so Elon has effectively scored a big own goal here by providing such an exploitable rallying point to them on a silver platter.
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I was contemplating last night how miserable it must be to believe what you read on reddit. Because the leftist echo chamber sentiment is nearly always wrong. And I'm not talking about vague philosophical political issues. I'm talking about actionable, make your life better or worse issues.
For example, say you were on /r/investing circa 2016 going into 2017. If you believed the leftist dominating the narrative, you would have panic sold your portfolio and missed out on profound returns over the next 4 years. The same narrative is spinning up again now that Trump has retaken the office, and "all the economist" are predicting market destruction again, although not to the same degree I saw in 2016. I think partially because /r/investing is an almost entirely dead board. All the same, at this point if you fall for it again you have no one but yourself to blame, but that's reddit for you.
Then there is /r/rebubble. If you believed them circa 2020 going into 2021, and refused to buy a house at low interest rates because "bubble", you may have missed your chance to own a home for 10 years or more! Sometimes you get people who did put off buying a home and find themselves priced out, the goalpost of a down payment racing away from them, their capacity to save getting eaten alive by inflation. They come bemoaning that they ever listened to /r/rebubble, and the reaction is usually "LOL, you didn't have to listen to us". Which is true. But neither side ever re-examines anything about themselves. The guy who put off buying a home falls for the next leftist panic issue, the guy who was wrong about the real estate bubble keeps spreading retarded predictions about everything. It's like he's competing to be the next Krugman.
/r/Bitcoin has been a fascinating case study in Gell-Mann Amnesia. They absolutely know the leftist consensus on bitcoin is a gross misrepresentation or outright lie. And yet they buy into the leftist consensus that Trump will be terrible for bitcoin. For reasons I still can't figure out, every thread about Ross Ulbricht being pardoned was locked, and right up until it happened people were gloating about how much of a liar Trump is for not pardoning him, and that anybody who believed Trump was a fool. I hope people aren't foolishly panic selling bitcoin because orange man bad, and that's generally against the hodl ethos of the board. But there is a strain of that there.
I could go on and on and on. It must be miserable to believe in the world according to reddit. If you acted according to reddit, you'll be poor, sick and miserable your entire life, scared off from making any single decision that could materially better your life because of TDS.
It’s not just echo chambers. Honestly these people generally don’t understand the concepts they’re discussing, nor do they understand the concept that there are seasons of life and that some things have to happen by a certain time if you wanted them to happen. Housing is often a thing you want to have before thirty because once you have kids it gets a lot harder to get a lump sum for a down payment.
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R/frugal is mostly not cool money saving tips, it’s ways to make your life worse out of paranoia. Many such cases.
I'm most shocked at how there is no escaping The Narrative on reddit anymore. Leave /r/games for /r/pcgaming and a few years later it's just as bad. Weird political PC Gamer articles that shoehorn in Trump. And every time reality starts poking through, like with nobody wanting to play the extended trans polemic that was Dragon Age: Veilguard, you effectively can't bring up how gross it is to have a game dedicate a mandatory1 side character's entire storyline to lecturing you about gender. So "bad writing" becomes the coded acceptable phrase and all the threads get locked. All the dedicated dissident places have been banned, or so neutered out of fear of being banned they are dead.
Maybe I should just go back to 4chan, or get another protonmail account just to sign up for kiwifarms. My days of expressing my honest opinion here are clearly numbered. I'm against the rules.
1: Mandatory in the sense that if you want the best ending, as most compulsive RPG players do, you are obligated to recruit that character and finish all their side quest.
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It seems to only be on reddit though? I think now that Trump is in office and all the Jan 6 "insurrectionists" are being released we can finally put to rest the idea that reddit has much influence on society or any real insight into what's happening in the world. This move will actually cut them off further from normal people and just reinforce their echo chamber. The site is going from the internet's front page to the internet's asylum.
Even had the ADL themselves come out and say it wasn't a nazi salute. That's the management that has actual power. This is just janny tantrums over losing the election.
Agreed. Reddit is increasingly siloed and useless, and even the "put reddit after a google search to get good results" is quickly becoming supplanted by AI. I quit after we moved offsite, and I don't have any interest in using it now.
I still read (but don't post to) some Reddit communities. But the more they do stuff like this, the more they drive me away. /r/lego of all places chased me off because they were bringing politics into my happy free time activities. It's so frustrating - can't have fun any more, everything has to get infected by activists trying to drag their politics into it.
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That's something that bothers me -- it's pretty much apolitical to submit this framing that he's a Nazi/fascist/whatever and ask if X links can be banned, but to actually discuss the framing is political, so the framing wins by default. It's something we've seen quite a few times by now, but I don't know what the answer is.
The answer was Musk buying Twitter and the US re-electing Trump. That is, it's a conflict that cannot be resolved by reason and compromise, only by one side defeating the other.
That is a solution, but it seems like a pretty bad situation if that's what the solution always is. Is the marketplace of ideas dead? Liberalism dead? Conflicts can only be resolved by vibes based voting against your enemies? I really hope you're wrong. There's so many vibes and so much noise in each election, and it's pretty much a tossup which side wins in the end. "Normal", reasonable people may be the loser in 2028, through no fault of their own.
You didn't notice the jackbooted stormtroopers stomping all over said marketplace? Everyone from Reddit powerjannies to the US Government itself?
Again, did you not notice the former liberals decrying "freeze peach", and suppressing confederate flags, politically incorrect children's books, and the like?
This isn't 2009, when Racefail marked the end of the recession of Political Correctness. It isn't even 2014, when this stuff really started ramping up and some high profile events like Gamergate demonstrated it was winning. It's 2024. The battle lines have been apparent for a long time.
Yeah. I get it. Rhetoric getting increasingly underhanded, and rationalism tried and found impossible/useless, leading to everyone going to their secluded corners of the internet.
But if the marketplace of ideas is truly an antiquated concept, it's only a matter of time until its corpse starts to obviously reek. I don't think that going mad with political war every 4 years and winning half the time is sustainable. I don't know that it's going to lead to literal civil war, but there doesn't seem to be some mechanism for it getting better.
Are you familiar with the essay Tolerance is not a moral precept? If not, I would highly recommend it.
I would argue that this reek is what you are observing around you at this moment.
No, it is not. The present arrangement cannot last. The highest-probability positive outcome is a collapse of centralized power leading to durable federalism. A soft separation, if you will, where Red States and Blue States get to do things their own way in their own areas without being able to impose their preferences on the other. In many ways, this is pretty clearly how things have been drifting for some time, with sanctuary states and state "legalization" of marijuana; Red Tribe is starting to dip their toes into similar efforts in nullifying federal firearms laws, and is likely to continue doing so with increasing success. As polarization increases and the tensions ratchet up, actually enforcing the law becomes increasingly impractical, and cooperating with the other side's enforcements becomes increasingly unacceptable. The path of least resistance is to just let people go their own way.
The highest-probability negative outcome, as you hint, is civil war.
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