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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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