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That is what initially attracted to me to this space and why I was very excited about it. I'm just sad to slowly watch it turn from a rat adjacent discussion forum into more of a bog standard Tucker Carlson talking point partisan space. Maybe not in all the comments (yet), but the votes are there to turn it into an echo chamber once all the non-conformists are driven off. A right wing "Shit post" even one that catches a mod ban, will get 30 upvotes while a well thought out slightly to the left posing will usually be in the negative. The writing is on the wall and I'm unsure as to why I'm fighting against it.
You're not saying anything that hasn't been said for years - since before we left reddit.
The median poster here is not a MAGA Trump supporter, but a disaffected former liberal. Actual MAGAs, or even old-school Republicans/conservatives, are almost certainly a minority, albeit a vocal one. We have some (former) alt-righties and DRs and a few actual fascists, and a few lefties. But most are still somewhere in the center and only appear "right wing" simply because, as others have pointed out, we don't ban people for supporting Trump or preaching white supremacy or complaining about Jews or saying trans women are men, and thus we tend to attract people who really want to talk about those things.
Honestly, what would you like? More left-leaning opinions? Bring in some more (higher quality, non-trollish) left-leaning posters. Maybe you are right and we're doomed to eventually become a Nazi bar. But you aren't helping when most of your contributions read like shitposts too.
By the way, there is quite a dedicated core of left-wing posters who consistently downvote and report every right-wing post, and vice versa. Despite people claiming they don't want an echo chamber, empirically quite a few people do want an echo chamber. So we're always fighting against that too.
We really need a new poll. Maybe I'll ask Trace what his old questions were and see if I can put a form together.
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I haven’t noticed any uptick in Nazi posts. I suppose we’re more racist on average than we were on Reddit, we definitely have a higher fraction of socially conservative tradcaths. But most people here seem to be, on average, fairly centrist, blue tribe but fed up with antics, the sort of people who would be persuadable Biden voters in a better economy.
I don't have a graph over time or anything, but we do have, what, four prominent Neo-Nazis? Three? That's a pretty high number by internet standards, and plenty of people around them who are sympathetic in a soft way to them. We don't seem to have many actual left-wingers, though.
I'm not tarring everyone here - I'm here, after all. But I feel like we have more capital-R Racists here than we do lefties.
It's true, I think, that the Motte is mostly blue tribe. Even the racists and Neo-Nazis here are in fact blue tribe. (Per the original formulation, there are Republican-voting right-wing blue-tribers, and Democrat-voting left-wing red-tribers. The tribes aren't just voting groups.) Indeed, I suspect that their position is actually more appealing for a young, clever, right-wing-attracted blue triber. Being a Neo-Nazi is special - being a (pseudo?) intellectual far-righter obsessed with genetics and population IQ and ethnostates makes you just as anathema to the left as being a MAGA barstool type, but it at least makes you different to the MAGA type. You can still position yourself separately from the poorly-educated populist blue-collar beer-and-guns-and-Jesus type of right-wing, because I really doubt anyone in the far-right wants to be confused with them.
We don't have any socialists that I know of, but we've got some techo-optimist progressives. I think this is an expression of the IQ here; internet socialism seems like a phenomenon of just not understanding markets or capitalism, and techno-optimist progressivism has some of the same impulses towards utopianism and unlimited future progress, without the basic obvious factual errors and delusions.
We definitely have some prominent racists. And I'd definitely lean towards them being disaffected blue tribers- indeed, our white nationalist effort poster is explicitly so- but I'd dispute that far right wingers generally are opposed to being associated with guns, Jesus, casual homophobia, and beer-and-forklift-jousting blue collar America.
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Is the economy better because Biden is a really successful articulate president, with engaging ideas that get to the root causes of problems, imbalances and deficits in our country?
You can turn this one around, too, though: was the economy better under Trump because he was a really successful articulate president, with engaging ideas that get to the root causes of problems, imbalances and deficits in our country?
Or was it because the establishment republicans like tax cuts, and Trump was happy to oblige?
Tax cuts are popular amongst many who pay taxes. I'm not sure it's only establishment Republicans.
Global energy prices were lower under Trump. Is that Trump or Biden?
Better economy with this Biden doesn't get my vote. I'd need a better economy with a better Biden.
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I have been summoned.
I mean, you know who you replied to, right?
And I guess we lost a cath recently, maybe not so trad but certainly conservative. Hope she comes back.
I mean I did say we had a relative increase; I've been here since before we left reddit.
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I don't want left leaning posts. I want rational posts!!!! I want hot takes on current events from a reasonable and objective body of smart people. Not this partisan shit. It just makes me upset and mad at what it could have been, and what it has been when in full form. I occasionally have been able to come on here and the former sub for some of the smartest and most informative information available anywhere on the planet.
Maybe the news is too slow now and it is impacting the quality of the posts, maybe it is ideological drift or capture, all I know is I'm not getting the discourse I would expect from a forum that perhaps I saw as a more august body than it was.
Are there any particular current events you'd like hot takes on, at the moment?
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Looking at the AAQCs from August 2022, something like half of those people are still posting here regularly. It's largely the same people posting here now that were posting back then. So I'm not sure when you think the alleged golden age was, but apparently, it was more than two years ago. (Which means you're still posting on a forum that you think has been shit for 2+ years.)
"Losing ~50% of the best posters" over the course of two years does seem like kind of a big deal? (and I do think we lost a lot of good people in the years prior to that, albeit for different reasons)
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Yeah I've been around this particular weird space since 2013ish so 2 years ain't a lot. The fact that I can see an admin amongst the posters from your example is not a point in the favor of this argument.
Two, actually - self_made_human and FCfromSSC.
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