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submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by Cloak@lemmy.ml to c/reddit@lemmy.world

Historically, I've perceived Reddit as slightly left leaning, with strong pockets of conservatives. Recently though, a vast majority of comment sections seem to excuse violence, such as in this thread (TW: police brutality), where people say things like

TW: Supporting violence

The students didn’t hurt the bullets, right?

They paid to learn so....... You go learn today

Um...good?

Follow the rules of the people who own the property. If they ask you to leave then leave. Don’t interfere with people’s incomes or you’ll end up finding the fuck out

Got it. The next time I stand on a private piece of grass that I paid 200 grand for the privilege of using, I should expect to be shot at like I deserve. I'll keep that in mind.

When the owner of the property wants you to move on? Yeah. Move on. Or don’t and find out.

And I'm seriously wondering when Reddit got so bad that the hivemind supports calls for violence. Are these humans? Are they bots? Why does reddit allow this conduct?

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[-] Mwa@thelemmy.club 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I think reddit is Usally far left ngl (if that's a word) I never really seen racism happening it just gets deleted

I remember someone on reddit saying the n slur to me I reported him and reddit deleted the account (idk?)

[-] queermunist@lemmy.ml 126 points 1 month ago

We all left. Who are the people that stayed behind?

Also bots.

[-] Zaktor@sopuli.xyz 28 points 1 month ago

Yeah, last time I went back to survey the landscape the more anticorporate/progressive subs I knew were noticeably diminished, while subs that get off on the futility of activism and immutability of power structures were going strong.

I straight up see top comments calling for the death of all black people on front page subs lmao

[-] alvvayson@lemmy.dbzer0.com 24 points 1 month ago

The last natural, human, popular subreddit to arise on reddit was r/antiwork

After that, the site got swarmed by bots and censorship.

If you try and post something even remotely progressive in a popular subreddit, it will get deleted and you will probably get banned.

[-] 8ender@lemmy.world 12 points 1 month ago

So sooo many bots now

[-] JeffKerman1999@sopuli.xyz 96 points 1 month ago

Spez is a fascist, dude allowed nazi propaganda on his platform in the name of "free speech". Users are disgusted by what's on r/popular so the nazi population percentage grows. Add to this the complete eradication of mod tools and you get bots and extremists invasions.

[-] TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 71 points 1 month ago

If it wasn't for reddit supporting /r/TheDonald, there is a good chance MAGA might not have ever happened, at least not in the way it manifested.

Trump was able to get a significance amount of grassroots support early on, and it almost all came from /r/TheDonald. This was before anything was really happening on other social media. People that were disenfranchised with Obama pretty much went with either Bernie or Trump. It was a warzone on Reddit. Both Bernie and Trump did AMA's and this blew them up popularity wise.

What Bernie didn't have that Trump did was an army of russian bots supporting him.

[-] Habahnow@sh.itjust.works 13 points 1 month ago

idk, I disagree that /r/TheDonald's existence was what sparked MAGA. Russia had such a heavy hand in the creation and support of MAGA that they would have found another place to start the fire. TheDonald was just the largest pile of kindle available... with many more around it. I could imagine they would have focused even harder on facebook, or news coverage or whatever else.

Regardless, I do agree with the rest of your point that TheDonald had a huge influence on MAGA

[-] A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world 13 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Nah, if you want to point at the thing that made all this happen..then its not MAGA.

it was Gamergate.

Gamergate was the prototype and test run for the foreign provocateurs, right wing extremists and other hate mongers to see how successful such a large scale attempt at manipulation of narratives and communities could be.. and it proved quite successful, and the same tactics and methods were scaled up even further to lay the groundwork for Trumpism and what we have today.

Gamergate was the Trinity test that lead to Littleboy (general uptick in rightwing extremism/fascism/alt-rightism and approval of such) and FatMan (Russian "Useful Idiots" who came to power, or threatened to, with Russian backing, not just in America, but elsewhere)

[-] TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 9 points 1 month ago

I was so confused by gamergate.

you are very into something but the whole thing was so just,,, incoherent. Like I still don't really get what gamergate was because it was like a Russian nesting doll of gaslighting.

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[-] blindbunny@lemmy.ml 11 points 1 month ago

This should be the paragraph in text books.

[-] theareciboincident@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

In hindsight it was pretty fucking obvious when TD was regularly inspiring terrorist attacks and was allowed to thrive while CTH got banned for saying 17th century slave owners deserve death

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[-] stembolts@programming.dev 62 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Conservatives have a lot to gain by building bots to antagonize and convert naive young (and old) people by plastering their dumb ideas everywhere. It's marketing, if you're cruel and dumb they want you on their team.

Why do they allow it? Many reasons I'd guess.. engagement , capitalism, shared-beliefs.

Controversial things generate engagement.
Engagement generates profits.
Many of the decision makers are narcissistic conservatives who think the same thing, but instead of saying it they just enable it, indirectly achieving the same goal as hate-evangelizing.

A surprising amount of people want to watch the world burn, as long as they can do it from a balcony.

[-] MelodiousFunk@slrpnk.net 27 points 1 month ago

A surprising amount of people want to watch the world burn, as long as they can do it from a balcony.

I do believe I'm going to borrow this one.

[-] madcaesar@lemmy.world 9 points 1 month ago

It's also so, so, sooooooo easy to post right wing bullshit because it's always emotional shallow and without any nuance.

So if you say immigrants are stealing all our jobs and committing crimes all over our country! People are already getting riled up, while I have to spend 5 minutes explaining that while we have to secure our borders immigrants aren't the cause of all our woes.

And while I'm in the middle of my 5 minute explanation debunking your first horseshit point, you interject "Gays are over running our schools and molesting our kids!"....

So yea... The truth has a huge disadvantage in the online space because it's so easy to spread lies.

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[-] A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world 7 points 1 month ago

Conservatives have a lot to gain by building bots to antagonize and convert naive young (and old) people by plastering their dumb ideas everywhere. It’s marketing, if you’re cruel and dumb they want you on their team.

Because their opinions are unpopular as fuck, even amongst their own base, so they have to resort to paying propagandists and social manipulators to spam accounts and posts about their shit to make it seem more popular than it is, in the hopes of converting some of their idiot base by making them go "WELL SO MANY PEOPLE (BOTS) ARE TALKING ABOUT THIS, IT MUST BE POPULAR, THERE FOR I MUST LIKE IT OR I FAIL CONSERVATISM"

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[-] drmoose@lemmy.world 60 points 1 month ago

It simply grew too big and corporate. Reddit is not a niche social network anymore. It's Facebook.

[-] alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml 23 points 1 month ago

It was never a niche social network. In the beginning, Spez used sockpuppets to fake engagement, later on advertisers and state actors (In 2016, they forgot to scrub the bots from their statistics, and posted that Eglin Airforce Base was the most reddit-addicted city) generated engagement.

[-] drmoose@lemmy.world 24 points 1 month ago

What it absolutely was a niche network to the point where if reddit was mentioned in mainstream media it made big waves. Dudes even had secret greetings like when does the narval bacon or smt like that I don't remember. But reddit was super niche and that's what made it special imo. The first secret santa exchanges were trully amazing, unique experiences that will never be replicated again and the platform was full of these niche little gems that are forever lost now.

[-] andros_rex@lemmy.world 14 points 1 month ago

Reddit also harbored trading rings for CSAM. It took a CNN report about r/jailbait for it to be removed. There was also r/picsofdeadkids. r/creepshots.

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[-] whotookkarl@lemmy.world 52 points 1 month ago

June 30th, 2023. There were always subreddits like r/thedonald that used violent right wing authoritarian cult-like political rhetoric, but after the users and mods who gave half a shit left when they banned third party apps and sided with advertisers over the people keeping it from becoming 99% bots and bootlickers.

[-] CitizenKong@lemmy.world 16 points 1 month ago

Or in other words, Spez decided to speedrun enshitification.

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[-] TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee 35 points 1 month ago

Well, you see in June last year, Reddit decided to make some greedy corporate changes. So in response, tons of principled leftists departed the site. What did yall expect? Same thing happened to Twitter.

[-] TheBat@lemmy.world 25 points 1 month ago

This shit is spreading everywhere, even to non-US subreddits. I regularly saw anti-muslim, homophobic comments on supposedly non-political subreddits like /r/indianboysontinder.

Even self-proclaimed feminist subreddit like TwoXIndia has their members posting BJP talking points when duscussion turn to politics

[-] NoneOfUrBusiness@kbin.social 23 points 1 month ago

I mean tbf Islamophobia on an Indian subreddit isn't surprising.

[-] TheBat@lemmy.world 7 points 1 month ago

It used to be limited to right wing subreddits but now its everywhere

[-] Jikiya@lemmy.world 20 points 1 month ago

Two things are happening simultaneously Russia/China are trying to spread discontent, and Trumps followers are being told they no longer have to abide by social norms that keeps societies civil.

I believe the uncivil thing just always comes in waves as the people that don't like change are forced to change and get resentful. Some kind of event happens and resets the floor, or all the people that don't want to change die off, and things settle down.

And this is the mental framework through which I see the world.

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[-] GBU_28@lemm.ee 19 points 1 month ago

Everywhere is shit. Lemmy has those folks too

[-] Raiderkev@lemmy.world 17 points 1 month ago

I think you have AI to thank. Bots are going to take over everything, and I worry that soon comments of anything on the Internet will be rife with garbage like this.

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[-] blindbunny@lemmy.ml 16 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Anyone worth a shit left already. It's full of normies and bots now. The "reddit is a psyop" guy is starting to make sense now.

[-] then_three_more@lemmy.world 16 points 1 month ago

Probably a bit before The Donald was flooding the entire feed.

[-] njm1314@lemmy.world 16 points 1 month ago

Reddit admins straight up love Nazis. That's not hyperbole. It's a long and recorded history.

[-] brax@sh.itjust.works 15 points 1 month ago

I assume it happened around the time most of us left for other places. The fascist community there probably hasn't grown much in numbers, but as a percentage it increased because the decent people left.

[-] card797@champserver.net 15 points 1 month ago

I said, "when will he die already", referring to Trump? And was permanently banned. "Inciting violence."

[-] blindbunny@lemmy.ml 9 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I said, "He should be shot" to a picture of Reagan. Who was shot and lived for two decades after that and was banned for 6 days.

If I can't say ridiculous things on the Internet where the fuck else am I supposed to say it?

[-] Brickardo@feddit.nl 15 points 1 month ago

It's flooded with bots as well as karma farmers. You can tell by the way they write down their comments.

For better or for worse, you'll often find real people at the reddit comments when sorting by controversial. Often for the worse, but sometimes for the better.

[-] homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 10 points 1 month ago

Friendly reminder the "block user" function is available on all your favorite platforms. Much like we had to invest the time in filtering mail back in the day, so do we have to do the same for comment threads now.

[-] LordPassionFruit@lemm.ee 18 points 1 month ago

I don't think this will solve the issue OP is describing. They're concerned at the existence of fascists on reddit, not just that they are seeing them. Blocking them all would be more like sticking your fingers in your ears and saying it doesn't exist.

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[-] grrgyle@slrpnk.net 10 points 1 month ago

My theory is that if you were really principled, you would have got out of there a long time ago. So what you've got left are people who are ok to put up with a shitty status quo, so long as they get their fix. You know, moderates.

I don't go on reddit anymore, but if it's full of people who put up with shit, then it's only natural that the shit started rolling in.

[-] Juice@midwest.social 10 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I left reddit for good 4 years ago for just this reason. I suspect it was well before that, like when someone tracked the IPS of reddit users and discovered that the most redditors were in the town where Eglin Air Force base is located. Now there's more bots but they used to have more people just doing the same shit. Lots of large police forces have big social media teams I wonder what they do. And the most prolific mod and poster of their time was likely Ghislaine Maxwell. Oh and their CEO made their career in the CIA before coming over to Reddit, which from what we know about people who left the CIA to go into media, is that they never really left

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[-] zeppo@lemmy.world 10 points 1 month ago

I've been using reddit since 2008 and the idea of any conservative bullshit on there would have been really surprising before 2015. Overall though the amount of generic person stupidity has increased in the past few years. Not that all sports fans are like this, but often i get the stupidest reply from someone - like, close minded, blithely cruel about whatever topic - and look at their profile and the ONLY other thing they've commented on is sports.

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[-] Vilian@lemmy.ca 10 points 1 month ago

just a feature of engagement algorithms, they promote mad and stupid shit, and fascist takes are exactly like that

[-] Katrisia@lemm.ee 9 points 1 month ago

Historically, I've perceived Reddit as slightly left leaning, with strong pockets of conservatives.

Yes, in international subreddits. The national ones were often right leaning (e.g. r/Canada, r/Mexico).

[-] magnetosphere@fedia.io 8 points 1 month ago

…with strong pockets of conservatives.

Being loud, disrespectful and obnoxious is frequently an attempt to mask weakness and insecurity.

I get what you mean, though. I avoid that cesspool as much as possible.

[-] Ashtear@lemm.ee 8 points 1 month ago

Fascism's quite profitable until they start rounding people up.

[-] alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml 9 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Helping keep track of who to round up was very profitable for IBM, and it was for Facebook in Myanmar.

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this post was submitted on 03 May 2024
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