I assume twitter blue offers other perks, that people might want without the shame of it being publicly known.

Are people really still convincing themselves this is a 5D chess move.

After everything else, are we still doing that?

How dare they fixate on topics I think are remedial.

Almost like they are stepping stones.

I think it's fine what they are doing.

Look, some people are not switching. But if they aren't going to switch, more negative PR for Reddit is the most they can accomplish. We can speculate all we want about the abstract value of negative PR vs engagement, but at the very least I support this over them being there and silent about disliking it.

The members of a site openly despising the site itself encourages migration too. Keep the attention on how lothesome things are and people are more likely to drift away slowly over time.

They are lobotomizing the softwares ability to provide bad PR answers which is having cascading effects via a skewed data set.

Taking photos with my eyes. Would help a ton with getting pictures of cool bugs without having to fiddle with my phone and get defeated by autofocus

There are 5 different forums on the internet about this topic.

You don't have to join all or any of them. But they are each available to you.

The US criminal justice system has never been for rehabilitation. No sane person thinks jail makes someone less likely to commit crimes.

It sounds like you already have values that align you against him, which makes you not the target of the rhetoric. When people characterize others using ad hominem it's usually with a subtext of alienating then from empathy.

Calling Musk a Boomer Karen buffoon for example, is much more effective than calling him a hateful fascist to people who aren't politically opposed to him. Same with posting ugly pictures of him at the beach or calling him super divorced. All of these things are participating in stigmatizing things that should be fine. But they click with people brains and turn society against people sometimes more than accurate descriptors like calling him a fascist.

This same principle applies to the association with reptiles which is stigmatizing neurodivergence.

That doesn't make all of them the same of course, because people have different priorities and make different judgements on what stigmatizing is too far in different situations. So your assessment of the language accepting a degree of stigma is accurate. Just also want to be clear its a messy layered decision that can't be reduced to black and white in all context for all stigmatizing, without a lot of tradeoffs.

You're also right that using rhetoric that throws certain groups under the bus also alienates those groups, and comes with downsides. It can even plant seeds that can evolve into actual bigotry in movements (a lot of the "boomer" talk for example has basically evolved into general ageism against the elderly, and Karen has transformed into something you can call any women who annoys you or is complaining about something).

So there's a lot of good reason to push back on this stuff. But it can also be effective, particularly with fascists who loath feeling humiliated and form cult of personalities around being charismatic. But also in just turning neutral people into psudo allies. Sometimes. It's complicated, is all I'm saying.

A weakness of inclusive leftist language is it removes most of the rhetorical shorthand insults that are useful for negative propaganda. What is rhetorically sticky is insulting people looks, behaviors, etc. But it also participates in the stigma of that stuff. Explaining the real reasons your political enemies are bad takes more work, which makes it lose out in comparison to your opponents who don't have this limit.

There are ways to walk this line, but it's very difficult. Stigmatizing language is the norm with stuff like "stupid" and "crazy" which are ableist. There often aren't better alternatives that are equally effective rhetorically.

I don't really have a point here, just acknowledging that this is an issue that arrives from a conflict that isn't as easy to solve as it seems at first.

aka: early tech adopters!

these folk are always the ones trying new things, especially anti-corporate things. They aren't keeping people away. this is just how the bleeding edge of new technology. The communities natural grow out over time as more people show up and start to outnumber them. But it's thanks to them that niche new stuff gets supported in the first place while it builds up it's audience (and reduces the friction to joining)

I'm disappointed how few subreddits are daring to call their bluff, or put their full weight behind migrating. It's clear they actually aren't able to replace moderators that easily.