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Did the Right lose the terminally online by emphasizing consuming rather than communing?
Leftists (especially LGBT-focused) congregate in highly socialized communities where every small action toward The Cause is socially reinforced. You find this on Twitter and Discord. While there’s a fair amount of complaining typical of online spaces, leftist spaces are unique in saturating their mutuals in compliments and praise. There’s an oversaturation of positive feedback, and negative feedback is seen with suspicion. Anything from an uncreative tweet, a poorly conceived thought, an unlikely empowering experience, whatever is usually met with
pats on the backsnaps (sensory issues!) and goodboyspersons. While this oversaturation leads to an over-sensitivity, not to mention some bad behaviors and creations, it also means that the online community forms strong bonds and is only associated with positive emotions.In contrast, Right-oriented spaces are less keen on compliments and engage in more stressful catastrophization. They consume too much news and complain too much about the news. Culturally right online spaces are more socially stressful and have less bonding. They are critical of the liberal-coded heaping of compliments and empathy, and consequently miss out on a lot of the power and energy that’s present in Leftist spaces. There’s also an optimism deferential, with Leftist spaces generally more optimistic despite performative lamentation, and Right spaces more pessimistic, at least since ~2018.
This is a poor example, but imagine watching Contrapoints versus Jordan Peterson. This is a poor example by necessity — the Right does not have any counterpart to Contrapoints. You can watch Contrapoints and come away without any argument or evidence — but then you would be missing the point; the point is that you’re having an endearing and charming parasocial relationship with the person, and the outfit changes and odd social contextual changes simply work to increase the emotional affect, like a dozen playdates in video format.
There’s a phenomenon online where hobby spaces get “taken over” by more progressive mod teams in a variety of domains but especially terminally online spaces (video game modding, illustrations, speedrunning, etc). We see this on Reddit too. One possible reason for this is the uniquely reinforcing culture of online Leftist spaces. Someone becoming a mod on an otherwise unknown speedrunning discord community is something that would be praised in these communities and an earnest mark of reputation. And maybe they are right to do so — in any case the effect is that these small positional advancements can be a source of continual reward for the Leftist enjoying their quasi-lovebombing, while at the same time advancing the cause day after day.
You're forgetting that reality has a left wing bias.
Consider the keffals drama: if it was a rightoid vying for a rightoid cause, they would not have enjoyed the success that keffals did. Keffals manages to represent the mainstream, popular interest, and thus with minimal effort on her part she can succeed in her goals. While keffals instigated and pushed forward the situation, she only managed to do so because the broader world was prepared and receptive. Compare something like the Ottawa trucker protests. Possibly due to the police being supportive of their cause, they managed to dig their heels in and create a protest that seemed to actually be challenging the powers that be. Gofundme was allowing them to receive donations. The media was altogether against them, the house of commons passed the emergency act and started freezing bank accounts and arresting people, and suddenly their whole movement was fucked. Keffals, while she might seem the underdog in a given matchup, enjoys the support of the cathedral, while the truckers, while they may have seemed to momentarily have the upper hand, didn't.
The relative penetration of either side on online platforms just reflects the inherent bias of those platforms. Fun, playful rightoid youtubers either got taken down, or completely shifted their politics towards leftoidism to protect themselves. Very serious and careful, usually quite milquetoast, rightoid youtubers are also still around. The result is that it seems like only leftoids can be playful, when in fact the platforms themselves filter away playful rightoids.
I don't see any meaningful way in which the "the Right [lost] the terminally online". Many terminally online people are rightoids. You don't usually see them on reddit or twitter, because they get banned on reddit or twitter. Or they attenuate their views there to avoid being banned.
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