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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   28185 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

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Yeah, I... Yeah.

It's gotten really awful. I still go to /r/all sometimes to get a sense of what normies are seeing on social media and it is so brutal and bleak. Doesn't exactly ruin my day but I always come out of it terribly disheartened. The derangement, the self-righteousness, the absolute inability to imagine any other narrative. Clicking on threads which contain straightforward outrageous lies in the title only to find everyone nodding along, bashing 'MAGAs' for mostly-unrelated reasons, and one brave person pointing out that the whole thing is bogus -- only to be heavily downvoted of course. The speed and volume of the echo chamber are bewildering.

To be sure, though, niche communities are often still great, and that's what reddit's really about imo. It's a shame how much garbage has to be waded through to find them, but once the account is set up correctly it's fairly usable. Even if the toxicity has a way of working itself into everything eventually.

Also, the sheer popularity of trans-oriented comics drawn in hideous art styles is entirely baffling to me.

The most baffling I saw on the front page was a headline about how the University of Minnesota allows senior citizens to audit classes for 10 dollars a credit hour.

"Oh, how cute," I thought.

Redditors were furious.

I think there might be a dynamic going on whereby the kind of person who hangs out on big Reddit subs is looking to be angry, (either because that's their hobby or because of selective pressure on comments in a large subreddit), so pattern matches even completely innocuous stories into rage bait (in this case something about student debt and boomers stealing from the future).

Redditors were furious.

I sincerely can't imagine why.

Is reddit even "normie" anymore?

Last I checked it was still a top ten site, but idk.

The extreme popularity of lgbt (and especially t) content on the front page makes me wonder if it isn't just convergently evolving into another tumblr.

My experience with a very small sample size of normies (my wife) is that they use reddit to view only one or two hobby subreddits.

Tumblr is more ideologically diverse than Reddit these days.

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