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Reddit is a completely curated experience for the most part, and so it’s never going to be a vanguard for new ideas. It probably stopped being that in the early 2000 before the normies showed up. Now it’s mostly low effort and tryhard shlock that most people have heard some version of before. The memes are not original, in fact they’re basically the same stuff that would have been posted there 20 years ago with names updated. The AITAH and similar talk forums are basically barely realistic fanfic level crap that doesn’t even bring up interesting discussions— and the user is never the asshole because Reddit doesn’t think any relationship is worth working through the slightest problem for. Like if she burned your dinner, you should dump her immediately, if not sooner, and be sure to ruin something she loves on the way out the door.
Avant Garde stuff does not come from places curated to mainstream tastes. TBH I’d look at 8chan or something for that kind of future opinion shaping.
What? Reddit was founded in 2005, and didn't ban its first subreddit until 2011 (r/jailbait, rest in power).
Kind of shocking how hands off Reddit was given how much of an SJW the founder is right now. I guess he was willing to shut up when he had to, but once he got the network effects, he was ready to push the agenda.
It was different times when Reddit was founded. Back then the left was confident in it's ideas, so they craved free speech as they saw it as the key to winning. It's only when they realized they can also lose on the marketplace of ideas that they turned sour on it.
Hard to overstate how much Donald Trump changed the vibe, too.
He really exploited the idea that you can "just say things" and since it appeared that 4chan played a significant role in his rise to power, the norms of free speech were suddenly cast as the enemy of Democracy, somehow.
It all escalated from there, but with his current win (and him going on a revenge tour) there's been some rapid capitulation almost everywhere BUT Reddit.
If Reddit wanted to make a change, they could start by re-opening /r/the_donald.
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Left-libertarian to SJW is not an unusual ideological evolution over the relevant time period.
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When it was founded all of the main founders were either libertarians or techno-anarchist types. The ideological evolution of Huffman, Ohanian and so on happened later.
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Pretty sure there are now multiple bot accounts that just repost the most-upvoted content on a sub from like a year ago, then add in the same top-upvoted comments on said post.
And from what I can tell Twitter is currently the place that most tightly interfaces with real life events in terms of both causing and quickly reacting to them.
Karma repost/farming bots have been happening for so, so, long
Like way before COVID, probably close to a decade ago
They were rampant on AskReddit when I was in university
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