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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   29337 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

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Comparing Reddit to some 4chan offshoot is played out at this point. I am bothered that toxicity from the Left gets a nice mainstream pasture to jerk themselves off day and night with tacit mainstream approval while milquetoast Right wingers get left with condemned self-hosted shitholes or bust.

We've seen how the Left reacts to 'bad speak' where no slurs or threats are even deployed. And the entire neurotic hammer-dropping process has been completely absent here as it was with Kirk.

You want to compare this to a chan schizoid going off on gassing the Jews? Okay. I'll grant that an apples to apples comparison leaves the virulent antisemite looking worse. But this phenomenon where Reddit discourse gets pass after pass? Yeah, I think thats more concerning and even dangerous.

Is Reddit representative of the Left? Not entirely, but it represents a mindset that is quite alive and well over there. And its one I've detected enough IRL that I no longer consider this 'a random internet opinion'. Meanwhile, I know zero people that express chan bile unless they have the good sense to leave that on the net.

/pol/ isn't a self hosted 4chan offshoot, it's just 4chan. And the correct comparator to reddit isn't even 4chan, it's twitter, where people are happy to issue calls for the death of whoever you'd like, unabated.

Right-wingers from milquetoast to genocidal currently have Twitter to jerk themselves off day and night.

So do left wingers. There’s still progressive Twitter, the lolcows just left for blue sky.

Along with eveybody else from any political corner. And that is solely due the intervention of one eccentric manchild billionaire. I guess I'm fortunate that things progressed that way given the way the stars were aligning.

I don't really care if toxic sentiment is spilling out in some free-for-all arena - or at least don't care as much. I do care when spaces (often de facto Left-ruled) make a big song and dance about rules and decorum, deploy them maliciously against their opponents, and spare themselves. This is sanewashing what got many other subs monitored and eventually banned, and allows users to acclimate to a norm.

Find me the mainstream right-wing Reddit easily downloadable and accessible from the IOS store and I'll take these comparisons seriously.

Sure, it's open for everyone (though I suspect that right-wing content gets boosted by the algorithm), it's just bit rich at this point to say that right-wingers (let alone milquetoast right-wingers) have to do with "condemned self-hosted shitholes or bust".

IIRC at least Parler and Gab were kicked out of both the Apple and Google app stores for what is demonstrably less "violent rhetoric" than is frequently seen posted on Bluesky (by public figures, no less) about Jesse Singal, plus whatever you can find about Charlie Kirk.

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