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I agree with most of your criticisms of reddit. But I don't know if it is particularly indicative of anything about the human condition. I think, rather, that it says something about the type of person who comments on reddit threads. The number of reads that reddit gets dwarfs the number of posts and comments by orders of magnitude. And the number of people that actually spend time reading reddit posts is just a tiny fraction of humanity.
I think there are two take aways from this. The first is that it is worth thinking about why only a tiny fraction post things. My guess is that posting takes effort, and people are very hesitant to put forth effort for no reward. The people that do end up posting are often some combination of very unusual or very unbalanced. More often than not, I think it may be the later. People who's lives are going well don't spend their time angrily yelling at people they don't know and will never know about minute differences of opinion.
Which brings me to my second point, that the culture of much of the world was dictated for about 15 years by those exact, maladjusted posters. From around 2010 up until very recently, the collective opinions that these people coalesced around were pumped into the mainstream by journalists, media companies, and news networks that couldn't resist a cheap and easy source of material that was pre-optimized to be as tribalizing and divisive as possible. While there was a culture war before then, almost all the ideas debated on this forum and across society as a whole crystalized into their modern form during this era. I guess now that bots are starting to out-post humans by wide margins, this will probably change, and we'll move back to a world where majority opinions are dictated from above rather than from the grass roots. But the scars from it will last a long time. In the end, it really makes the optimism of the early internet era look utterly absurd in hindsight. Who in their right mind thought that letting anyone message everyone would possibly lead to good outcomes?
This is a complete misrepresentation of early reddit. Back then, reddit wasn't the holier-than-thou leftist hellhole it is today. It was full of “grey tribe” progressives: nerdy atheists who were certainly not conservative, but also not easily offended feminist wokescolds. There was an ethos of free speech maximalism, which is why besides le epic funny subreddits like /r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu there were also 4chan-worthy subreddits like /r/WatchPeopleDie and /r/Niggers. The general attitude was that yeah, they are kinda awful, but they have just as much of a right to exist here; if you don't like it just don't subscribe to it.
Remember /u/violentacrez, the guy who created /r/Jailbait (for posting sexualized pictures of minors), and moderated /r/BeatingWomen, /r/Creepshots, /r/PicsOfDeadKids, /r/PicsOfDeadNiggers (and a bunch of other subreddits that were exactly what it said on the tin)? When Gawker reporter Adrian Chen threatened to dox him, calling him the “biggest troll on the web”, reddit rallied behind him in solidarity, and responded by banning all of Gawker media in support.
This included mainstream subs like /r/politics who wrote: “Reddit prides itself on having a subreddit for everything, and no matter how much anyone may disapprove of what another user subscribes to, that is never a reason to threaten them.” It's literally inconceivable today!
(Incidentally, did you guys see the recent Pew poll which concluded /r/politics is 97% leftwing/progressives now?)
Of course those 4chan-esque subs were always dubious if not outright illegal, so it was clear that as reddit grew into the mainstream, something had to be done about them. The problem is that the admins overcorrected and instead of just banning some of the worst offenders like /r/Jailbait or /r/CoonTown they ended up banning almost everything that violated lefist sensibilities.
Anyway, to wrap a long story up, my point is that:
...seems exactly the wrong way around. It was woke politics that grew popular around 2010 that ended up taking over reddit, not the other way around.
I think "the other way around" is right, though. They didn't take over by becoming popular, they took over by consolidating moderation in their hands (I think right now a handful of people moderates a ridiculous amount of the most popular subs, though I don't remember the numbers), and getting admins to ban opposition.
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Like @haroldbkny I also take issue with this statement firstly because I'm skeptical of the degree to which majority opinions were ever "dictated from above". IE was there a genuine consensus or merely the appearance of consensus because all the records we have come from a handful of closely-aligned sources? Secondly because even if it was possible to dictate opinions in the past, I'm not convinced that it is possible now. Back in the 90s and early 2000s people would say "pics or it didn't happen". Nobody says that anymore, because everybody knows how easy pictures are to fake.
To your point (and @haroldbkny 's ), I agree that public opinion was never completely dictated from above. The "market of ideas" so to speak, is actually more like a testing ground to see what ideas resonate with the public and what do not. But the consolidation of news papers and publishers under the likes of Hearst and Pulitzer brought about a situation where the people at the top had a large say in which of these "publicly resonant" stories were allowed to propagate. And over the following century, it largely stayed that way. Of course there were smaller publishers and other communication channels, but the majority of public discourse was under the thumb of these gatekeepers.
We have just gone through an era in which there were essentially no gatekeepers. Anything that was emotionally resonant enough "went viral" on social media and entered into the public zeitgeist. Look at what the results have been.
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All good points. My main dispute is this:
This might have some merit, to the degree bots are influenced by their system prompts. But bear in mind where the vast corpus of training data for these bots came from to begin with: Reddit. And in my experience, you can't always override the bot's natural training with specific directives.
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