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Tourists coming into the space was always a thing. They would either get curious and lurk after getting told off or they would leave. That doesn't explain why old communities were culturally replaced.
It's not the normie who has the power to 'weigh' in on anything. Mod cliques do what they want to do. They enforced their rules from the top down. And it's not even that they catered to normies. They just enforced lib/progressive/leftist ideological orthodoxy because that's what the lolcows like in real life. The ultimate ideology that says you can't laugh at them anymore.
Take any regular reddit post that gets locked because too many users are noticing something about black people. You get the typical condescending reddit mod "I guess we just can't play nice today" or whatever. Normies just put up with it because they are normies, they have a real life to live and care about, after all. The mods see themselves as curators of comments that the normies can be allowed to see.
/v/ was a great example of how extremely top down things are. Moot bans discussion on GamerGate because of his real life social circle. This was so contrary to the wants of the userbase that it spawned an entire splinter site.
Same thing, to a lesser extent, with reddit and voat.
I think it would be much fairer to say normies don't actually have opinions. They just read them. In a war of internet minorities, no-lifers lost to the lolcows.
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