Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
What is wrong with reddit? I find that oftentimes I have a question, and I can't honestly think of any other place on the internet that I can ask that question and get an answer other than specific subreddits. But at the same time, I don't want to post on reddit because I hate it. You can't post anything there without at least half the comments being about how you're a fucking idiot for even asking the question to begin with. Every single time I'm like "I know I had bad experiences on reddit in the past, but this current post I'm about to do is so innocuous that no one could possibly take issue with it and ridicule me for it", and every time, without fail, I'm proven wrong.
Reddit just seems to me to be the judgiest place in the world. Does reddit select for this? Is this some sort of toxoplasma in action? Does half of reddit just consider themselves to be better than other people?
I do think admin and moderator decisions (some of which were absolutely necessary) have resulted in its userbase becoming more selected for midwittery, conformity and smugness over time. In 2012, Reddit was so committed to its vision of a free speech-friendly website that there was a major controversy over whether or not to ban a subreddit for photos of attractive teenagers taken without their knowledge (a rare example of a subreddit ban I fully endorse, for what it's worth).
But successive bans of subreddits for weird porn, edgy humour or anything which contradicts woke orthodoxy (most notably The_Donald, but also numerous subreddits which tolerate even the mildest scepticism of gender ideology - I expect the days are numbered for /r/detrans) have resulted in most of the witches and weirdos fleeing the coop, leaving behind only the midwits whose tastes tend toward the anodyne and who can reliably be assumed to believe that we really have always been at war with Eastasia.
Hard to be at all sympathetic given that they banned any criticism of Trump. Hard to complain about being banned for 'contradicting woke orthodoxy' (which I don't think is a fair representation of what happened but nevertheless) when you don't allow any contradiction of Trumpian orthodoxy.
I hope you didn't interpret my comment as to imply that I support any and all subreddits which contradict woke orthodoxy. /r/itsafetish was banned, but so was /r/GasTheKikes. My point is that the common thread underpinning the banning of most political subreddits is that they were insufficiently woke, sometimes subtly, sometimes extravagantly. I have yet to hear of a subreddit which was banned by a conservative admin for being too woke.
I don't see anything intrinsically objectionable about a political community banning all criticism of a specific political figure. It's pretty weird to go into a subreddit for supporters of Donald Trump and start ranting about how much Donald Trump sucks, especially when there are thousands of other subreddits (most of which have nothing to do with politics) in which you can do that and get a warm reception. Which is more pluralistic: a website with numerous sub-communities each enforcing their own specific orthodoxy on their members, or a website in which the members of every community have to adhere to exactly one orthodoxy?
Well we can make this argument one stage removed no? Reddit is simply one of many websites enforcing certain values, if you don't like them you can go to another website - it is itself a 'sub-community' of all websites.
Ah yes, the old "if you don't like it, start your own website" argument.
Then someone does start their own website, and woke people don't like that, and immediately start hitting said website with DDoS attacks and putting pressure on their hosting providers and payment processors to drop them as clients.
You seem to be operating from the assumption that woke people, as a group, actually respect people's rights to hold and express political opinions they disagree with. I have absolutely no idea how you arrived at such a manifestly preposterous idea, when the last 10-15 years of Western politics have largely consisted of woke people loudly and explicitly announcing that they do not.
They could and they did! Patriots.win is still up and running. Where do you think you are now?
So you're not even going to acknowledge my point then, cool.
I was responding to you, specifically your smug mockery of 'start your own website', which was silly because that's exactly what they were able to do.
Kiwifarms, though I don't necessarily agree with Cloudflare's decision, was clearly not just banned just for its ideological proclivities.
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