Historically, I’ve perceived Reddit as slightly left leaning, with strong pockets of conservatives. Recently though, a vast majority of comment sections seem to excuse violence, such as in this thread (TW: police brutality), where people say things like

TW: Supporting violence

The students didn’t hurt the bullets, right?

They paid to learn so… You go learn today

Um…good?

Follow the rules of the people who own the property. If they ask you to leave then leave. Don’t interfere with people’s incomes or you’ll end up finding the fuck out

Got it. The next time I stand on a private piece of grass that I paid 200 grand for the privilege of using, I should expect to be shot at like I deserve. I’ll keep that in mind.

When the owner of the property wants you to move on? Yeah. Move on. Or don’t and find out.

And I’m seriously wondering when Reddit got so bad that the hivemind supports calls for violence. Are these humans? Are they bots? Why does reddit allow this conduct?

  • JeffKerman1999@sopuli.xyz
    1·
    2 years ago

    Spez is a fascist, dude allowed nazi propaganda on his platform in the name of “free speech”. Users are disgusted by what’s on r/popular so the nazi population percentage grows. Add to this the complete eradication of mod tools and you get bots and extremists invasions.

    • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
      1·
      2 years ago

      If it wasn’t for reddit supporting /r/TheDonald, there is a good chance MAGA might not have ever happened, at least not in the way it manifested.

      Trump was able to get a significance amount of grassroots support early on, and it almost all came from /r/TheDonald. This was before anything was really happening on other social media. People that were disenfranchised with Obama pretty much went with either Bernie or Trump. It was a warzone on Reddit. Both Bernie and Trump did AMA’s and this blew them up popularity wise.

      What Bernie didn’t have that Trump did was an army of russian bots supporting him.

      • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        Nah, if you want to point at the thing that made all this happen…then its not MAGA.

        it was Gamergate.

        Gamergate was the prototype and test run for the foreign provocateurs, right wing extremists and other hate mongers to see how successful such a large scale attempt at manipulation of narratives and communities could be… and it proved quite successful, and the same tactics and methods were scaled up even further to lay the groundwork for Trumpism and what we have today.

        Gamergate was the Trinity test that lead to Littleboy (general uptick in rightwing extremism/fascism/alt-rightism and approval of such) and FatMan (Russian “Useful Idiots” who came to power, or threatened to, with Russian backing, not just in America, but elsewhere)

        • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
          1·
          2 years ago

          I was so confused by gamergate.

          you are very into something but the whole thing was so just, incoherent. Like I still don’t really get what gamergate was because it was like a Russian nesting doll of gaslighting.

    • alvvayson@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      1·
      2 years ago

      The last natural, human, popular subreddit to arise on reddit was r/antiwork

      After that, the site got swarmed by bots and censorship.

      If you try and post something even remotely progressive in a popular subreddit, it will get deleted and you will probably get banned.

    • Zaktor@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      Yeah, last time I went back to survey the landscape the more anticorporate/progressive subs I knew were noticeably diminished, while subs that get off on the futility of activism and immutability of power structures were going strong.

  • Juice@midwest.social
    0·
    2 years ago

    I left reddit for good 4 years ago for just this reason. I suspect it was well before that, like when someone tracked the IPS of reddit users and discovered that the most redditors were in the town where Eglin Air Force base is located. Now there’s more bots but they used to have more people just doing the same shit. Lots of large police forces have big social media teams I wonder what they do. And the most prolific mod and poster of their time was likely Ghislaine Maxwell. Oh and their CEO made their career in the CIA before coming over to Reddit, which from what we know about people who left the CIA to go into media, is that they never really left