I keep an account so I can follow what local redditors are saying about local politics, but everytime I make the mistake of clicking through a headline on the front page I can’t help but notice the “non-political” subs have are regurgitating transphobia (specifically r/sportsgossip & friends).
The only place I don’t see a change in vibes are the CircleJerk subs like AmITheAngel and GirlDinnerDiariesCircleJerk which if I put my conspiracy hat on would suggest the vibes are being pushed by bots or AI(actually Indians).
Even on my local reddit anything pro-police/survailance will have a bunch positive of comments from accounts with names like unoriginal_words_1234 and all their comment history hidden.
Has reddit moved further right recently or is this just 1 particular culture war thing being pushed, it does seem pretty engineered (AFAIK there are 0 trans women in the WNBA)? Has anyone done a study on this? Especially the rightward skew of seemingly bot accounts.
way way back at the beginning…
Imgur And Reddit were peas in a pod. Imgur became a toxic performative woke site that punished people HARD for not whiteknighting the trans/feminist movement, even when said movements were shooting themselves in the foot. I parted ways with them in 2022, when I realized they had shadow IP banned me. (I upgraded my router and HEY PRESTO! I could suddenly log on again. Fuck em.')
Reddit has become a corporate hogwallow of neoliberal centrist doublespeak and if you aren’t “average demographic user™” or start venting using the “bad no-no words :(” (I.E. “anything even remotely reactionary to living in today’s fucked up system”) they get cranky because you aren’t staying in the lane that will make investors feel “secure.”
It’s also been my experience that Transfolk are a little bit heavy handed with slapping the “Transphobic” label on any views they disagree with or might be critical of them, constructive or otherwise.