Voats problem wasn’t engagement. It was literal nazis.

They tried to prop up a thin veneer of legitimacy but at some point they just stopped caring. The front page became blatant “kill all [whatever]” type posts. That’s when engagement completely collapsed.

Lemmy has some clearly in bad faith instances which are probably run by nazis. Federation seems to be doing its job of resilience.

You can’t enlist the support of an entire gender by telling them that they are the source of all of society’s evils, and that they themselves are fundamentally evil no matter what, that they are all rapists-in-training, that the world would be better off if they were all killed, and that they are no better than vermin. And more importantly: that when they do something objectionable it is misogyny and bigoted and disgusting and (with some things) even illegal, but when women do it, it is a big nothingburger with zero consequences for the woman.

Where in the Democrat platform says all this? You’re using the lies the right uses.

The Friday news dump returns.

I dare say they own Reddit and likely were running social media interference at the lowest levels (with false stories of hopium. If you were on /r/politics you know what I’m talking about, focusing on shitty stories that Kamala was ahead)

Finally someone else is saying it. Feels like I’ve been taking crazy pills.

Notice how the politics subreddit is basically operated like the_donald. It’s controlled opposition. During the 45th administration they made a huge deal out of every single thing Trump did. No matter how big or small there was megathreads. What happened during Bidens administration? Fuck all of attention to anything. It was like 50/50 chance on any given week the mods would bother to create big posts for anything significant the administration accomplished. Net effect of making Biden seem more ineffectual. It’s basic a strategy of skewing what people are seeing by subtly editorializing the feed.

Throughout the Harris campaign there was scarcely any good discussion about actual policies. There was no shortage of comments saying it looks like she has not much policy. Followed by rare replies that never get any upvotes pointing out yes there’s actually an easily digestible 80 page document.

They let the subreddit flood with newsweek articles about how well Harris is polling. Seems to be one of the main diversionary tactics.

A lot of reddit users don’t seem to understand that reddit is not a democratic content driven platform. What they see can and is editorialized by the moderators. Hell people can’t even figure out the difference between admin (reddit employee) and mod (anonymous users with indeterminate biases/agendas). Some even seem to think reddit employees run subeddits. What a fucking disaster of ignorance but I digress.

All in all it appears reddit never recovered from the 2015-2016 the_donald coup. There was never an answer to that lrlourpresident account which was obviously astroturfing Democrat named subreddits.

I think much of the older userbase of anyone remotely left of center has gradually left by attrition over the years. Coincidentally between 2016 and today they’ve basically relaunched the platform bringing in whole new waves of unsuspecting users with the desktop redesign, phone app, and the IPO.

Something that hadn’t dawned on me until relatively recently with all the Musk Twitter bullshit. After reddit the company became independent from Conde Nast their chief source of funding is Thiel and Andreessen. Both we now know are hardcore MAGA supporting billionaires.

Steve Huffman calling those white supremacists on their platform “valuable discussion” is his “very fine people” moment.

ETA: The DOJ released documents from Russia stating they are to target “community of American gamers, users of reddit and image boards such as 4chan (the backbone of right-wing trends in the US segment of the internet)”. Emphasis mine. Comments linking to these documents were being inexplicable removed from the politics subreddit. This whole story got swept off the reddit news cycle real quick.

Oh well nobody’s gonna hear him over the tsunami of political persecution he’s complicit in ushering.

They’re doing their own version of Iranian revolution aren’t they.

I don’t think they’ve given up because the issues the care about matter to them but it has to be communicated in the form of inside joke meme-speak. Republicans seem to have cracked this nearly a decade ago. That’s how long a head start they’ve got on Democrats. By now they’ve thoroughly indoctrinated a generation with their own baseline.

I think what’s breaking older peoples minds is how far fetched all of this is. Not only do the kids speak in coded language. They cannot be reached by speaking normally to them. You have to use the codes.

I’ve been saying this for a long time. Before Trump even. The left could not rely on liberal youth defaultism forever. I hate being right.

What really drove it home the direness was nobody else has been seeing it. Culturally younger people are just different some how. I mean every generation has its idiosyncrasies but people just couldn’t get past that idea. Sounded like I was speaking in tongues to them I’m sure.

I could not put my finger on it. It’s not the current slate of political issues like housing or whatever. It predates this. I used to chalk it up to internet skull fucking kids minds in ways the older generations cannot grasp.

I had hoped the political mega minds would be able to hone in on these things. Turns out they’re all fucking clueless. Just winging it.

We’ve just seen that stepping aside is pointless without a popular candidate to step up. Neither the Liberals nor the NDP have anyone.

I thought to myself before the election. If the Dems lose it’s not entirely on them this time. The (non-)voters will have made their choice.

I still stand by that. I know the internet trolls are feasting on the Dems bad narrative. This one is just as much is on those voters as it is on whatever failings will be pinned on the party in the coming future.

Count us out. Canada has our own Trump wannabe lined up. He’s been like 20-30 points ahead and we’re no where close to election time.

Ontario the biggest province stayed home and didn’t bother to vote out the conservative premiere who has been fucking shit up. They all stayed home and handed him another majority. In a year or so we will elect our analog of Trump. Make no mistake he’s stocked the party full of MAGA and Proud Boys. I’m not being dramatic. It’s literally what it is. Within 4 years Canada will be openly aligned with Trump.

Fox News is a vestige of the 20th century. Social media is the 21st century Fox News. Everyone knows it’s bad but we have not reckoned with it. Everyone agrees it’s bad then everyone returns to scrolling their echo chamber.

Unfortunately the social media oligarchs side with Trump. We’re all fucked.

Underground railroads. It’s basically already a thing again with abortion.

Good news for pollsters. They weren’t so wrong after all.

We’ll finally see what Cannon actually looks like?

Double standard. Trump wins 2016 and it’s 4chan and reddit won it for him. Democrats finally get a clue 8 years later an start using social media but this time it doesn’t factor.

The broadcaster in Canada interviewed a young Trump supporter woman. She said all the abortion fears are made up. And that abortion isn’t real healthcare.

Well damn. This is as much a referendum on the character of America. What a searing indictment that it’s even close at all.

Reddit posted their own site metrics showing much of the traffic came from a US army base. It’s a US propaganda outlet.

For these social media ad companies to profit, self awareness had to be done away with. The profit machine stops working when the crowd realizes they’re trapped inside of it.

I don’t think the older internet was crude. It was more polished than the social media garbage of today. Corporatized internet had to mess all that the old internet worked to achieve. Because if everyone starts understanding the meta-dynamics of the internet again, then crowds will realize they’re trapped inside corporate internet. The profit machines would stop working.

You ever notice how the old internet figured out the basic rules of teh game decades ago. But trying to tell the social media crowds how these things work is like talking to a brick wall.