• 0 Posts
  • 37 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: August 30th, 2023

help-circle
  • 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.




  • spector@lemmy.catopolitics @lemmy.worldDemocrats' Gen Z dream just died
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    4
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    1 day ago

    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.


  • spector@lemmy.catopolitics @lemmy.worldDemocrats' Gen Z dream just died
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    22
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    2 days ago

    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.


  • 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.












  • Their premise is that the free market drove up the price of houses. Deregulation that is to say end of social housing programs led to this. Is that not neo-liberal? High construction costs come mainly from high cost of labor. The market driving up costs isn’t free market? What protectionist policies are there? When have property values been under threat of dropping. They’ve been ever increasing due to market demand. You say “lack of good investment”. Others say investors determined housing was a prime investment. Ditto for your last point.

    a bunch of 5-over-1 in mixed zoning

    What does this even mean?


  • The goal has always been engagement prisons. Where people never leave the platform. With generated content this must seem like a final step. They don’t need to make people to interact with each other in ways that keeps both of them engaged. They don’t need to leech content from other sites while preventing people from going to the site. With generated content people will interact with themselves while engaged in completely fabricated content. It’s even more dystopian than ever.