Amerika

Following up on actions by Twitter and Facebook, both of whom have banned high-visibility non-Leftists this week, Reddit went on a spate of bans of subreddits which opposed its Leftist orthodoxy, culminating in a ban of anti-Leftist meme hoard /r/SJWHate.

This “sub,” which is the Reddit name for a channel which works like a Facebook page or Twitter hashtag, grew famous for criticizing SJWs from a non-Leftist position. That is, instead of complaining about how annoying they are, it pointed out that SJWs/PC are a Leftist attempt to take over our society.

A few weeks ago, Reddit contacted the mods of the sub with a complaint. Someone — a new user to the sub, as it turns out — had posted a link to a story about a man who beat up a pedophile. Reddit’s admins were concerned by responses such as “Good Deal” and “Give him a medal,” which they claimed were “glorifying violence.”

As a moderator of /r/SJWHate, I encouraged any content that made fun of the Left, but found it impossible to police the constant stream of stuff for comments by Reddit’s mostly-antisocial users who would come in from other parts of the site.

However, we never had any content advocating violence to the level of what we saw regularly in the Leftist subs, including communist and anarchist subs. They could post calls for violent activity, even blatantly violate other site rules, and nothing happened to them.

At first, I resisted the idea that Reddit was simply biased, but after seeing their message to us complaining about users typing “Good deal” into a comment box, it became clear that this was a persecution. They wanted their hugbox back, a “safe space” for Leftist snowflakes, and we were in the way, even if we were not because we had our own little space.

It turns out that Redditors are triggered by any competing ideas, much like Leftists on other social media, mostly because they are unstable as people. To them, the internet is a place they go in order to hide out from the world and talk to others who affirm their worldview.

You can see this in Reddit’s creepy culture, which celebrates being “forever alone” much as it idealizes losing weight and getting motivated. Its fascination with anything submissive, including cuckold pornography and “pegging” or male passive penetration, shows how these people identify as losers and want to be a loser army against winners.

As one user wrote, the average Redditor is defined by desiring power above their natural level of ability:

I applaud you for applying all the concepts you are learning at community college. I also recognize your courage in leaving the safe space to compose and send this response.

You impress me with your ability to incorporate phrases into a coherent foundation to support your arguments. I would even venture to say you are probably the smartest barista at the coffee shop or clerk at Whole Foods.

Not surprisingly, in protecting these people Reddit has racked up a list of censorship events including the banning of the neutral discussion forum /r/klan/, not to mention double standards.

This calls into question Reddit’s past bans of Right-wing subs (possibly by deception) and habit of invisibly coordinating content behind the scenes, reminiscent of the Left’s JournoList scandal.

More significantly, with its new redesign Reddit has been trying to become more like Facebook over the last year, except that Reddit seems allied with Google instead of Zuckerface. This means that Reddit is trying very hard to play nice with Google’s new standards for its advertising and ultimately someday its index.

As a result, Reddit adopted a more stringent but still vague content policy earlier this year, perhaps because of the scandals of the past year including algorithm adjustments and editing user messages that were critical of the CEO.

Even more, an analysis of Reddit’s actions showed that they were not banning troublesome behavior, but unwanted topics. This suggests that Reddit has lost control of its userbase and is heading down the MySpace cycle, at the end of which lies catastrophic bankruptcy. Its last-ditch effort is to become Facebook lite with anonymous user logins so that people can browse porn as well as catch up on the updates and egodrama from their internet “friends.”

All of this provides more fodder for the argument that conservatives should abandon social media. Allow these safe spaces to become echo chambers and, without internal variation, they will die out and fade away. Then, as always, non-Leftists can rise from the ruins and rebuild.

Tags: censorship, reddit, sjwhate, social media