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.
Reddit’s user base has always been libertarian basement dwellers, they just did a better job of suppressing it right when they were targeting an IPO and the culture war vibes were more profitable to Rainbow Capitalism. r/jailbait and endless Ron Paul worship ought to be the only things Reddit is known for.
When I used reddit it seemed like clearly the majority were left wing Democrats 2005-2020. But the entire spectrum was there.
When Trump won his first election there was a very strong majority against him.
Again, this was all PR and good managing. Remember the quarantining of the_donald and it being blocked from the frontpage despite being one of the largest subs with almost a million users (top 50 on the site)?
There was an entire half of the website that was hidden from you because it wasn’t seen as financially smart to be seen as aa social media platform with a large conservative user base.