I don't think spez really likes conservatives, he edited a trump supporter post to make them look bad so I'm not sure why right-wingers are licking the boots of a left leaning person. They're owning the libs so hard, they're licking the boots of one? (What is the political view of spez, anyways?)
He's a tech bro with pp envy towards those peers who flipped their startups for more than he did. He feels silly for having sold reddit for "only" 10 mil and wants reddit's IPO to springboard him into the deeper end of the pool.
I don't think there is a political view of spez, because I think he's just a wannabe Zuck, Dorsey, etc. His motive is cash.
It's so obvious that they are going for a traffic grab. The message is basically "post stuff that maximizes reach and doesn't scare off randoms". There are subs that decided to address the problem, subs that ignore the problem and then there is r/conservative who try to take advantage of the problem. So fitting.
In a strange way reading /r/conservative since the mods took a holiday has been kind of fun. I've always checked that subreddit, even though I hated reading it most of the time, I always thought it important to see what the other side has to say. Some of their memes today have been funny, even for a lefty and in some way it's like a beautiful and surprising reddit farewell gift from the place I least suspected.
I was banned for "promoting the party switch myth" when I pointed out that the Republican Party of the 1860s is not the same as the republican party of 2020.
That sub in particular is just notable for banning people for even mild "offenses". I found a post from it on r/all and asked a comment for a source on a claim they made and got permabanned for it calling me a troll.
The difference is you get banned from the conservative subreddits for questioning them about trivial bullshit and from the liberal subreddits for denying people their existence.
I feel like there's a difference between being banned for "this country was built by immigrants" or "racism and nazis are bad" and "vaccines are Satan's poison" and "trans people need to be eradicated".
In my experience while the amount of moderating done was comparable, the actual content that got removed was different.
In left spaces you would often see people with conservative opinions getting banned and deleted... After they started saying slurs or insulting people. Some people would argue that whether or not something is considered a slur or an insult is a difference in political opinion, but those kinds of things are already against the reddit site-wide rules so it's moot.
In places like r/conservative, people would get banned for being aggressive and insulting people, but also for ever presenting an opinion that isn't strictly in line with modern conservatism. The moderators of that subreddit used bans to remove any and all dissent no matter how severe or mild.
This is exactly what happened to DIGG* and what's currently happening to twitter.
Conservatives get beaten down by the vast majority of users and get a chip on their shoulder. Then as the site starts to die and the users move elsewhere conservatives jump on the sinking ship and declare their the new captain. They start drilling holes in the sinking ship cause theres nkthing else to do, and eventually realize the echo chamber sucks and then move on to the other social networks that everyone else went to, and the process repeats.
I hope with federation that the cycle doesn't repeat but we'll see.
DIGG made their big DIGG 4.0 change to overhaul the algorithm because it was being gamed and brigaded by members of conservative forums at the time. It just so happened they did it with a user interface overhaul. For a while, after most everyone moved to reddit, the top posts were mostly conservative stuff.
They’re doing the same thing that Republicans in Congress are doing/proposing: gerrymandering and raising the voting age. Conservatism is at odds with democracy.
Then as the site starts to die and the users move elsewhere conservatives jump on the sinking ship and declare their the new captain. They start drilling holes in the sinking ship cause theres nkthing else to do,
This is a really clever metaphor. Someone with the skills needs to draw it in the style of a political cartoon from the 1910-20s.
(Also, I saw a great quote somewhere about how conservatives destroy things because they don’t have the capacity to build. Your “drilling holes” reminded me of that.)
Wow, absolutely nobody in here gets what they’re doing and just wants to shit on “conservatives”. What they’re doing is what the other mods should also be doing - mod strike! Take down the barriers and let Reddit get overrun with bots, spam, and low-effort posts. If every sub did that instead of the weak-ass “dark for two days guise!” Reddit management would fold immediately.
With this two-days-dark plan, management thinks (correctly?) that they can just wait it out and they win. And they’re probably right. No competent strike ever gives a deadline and expects it to work, that’s absurd. The smarter subs have at least said “at least two days, then we’ll reassess” - that’s the better approach, keep it open-ended.
But the best approach is what /r/conservative seems to be doing, which is just put down their tools and walk the fuck away. Reddit management would have literally no response to that approach if it was the approach taken site-wide.
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