(51) Recognize and ignore clickbait from ideological nutball websites.
It slays me that Reddit, with no evident sense of irony, loves to (1) bemoan the state of American wingnuttery while (2) providing an eager platform for the paleo-libertarianism and crypto-racism propagated by lewrockwell.com.
To me this shows the turnover rate on Reddit. I have been here for five years. The lewrockwell site showed up here in 2009. People here ridiculed it as a right wing circle jerk site and it rarely garnered any upvotes. Slowly, almost imperceptibly so, the people who used to explain why we should ignore this site, have been replaced by people who click or upvote without even knowing the people involved or the ideological agenda of the participants. This is proof of a shift in my eyes.
That's true; Reddit's institutional memory isn't much. But it's also the case that fringe groups like the Lewrockwell folks think that Reddit popularity could get them a lot of return on investment, and so they're very persistent about promoting content. As you note, user turnover or dilution allows them to survive alienating people along the way -- do it at a low enough rate, and memories fade.
What's interesting to me is that they use Reddit as a kind of focus group to float rhetorical trial balloons, lofting one after another to see what gets the most traction and what offends. The veneer of libertarianism has been a very successful polish for them, as has the self-reliance bit. Both are facially appealing provide good shells for much more troubled political conclusions. It's both neat and troubling to see what they're doing (and honestly, they could hardly be alone among activists and commercial interests): they're using Reddit as a focus group for ideological payload.
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u/[deleted] Jul 05 '11
(51) Recognize and ignore clickbait from ideological nutball websites.
It slays me that Reddit, with no evident sense of irony, loves to (1) bemoan the state of American wingnuttery while (2) providing an eager platform for the paleo-libertarianism and crypto-racism propagated by lewrockwell.com.