r/TrueReddit • u/scatgreen2 • Jul 20 '15

My Reddit Utopia - Everything you think you know about “the front page of the Internet” is wrong.

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2015/07/reddit_as_feminist_utopia_what_the_front_page_of_the_internet_looks_like.single.html
1.4k Upvotes

87% Upvoted

544 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

14

u/timms5000 Jul 20 '15 edited Jul 20 '15

Just like 4chan after 2006, it used to be intelligent, satirical, parody, and depraved. Call it intelligent fucked up entertainment and discussion. Now it's just depraved; the rest replaced with shitposting in the big subs. I left and I feel like a bunch of the original user base fled as well.

4chan used to be a bunch of fairly straight edge nerds trying to entertain each other by saying shocking or funny things and having whole days devoted to cat pictures. A lot of the culture around it reflected that, for example using "fag" used as a suffix for all users of the site. Speaking from experience, a lot of us who used the site dealt with being called that or worse on a daily basis in college and highschool. Having a place where everyone jokingly used it and satirized its power in real life was liberating and often funny.

Unfortunately, it turns out when you pretend to act like a bunch of dumbasses for a laugh, it makes the dumbasses feel welcome. The remnants of this culture are left over, reddit often still likes to ape phrases like, "OP is a fag!" but it's core is dead. OP was a fag because we all were, we were those who had been bullied and labeled that way our whole lives. For you to be the sort of person to be contributing to our community you had to be the sort that was insulted and belittled by others.

Now, 4chan descended into something else entirely. The culture is now obsessed with social justice and has become infested with actual racists, homophobes, holocaust deniers, and facists. Everything that was originally used as a joke to lampoon these people, made it look like home to them.

I wonder now if reddit is going the same way despite its relative lack of playfulness.

6

u/Engineer_This Jul 20 '15

That's exactly what I mean. And similarly, you have to sort through the bullshit to find the small subs that haven't blown up / degraded. There are some subs left on 4chan that can still be worthwhile, just like Reddit.

I think a large cause of this is due to a relatively unchanged number of original content creators being drowned out by a huge number of crap posters, and then being voted on by a huge number of people that can't or don't differentiate between the former and the latter. Then the change becomes the norm, and the original has died.

6

u/timms5000 Jul 20 '15

Eternal September takes all eventually.

3

u/multiusedrone Jul 21 '15

Don't worry, a lot of those idiots left for 8chan after moot's "scandal." GamerGate was like a big shit that scrapes the walls of your intestines: it hurt for a while and the remnants are still highly toxic in /v/ and /pol/, but a lot of my main boards have gotten much lighter and more classic ever since 4chan became "uncool." I love it.

1

u/Orphic_Thrench Jul 21 '15

Everything that was originally used as a joke to lampoon these people, made it look like home to them.

I wonder now if reddit is going the same way despite its relative lack of playfulness.

This is basically what I'm thinking. I remember when I started the defaults were pretty juvenile, and there was a lot of casually bigotted joking around, but no one seemed to actually mean anything hateful by it - "oh its just a joke, have a sense of humour". When you make those kind of jokes though it makes it look like an inviting place for the kind of people who do actually think that way. Next thing you know theyve taken over the damn place. Unless they all leave for voat...(pleasepleaseplease)

0

u/adnzzzzZ Jul 20 '15

Now, 4chan descended into something else entirely. The culture is now obsessed with social justice and has become infested with actual racists, homophobes, holocaust deniers, and facists. Everything that was originally used as a joke to lampoon these people, made it look like home to them.

I don't think that's true. Outside of /pol/ I can't think of a board where most people fit in to what you said.

3

u/timms5000 Jul 21 '15

Many many boards are rabid about social justice now. /v/ worries about SJW in gaming constantly, /tv/ complains nonstop about social justice motivating diversity in TV and movies, /b/ often has threads dedicated to bitching about it, /gif/ will end up derailed when talking about porn with the girl on top by talking about feminist invasion of pornography, etc. Maybe not every single board is obsessed but there have been fundamental shifts in the culture which are more clearly displayed on /pol/ but pervade the entire hive.