So...I had an interesting discussion tonight on reddit in which we were talking about why harris lost, and they basically pointed out how the harris campaign grossly misspent funds on things like celebrities to raise their appeal. This convo eventually turned to a discussion about shilling on reddit itself, with this article being linked to me. Yes yes, I know the federalist is right wing, but it actually does expose the extent to which the democrats work to astroturf reddit.
Now, I'm going to say this. None of this surprises me. Reddit has turned into a craphole over the past decade with all of the astroturfing going on, and I believe that this started in at least 2016. I went over correct the record at the time and how the culture of reddit seemed to change overnight, and it never really changed back. Like, originally, in 2016, reddit was very pro bernie but i would come across these accounts that really seemed to be artificially boosting clinton, and a lot of these guys are why i developed the hatred and disdain toward the democrats i have in the first place. Because those guys ended up ruining reddit by astroturfing for clinton and literally bullying users like me into voting for her. And a lot of reddit changed for the worse starting in 2016.
Honestly? I never really changed though. As I keep testifying, my views have changed surprisingly little throughout the years, and honestly, it's because i started developing an adversarial perspective toward these kinds of shills and crap posters. But...reddit itself was changed by them. I quickly found myself banned for calling out weirdos like this and it really did seem like the mods were in on it too on a lot of mainstream liberal subs. This is also why leftist subs left, formed their own corners of reddit, and started banning anyone who was pro dem at all. And yeah. Honestly, it's one of the reasons im so politically homeless. Because most subs any more are either all in the tank with democratic party propaganda, or they're outright leftist. The right maintains its own small echo chambers, but regularly get banned because reddit's TOS started cracking down on things like transphobia, which drove a lot of the right off of reddit since they seemed willing to die on that hill. Not to mention the election denialism.
And yeah. I kinda suspected that through 2020 and 2024, this stuff kept happening, but this article really shows how expansive the conspiracy is, and how astroturfed reddit is. Old timey regulars like myself know better to avoid the mainstream subs like the literal plague, but yeah, the culture radically changed online post 2016. And it's one of the reasons the dems seem to lose. No one likes this stuff. These guys alienate genuine posters with actual genuine opinions, and end up displacing them from their favorite communities. We end up getting this toxic community where we end up arguing with the blue no matter who cult types, and yeah, it's one of the things that's shaped my politics into who I am. Despite not changing my core convictions, my opinion of the democratic party is quite negative now, and it does not surprise me at all to see the democrats just ignore whatever lessons they need to learn and instead of using their army of shills to actually just...gauge the atmosphere and what people are actually saying and course correct, they think the answer is to just keep spamming whatever BS they wanna push down everyone's throats.
Remember, for these guys, the democratic party cant fail, it can only be failed, and while post election you start seeing more genuine posters come out of hiding and call this stuff out as their army of shills takes a vacation, I really don't expect the dems to change their opinions much. Again, because the party cant fail, it can only be failed, and they'll just keep lecturing us rather than listening to what we think.
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