No, I won't share it on reddit, because I'm only active on two subreddits that are highly specific and technical. They aren't "geeky" in any sense. The participants may or may not be geeks. (There's no way to know.) Think of a topic like engine repair, or canning for food storage. They don't care about the rest of reddit. It's all technical and tool oriented.
Naw dude, try Dave Rubin's Locals.com platform, it's decent.
Ok I take it back, it has a lot of technical things it has taken forever to fix. BUT, it does have the distinct advantage of concept-driven communities, without auto-doxing every user, a lot of privacy -- only paying users can post in any topic, PER topic. The problem of course is you need a host, one celebrity or "influencer" to open the room for people to gather around. This person of course collects all the money.
I am probably way explaining this wrong, but all I can say is, I've been in Michael Malice's Locals for like 2-3 years now, and it's amazing. It has the early 2000s feel of a close knit community of active posters, and no one really knows you, you can say what you want, NYT isn't going to come in and dox you, my family's not going to stumble into my posts. And once in a while I can give Malice some direct feedback, ask his guests a question, etc. p cool stuff. I think Locals has a lot of potential. It feels the way the internet should've been and used to be.
Perhaps I should give Locals a second look, but the OP was complaining that there are niche technical communities that are currently only served by Reddit. It seems to me that Locals communities are driven around sponsoring an internet celebrity. That's two different circles on the Venn Diagram. The fact that it's private doesn't necessarily help matters because, as OP said, it's a niche technical community, not another sounding board in the online-right echo chamber.
Totally. When you need very specific technical knowledge or detailed reviews or explanations of how to fix your specific model of 2017 coffee-maker, there is nowhere that comes even closer to being as useful as Reddit.
I agree reddit culture is terrible, but I think you're mixing up the geek component with the leftwing conformity component in a way that's not helpful. There are plenty of centrist and right-wing geeks. Ever heard of Eric S Raymond, Peter Thiel, or Balaji Srinivasan?
"One of the most popular subreddits is r/AmITheAsshole, where users debate everyday social etiquette. Husband keeps leaving the toilet seat up? Divorce. He’ll never respect you. Grandma wants hugs from her reluctant grandkids? Emotional manipulation. Go no contact. New boyfriend wants to get married within the year? Lovebombing. Dump him, girl! Every day, 24 million members are giving each other the worst possible advice, which usually amounts to taking the easy way out."
I absolutely loathe that subreddit, but it's not a geek sub. Reddit relationship discourse is the way it is because of a hostile takeover by the ShitRedditSays/Ellen Pao/etc. crowd many years ago. In the early days, reddit was much more libertarian and much more thoughtful in its reasoning. There was also a period where reddit was notorious for various right-wing "hate subs" which eventually got shut down, largely due to pressure from journalists.
You're speaking as though reddit's terribleness is an inevitable outcome of geek culture, but in reality much of the culture is imposed aggressively from the top down through moderation and censorship.
Dialogue on any controversial topic on reddit tends to be low quality. The downvote button leads to a culture of conformity. Other social media doesn't have downvoting, and people who disagree will actually go back and forth.
On reddit, there's little point in responding in a subreddit where your viewpoint is the minority. Your comment gets downvoted, it becomes invisible, you lose karma, your contributor quality score drops, you lose your ability to post. By disagreeing with the majority, you have committed a moral transgression.
Instead of doing dialogue, people will form dueling Pro Skub and Anti Skub subreddits, which select the most outrageous and dumb comments from the other subreddit and put them on display to laugh at. Then at some point the moderators went through and deleted a bunch of Anti Skub communities so now mostly Pro Skub communities remain.
That's the story of how reddit became a leftwing pressure cooker. It wasn't inevitable. You can look through the internet archive, I've been browsing reddit off and on since 2008 or so. Someone should really work with users whose comments are banned to document all of that censorship.
> You're speaking as though reddit's terribleness is an inevitable outcome of geek culture
I think it went down like this: Most geeks are spineless so when women showed up to impose libtardism, they folded and pushed the geeks with spine out. So yes, it was imposed top down via mods and admins, but the call is coming from inside the house. Those mods and admins are geeks!
Geek culture is the cause of reddit culture. I experienced it in real life, believe it or not. A while ago I joined a geek book club. I was lonely and lost my previous friend group and went online for some social interaction. The geek group had an internet forum but mostly interacted in real life. Weekly meetings and yearly big events, that kind of stuff. The geeky tolerance thing struck me as overboard at once. I could get behind the "our nerdy thing is not cringe" because otherwise the club would become disfunctional, also giving space for obviously autistic members was fine too. But I had to check myself from visibly cringing at some other things. Bad cosplay for example. Or pseudo intellectual babble "proving" the current thing, like sex transitioning. Needless to say, any sort of shaming was tabu. Everyone had a *right* to do "their thing" and enjoy it. Everyone had a duty to emotionally support others. Sciency things were celebrated especially, half of the meetings felt like cosy science conferences. Frankly, it was nice until it became suffocating. And then covid came and trust the science hit the fan. I left soon after. Or maybe I should say I was passive-aggressively kicked out because I dared to point out the inconsistencies in their beliefs and criticise members who took the nerdy tolerance to the extremes. I became that person in the room and suddenly no one wanted to stand near me. Except the autistic girl, who failed to catch up, I guess. So now I'm absolutely sure it's not caused by upvote / downvote systems or anything like that. Exelerated for sure, but caused by geek culture itself. The culture created by social misfits desperately trying to have a safe space. And turning berserk at a slightest hint of danger to their comfortable bubble.
I never created a Reddit account (that I'm aware of, anyway). It looked like a combination societal black hole/galactic-level timesuck. I've run across a few threads from there, but it was typically in regards to some project or something I was working on (usually automotive-based), and was seeing if anyone from there might have had some useful feedback, since those ancient automotive-based message boards are all cranky antiques now, with at least a decade's worth of morons burying years of valuable, often-irreplaceable information under mountains of sub-90-IQ blather.
And given that I used to be one of those message board trolls who rode into town and started fights with practically anyone and everyone there just for a laugh (I've lost count of the amount of times I've been banned from such places) until Myspace and Facebook rolled into town like an internet-based Wermacht Blitzkrieg and made that sort of behavior an antique...I'd like to think that I've got a pretty good idea of what a timesuck looks like.
I'd like to think that I wrote the book on Toxic Online Disinhibition Effect (also the benevolent variety as well), but most of that became meaningless when the message boards really began dying off after 2010 or so, and it's fascinating how very few people are aware of that nowadays, and that someone actually did a fascinating study on why people behave like raging lunatics on the internet.
I loved internet pissing matches, simply because your opponent rarely ever realized that there isn't a winner in one of these wars, the guy who walked away first was the winner.
What I find fascinating about the whole thing is that going back into some of these message boards is akin to a text-based archaeology dig, some of the die-hards often spent 20 or so years in some of these places with tens of thousands of posts, comments, and replies, and it's a complete 180 from the little bit of archaeology I did yesterday in regards to trying to dig up some history of a very distant relative of my wife's, the guy died in the 1950's and there's Jack and sh!t for information on the guy...and to quote Bruce Campbell from "Army of Darkness", Jack just left town.
This is the penultimate rabbit hole of history: We can't find anything on people who died less than a hundred years ago, as paper records were spotty at best (and are often shredded to make space or are destroyed when businesses close) we're drowning in a complete absence of information, but roll forward to the 1990's and beyond, and we're now drowning in a sea of too much information, entire lifetimes can now be spent in simply reading about other people just from the message board posts and comments they made before FB became a thing.
In other words, in less than a century we went from not being able to find information because nobody thought to write anything down, to not being able to find something today because everyone thought that it was necessary to write everything down.
Good piece. I have/had a draft on something similar about how noxious Reddit is but more from a technological point of view. How the design of it and low barrier to entry helped kill the old style internet forums off (a few do remain) and contributed to this gay online culture that reddit fostered. It's something in the combination of upvoting, no permeance and easy account creation.
Dudley, I really appreciate your post. Reddit is one of the most vile websites to exist and I’m glad someone is calling it out. The amount of blindness they have towards what they are is astonishing. They harass anyone who dare not conform to their dogma, all while condemning people who supposedly do that.
It's more because they rely on volunteer moderators who are free to impose whatever rules they like, unencumbered by any tradition or sense of place (as NRP would put it). Combined with no limits on user moderation either, and you have a system in which the most fanatical, totalitarian and un-work-encumbered weirdos end up controlling the conversation.
The meltdown after the mod of /r/antiwork went on TV was redditors getting a reality check. Apparently the classic SomethingAwful goon isn't quite gone, and I'd bet that a lot of reddit mods are still like that. They didn't disappear, they got drowned by the massive influx of people onto the internet. The fact that Ghislain Maxwell was also a devoted reddit mod somehow also fits the type, even though she is a woman.
Unfortunately, as leftism is a fanatical ideology, it's inevitable that leftists will end up controlling any forum which resolves disputes by simply counting upvotes or waiting for one side to get exhausted and give up. Wikipedia has the exact same problem: it's completely controlled by a tiny number of ultra-devoted extremists, exactly the sort of people you DON'T want in charge of anything important. But they rise to the top because of their fanatical devotion to screen time over living a decent life.
I actually think AI might help fix this. If you were to build a competitor to Reddit or Wikipedia or whatever today, you wouldn't rely on user moderation to scale. You'd just throw LLMs at the problem. They have the infinite patience needed to do that work whilst implementing a written set of rules that won't drift over time.
Disagree that "it's inevitable that leftists will end up controlling any forum which resolves disputes by simply counting upvotes or waiting for one side to get exhausted and give up."
Most of those mods are paid. They just pretend to be working for free.
Look at it this way: I could believe one or two true believing fanatics could camp out 12-14 hours a day without pay, but beyond that people need money to survive. Leftists could not control Wikipedia and Reddit without paying those guys to do so. It's simply too much coordination and too much time without remuneration. People need to eat, you know.
Various orgs exist and try to control online discourse. George Soros, various left wing front groups, and Deep Staters. So when the opportunity arises for "volunteer" moderators, they deploy guys who are getting paid via these 3rd-party orgs but claim they are volunteering.
Its a bit like Antifa. Sure, a few druggies or youths who join a fight might do so spontaneously, but the majority of Antifa goons are being organized and trained. And such organizing/ training requires money. (Which is also why I know the FBI never bothered going after Antifa at all, even though the FBI claimed it was. Merely tracing the money supplied for Antifa training would reveal the orgs behind them (likely Chinese communists) and then the whole org could be shut down easily with mass arrests.)
But back to Reddit/Wikipedia: I don't have any hard evidence of payment, but simply there's no way you get that much coordination and that many people working that many hours *for free* and they all have the same communist hivemind. And we know Soros, orgs, Deep State, et al, are all about controlling the discourse---look at how much they freaked the fuck out when Elon bought Twitter and removed the mods and suddenly righties could speak freely.
Thus, I'm 100% sure the Reddit "volunteer" mods are a group of paid commie stooges. Who is paying them is another question.
N.B. IIRC Reddit's founder was some kind of open communist and has said didn't want to make any safe space for anything right of center on Reddit.
I suspect it's largely down to the "hot" algorithm which prioritizes novelty over quality. Older online forums had a "bump" algorithm which lead to long, recurring threads that could get rather scholarly. They also had "off-topic" areas for building community.
It's not "easy" account creation per se, but rather "nonexistent" account creation since you can just re-use your existing reddit account. You're getting a tiny slice of lots of different subreddits instead of a deep dive into a single online forum. The old internet culture gets put in a blender, and the community feel is destroyed since you get fewer recurring unplanned interactions (preconditions for friendship formation according to sociologists). You don't hear as much about "online friends" nowadays, even though everyone lives their life online. It's rather dystopian.
Did you, an adult, just use "gay" as an insult in a piece on social commentary? Or did you mean literally "gay" to which I invite you to check out the majority of the users on Reddit who are, as I recall, still straight? Or do you mean to imply that "gay online culture" is a cultural etiquette/ movement most people on Reddit follow? All of these options are hilarious to me, but I am curious which one it is.
Much of argumentative geek culture used to exist *within* religion. Notice the hair splitting debates between Jesus and various Pharisees that happened in synagogues and in the Temple. Early Christianity had plenty of raucous debate which could even lead to riots.
Geek culture is so pervasively atheist in significant part because the churches became far less geek friendly when they dumbed themselves down in the 60s and 70s in order to be more Relevant. Reviving Vulcan-friendly Christianity is critical if we want to restore the America that was. https://rulesforreactionaries.substack.com/p/rule-7-market-christianity-to-college
Try this thought experiment: imagine Mr. Spock from the original Star Trek series attending a modern hip church service with its repetitive tunes and forced emotionalism. He would stand still looking over the crowd displaying a mix of confusion and disgust. The only way he would participate would be if some hostile alien energy beings forced him to participate. Then, Spock would indeed end up speaking in tongues – due to brain damage. Dr. McCoy would have to come up with a miracle cure, probably involving a Klingon nerve gas derivative.
Now imagine Mr. Spock attending an old school Catholic or Orthodox service in a beautiful cathedral. Order, beautiful art, beautiful music. Mr. Spock appreciated such things. In early episodes he played an electronic lyre type of instrument. In a later episode he demonstrated a thorough knowledge of earth art history, and the ability to sight read a Brahms waltz at a piano. And yes, I can imagine Mr. Spock visiting a Medieval Christian monastery as well. Mr. Spock meditated frequently…
The extreme sabbath keeping denominations which split off from the Worldwide Church of God provide intellectual stimulation. But they don't build church buildings and their music has much to be desired.
The 60’s & 70’s saw a lot of proto-leddit types veer off into pure heresy. Besides the most prolific “redditter” of the reformation, Erasmus, doesn’t figure among the heroes of the reformation I hear bandied about.
Outstanding history and analysis of the Internet. Your writing makes the descent of Reddit into embarrassing retardation - which I watched in real time - more entertaining and less painful. I would note that the censorship and eventual banning of The_Donald and similar subs marked a decisive turning point, after which Reddit quickly and clearly became astroturfed. The instant about-face of Reddit on Musk, where he went from ultimate nerd hero to a villain only exceeded by Bad Orange Man himself in the space of about a week, illustrates Reddit's Current Thing mentality and utter inability to think beyond group consensus.
I wanted to cover The_Donald but it's tricky because there was some genuine harrassment going on in some of those subs around that time. Felt that it undermined my point.
A lot of those guys went off the rails once they hit microcelebrity status. Same thing with TheRedPill subreddit. Contrarian edgelord spiteful geeks on the right are almost as toxic as their left-wing counterparts.
I missed in this piece about state level support on reddit, or various other forces, which flood comments and updoots to glitch the algorithm and trick ppl with an alternate reality. You hinted around the subject in this comment. I wonder how much the reddit geeks opinions on things are a product of manipulation by various large entities equipped with A.I. and whatever else. Maybe that wasn't the point of this article, but is an interesting topic. I get the overwhelming feeling when I go the reddit that it's not a real place anymore.
The "we are at war with Eastasia, we have always been at war with Eastasia" quote is so overused that it is itself a Redditism, but it does accurately describe the mentality
Yes! In Canada CBC the state broadcaster imitates Reddit (ama) and refers to it regularly. They love it. Our state broadcaster is Redditized. It’s awful. And they are pro-porn and trans to the max, and reflexively hate everything remotely conservative. Trump won to spite Reddit lol. But Canada is Reddit if it were a country now.
Great one but I take one issue with it. The importance of non rabid and non progressive geeks and nerds is undersold. There is no group Reddit hates more. Redditors can’t stand anybody who likes history and can call them out on their crap revisionism. They hate anyone who can fight back against the wokification and slopififcation of IP’s and fandoms or refuse to pay money for it. Finally, Redditors hate most of all that those horrible CHUDS can survive in their own spaces online. Many “reee’s” were had over these issues.
I agree with you about Reddit, but this goes back decades. The 1980s gave us a great surge and acceptance of nerds, including (but not limited to) the band Devo, Revenge of the Nerds, Burger King’s Herb campaign, and even bland things such as Huey Lewis and the News’s hit song “Hip to Be Square”. That was just the foot in the door.
A lot of it had to do with nerdy professions being a great way to make a lot of money at the time (computers, defense, food preservatives, etc.).
Prior to the 80s, it was unacceptable to be a nerd and nerds had to masquerade as normal-people-ishly as they could unless they could form a pack.
Why didn’t I mention Star Wars? Because in 1985 it was for normal people, not outcast endocrine-case pedo goon freaks. D&D same.
Based on current demo trends the Scoth-Irish types may end up being the only white people that really exist in the west in 100 years. Slavs will likely still exist but they may end up being not far behind the Anglos and Germans and will have limited power outside of what will be left of Russia.
> "The geek is specifically the Anglo-Saxon, who lacks the clannishness and rowdiness of the Celt... ...however, if there's a sea or mountain or river between them, Anglos and Irish cooperate very well against foreign threats."
I'm not entirely up to speed on the Albion's Seed situation in the States, but I recall the OG vikings were pretty liberal with the mead and blood-feuds, and the entire history of the British Isles for the last fifteen centuries would raise a few eyebrows about "cooperating against foreign threats".
I think either the genetic landscape has altered pretty significantly over the last millenium or you're underselling the role of more recent cultural & political developments. Or, I dunno, maybe the Norman aristocracy did something dramatic, but that's basically germanic + celtic anyway.
EDIT: Oh- I should also mention that the Angles and Saxons did not, for the most part, physically eradicate the Britons and Picts and other pre-existing BI populations- there was some degree of population replacement but maybe in the 30-40% range on average. So... genetically speaking the modern-day Anglo-Saxons are mostly Celtic.
In the 80s and earlier, it seems like the lesson of teen movies tended to be that the shy, awkward, nerdy boy could get the girl if he shaped up and stopped being a shy, awkward nerd. Revenge of the Nerds was the first one I remember that said nerds were great just as they were and shouldn't change at all for anyone. It took a while for that to become the mainstream view, though.
It was the advent and subsequent success of the execrable Big Bang Theory sitcom that changed everything, where being a geek was now a legitimate lifestyle and quirky. This is probably because Madison Avenue figured out that they stood to make a lot of money by pandering to geeks and selling them junk like Funko Pops. What resulted was cultural strip-mining where "geek" entertainment and especially behavior was made mainstream and basically lost whatever sense of meaning and authenticity it once had.
This is a fascinating perspective I've never heard before and really appreciate. I think you're on to something. The same line of thought that produced baseball runs through to Dungeons and Dragons, eh? There's definitely some kind of notion in Anglo thought that there is The Way to do The Thing which needs to be endlessly explicated. This can produce lots of technological innovation and invention, but also schism and in-fighting.
In the religious sphere, something like Independent Fundamentalist Baptists seem to be where the Anglo impulse ultimately winds up. As a convert from Evangelicalism to Orthodox Christianity, I've learned over the course of five years that those deeply ingrained impulses are very slow to die and desperately want to re-shape the vessel to a more familiar form. I think this is why much of online Orthodox culture, for lack of a better term, looks like Calvinism or Fundamentalism in its behavior and urges, but with those doctrines and practices swapped out for Eastern ones. Getting over that hump is challenging.
Do you have some evidence for anglo-germanics having massive IQ advantages over other euro/aryan groups? It doesn't really show up in country-level data.
This is a great piece, but the most impressive thing is how you always pick the best pictures to drive the point home. None of the guys featured here have a pair of shoulders.
Also, "The strident New Atheist could safely lay down his katana" made me laugh out loud.
Wow, what a fantastic essay, with genuinely profound insights. I'm glad you noticed Reddit is a death cult.
One thing that stands out to me about Reddit and the entire left is that they've made humor taboo. And I mean nearly all humor--pretty much everything that's actually funny is verboten. A decent heckin' human is one who never risks offending Satan's children. I feel in my bones that when you see a culture divided into a humorless side (currently, the left) and a funny side (currently, the alt-right and parts of MAGA), the former has to be the evil side and the latter has to be the good side.
Going a cut deeper, I think the spiritual root of the Redditor is a lack of love. Here I mean "love" in the sense of Christian love, what Jesus meant when he talked about love. You went into depth about the Reddit aversion to "responsibilities, duties, a sense of solidarity, a sense of belonging in a specific place, or transcendent beliefs", their "moral void filled by selfishness." That's a lack of love. Love defined as doing for other people what is best for their souls. (People in walking distance, not disabled lesbians in Palestine.)
We’re losing so much time. These fuckers have no idea how much time and civilization capital they are losing. It’s astonishing how people are willing to throw away so much for so little.
Well I can’t agree because I believe there are multiple factors. This could definitely be one factor though. I feel qualified to comment in that I have used weed extensively. Yes, it can decrease ambition and increase paranoia. It also triggers a certain creativity by altering perceptions slightly. These effects mostly go away with continued use but you still get mild euphoria. For the young, casual user it can be powerful enough to produce hallucinations. Some say it can induce schizophrenia, and that seems possible, if rare. Anything with that kind of power will be dangerous. IMO alcohol is many times more dangerous - I base this on the effects I’ve seen. Weed doesn’t take hold of most people like drink does.
I wish Americans would not look at the Ukraine War as some kind of liberal shibboleth, a "The Current Thing"... Here in Scandinavia, we have centuries of experience dealing with our neighbor Russia. Russia is our historical archenemy, so when we join NATO and support Ukraine these are acts of rational self-interest, not attempts to be "fashionable." We don't need Star Wars memes to justify our policy -- only history books.
Understandable. There is the very real, complicated, and high-stakes war and then there is "The Ukraine" the meme which is what I refer to here, a trite good guys vs bad guys narrative. The average American lib has no idea about the historical context of the war.
I strongly suspect that Ukrainian agents are moderating the WorldNews subreddit and shadowcensoring any comments which are even a little skeptical of Ukraine. Try leaving a comment like that, then wait a day, log out of your account and see if anyone has interacted with it or if you can find the comment to be visible on the subreddit. I tried linking directly to one of Trump's Truth Social tweets the other week and I believe it was automatically shadowcensored.
It's all predictable information warfare. The rational self-interest part isn't separate from the Current Thing part. It's in the Ukrainian national interest for their war to be America's Current Thing. The only problem is when they drink their own kool-aid, as in the famous Zelenskyy White House dustup. Redditors already hate Trump, and they have little influence in Trump's administration. Performing for them on TV gets you nowhere.
I find Ukraine much more sympathetic than Russia, but my enthusiasm for helping them has been seriously dampened by two factors:
(a) Lying about the contents of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum to say the US promised to defend Ukraine. Easy to verify for yourself, read the memorandum online, it's only a few pages. We promised very little. The entire internet is full of misinformation about this. I suspect it's being spread by Ukrainian cyber agents.
(b) Hating the US for not giving more. We're already very generous to Ukraine relative to non-European countries who have little stake in the war. Generosity shouldn't be met with resentment. We have no special obligation to Ukraine. I'm actually pleased that Trump is pivoting to helping the DRC with their war instead. There are nasty wars going on all over the globe. We've got to pick our battles.
A lot of the pro-ukraine discourse is either driven by left wing retards talking up muh current thing or micronationalists from one of a dozen shitty slavistans.
I’ll be honest nobody gives a shit what you euros think, you’re very much not at the big kids table in the Ukraine business. You have all of jack shit for militaries and all of jack shit for industrial capacity.
Let me tell you about Simo Häyhä, a.k.a. "The White Death" - a Finnish national hero. During WWII, this sniper single-handledly killed over 500 Russian soldiers - he is generally regarded as the deadliest sniper in history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simo_H%C3%A4yh%C3%A4
The shitty slavistans, lol. You are the meme of American ignorance incarnate. The shitty slavistans are at the moment the bastion of European culture and a growing military presence too. Given their natural affinity for US, it is extremely baffling to see right wing Americans constantly shit on the countries which would be most willing to be your active allies. Not only in military sense but on the cultural front too. Because those places are uniquely equipped to fight against leftist ideological bs that is currently ruining your land of the free and half of Europe. And let me disabuse you of certain illusions of being extremely self reliant most Americans seem to hold. The high tech company in one of shitty slavistans is currently providing Internet security to governmental institutions in USA. That's how things are in reality, not in your imagination. The world is smaller than it used to be. So maybe it's time to learn some geography you skipped in school. It's past time.
To understand Reddit is important to remember something: in the 20 years since founding Reddit always operated at a loss. In 2024, Reddit's net loss was $484 million.
What is the explanation for this miracle of survival in the capitalist jungle? It's obvious that they never had a path towards profitability but still they find people willing to invest and the stock tripled after IPO.
Someone is pumping lots of money in that ugly website that looks and works like an 80's BBS, that is filled with trite memes and AI generated slop.
At this point reddit exists to be paid for the right to use their stuff for training AI. That's literally how they make money today, not internet ads or anything reasonable.
> I attended a wedding a few years back. The vows were spoken in Klingon. A heavy metal band performed the wedding march. Taco trucks catered. I’ve also attended a Harry Potter wedding. Potter cocktails, Potter table decor, Potter photobooth. Dumbledore quote in the program. Apparently, Potter weddings are happening all the time.
Our family has a strict policy for the types of weddings we'll attend because of this mass retardation. It's gotten more than one couple angry.
I have been to a few weddings like this, including of family members. I don't think any of those couples are still together or have anything resembling a functional marriage. My husband and I are a lot pickier now, but I wish we would have figured it out a little sooner!
This is true too! I am an old millenial and am in the demographic most likely to still get married (or be married, by this point.) Many people in my cohort simply have not bothered, but among those who have, the best marriages are among those where both spouses share sincere religious belief and practice, which is already not normal. Simply living on cultural exhaust doesn't cut it - you have to be willing to be weird, and try really hard, and find other weird people who are like you. It's a way higher barrier of entry than in generations past.
This is a heckin' good article, dude! Fit perfectly into my schedule, too, between eating a breakfast burrito and reading a Buzzfeed listicle on "25 Least Problematic TV Shows."
I agree with the overall point, but in no circumstances will I not find the idea of George W. Bush being "undisputably bright" for graduating Harvard Business School absolutely comical
There is no “agree to disagree”, you are simply wrong. To get into Harvard business school, you have to be a top percentile scorer on what is essentially an IQ test, among other things.
Thanks to Dave Greene and another anon friend for helping me shape this piece.
If any of you are still active on Reddit, please feel free to share over there. I'd love to know what those nerds think!
No, I won't share it on reddit, because I'm only active on two subreddits that are highly specific and technical. They aren't "geeky" in any sense. The participants may or may not be geeks. (There's no way to know.) Think of a topic like engine repair, or canning for food storage. They don't care about the rest of reddit. It's all technical and tool oriented.
We really gotta set up some alternative platform and migrate these communities off of Reddit entirely.
Naw dude, try Dave Rubin's Locals.com platform, it's decent.
Ok I take it back, it has a lot of technical things it has taken forever to fix. BUT, it does have the distinct advantage of concept-driven communities, without auto-doxing every user, a lot of privacy -- only paying users can post in any topic, PER topic. The problem of course is you need a host, one celebrity or "influencer" to open the room for people to gather around. This person of course collects all the money.
I am probably way explaining this wrong, but all I can say is, I've been in Michael Malice's Locals for like 2-3 years now, and it's amazing. It has the early 2000s feel of a close knit community of active posters, and no one really knows you, you can say what you want, NYT isn't going to come in and dox you, my family's not going to stumble into my posts. And once in a while I can give Malice some direct feedback, ask his guests a question, etc. p cool stuff. I think Locals has a lot of potential. It feels the way the internet should've been and used to be.
Perhaps I should give Locals a second look, but the OP was complaining that there are niche technical communities that are currently only served by Reddit. It seems to me that Locals communities are driven around sponsoring an internet celebrity. That's two different circles on the Venn Diagram. The fact that it's private doesn't necessarily help matters because, as OP said, it's a niche technical community, not another sounding board in the online-right echo chamber.
Ohhh, my bad, you're right. Locals is more like Patreon+FB Groups, you're talking more public service, like Stack Overflow or something.
Actually SO seems more on-topic, and has a bazillion weird non-technical subtopics now, like sci-fi fiction writing.
That sounds cool. Message boards were usually less noxious than later forms of social media.
Patriots.win moved over to scored after it was banned from reddit. Potential option there.
Totally. When you need very specific technical knowledge or detailed reviews or explanations of how to fix your specific model of 2017 coffee-maker, there is nowhere that comes even closer to being as useful as Reddit.
Stack Overflow is more usually my go-to for that kind of information, but sure.
Also, if you are searching for a murderer and local police won't (or can't) lift a finger, Reddit opens doors!
Like the Walmart ads say,, "Who Knew?"
I agree reddit culture is terrible, but I think you're mixing up the geek component with the leftwing conformity component in a way that's not helpful. There are plenty of centrist and right-wing geeks. Ever heard of Eric S Raymond, Peter Thiel, or Balaji Srinivasan?
"One of the most popular subreddits is r/AmITheAsshole, where users debate everyday social etiquette. Husband keeps leaving the toilet seat up? Divorce. He’ll never respect you. Grandma wants hugs from her reluctant grandkids? Emotional manipulation. Go no contact. New boyfriend wants to get married within the year? Lovebombing. Dump him, girl! Every day, 24 million members are giving each other the worst possible advice, which usually amounts to taking the easy way out."
I absolutely loathe that subreddit, but it's not a geek sub. Reddit relationship discourse is the way it is because of a hostile takeover by the ShitRedditSays/Ellen Pao/etc. crowd many years ago. In the early days, reddit was much more libertarian and much more thoughtful in its reasoning. There was also a period where reddit was notorious for various right-wing "hate subs" which eventually got shut down, largely due to pressure from journalists.
You're speaking as though reddit's terribleness is an inevitable outcome of geek culture, but in reality much of the culture is imposed aggressively from the top down through moderation and censorship.
Dialogue on any controversial topic on reddit tends to be low quality. The downvote button leads to a culture of conformity. Other social media doesn't have downvoting, and people who disagree will actually go back and forth.
On reddit, there's little point in responding in a subreddit where your viewpoint is the minority. Your comment gets downvoted, it becomes invisible, you lose karma, your contributor quality score drops, you lose your ability to post. By disagreeing with the majority, you have committed a moral transgression.
Instead of doing dialogue, people will form dueling Pro Skub and Anti Skub subreddits, which select the most outrageous and dumb comments from the other subreddit and put them on display to laugh at. Then at some point the moderators went through and deleted a bunch of Anti Skub communities so now mostly Pro Skub communities remain.
That's the story of how reddit became a leftwing pressure cooker. It wasn't inevitable. You can look through the internet archive, I've been browsing reddit off and on since 2008 or so. Someone should really work with users whose comments are banned to document all of that censorship.
> You're speaking as though reddit's terribleness is an inevitable outcome of geek culture
I think it went down like this: Most geeks are spineless so when women showed up to impose libtardism, they folded and pushed the geeks with spine out. So yes, it was imposed top down via mods and admins, but the call is coming from inside the house. Those mods and admins are geeks!
Janny culture
Geek culture is the cause of reddit culture. I experienced it in real life, believe it or not. A while ago I joined a geek book club. I was lonely and lost my previous friend group and went online for some social interaction. The geek group had an internet forum but mostly interacted in real life. Weekly meetings and yearly big events, that kind of stuff. The geeky tolerance thing struck me as overboard at once. I could get behind the "our nerdy thing is not cringe" because otherwise the club would become disfunctional, also giving space for obviously autistic members was fine too. But I had to check myself from visibly cringing at some other things. Bad cosplay for example. Or pseudo intellectual babble "proving" the current thing, like sex transitioning. Needless to say, any sort of shaming was tabu. Everyone had a *right* to do "their thing" and enjoy it. Everyone had a duty to emotionally support others. Sciency things were celebrated especially, half of the meetings felt like cosy science conferences. Frankly, it was nice until it became suffocating. And then covid came and trust the science hit the fan. I left soon after. Or maybe I should say I was passive-aggressively kicked out because I dared to point out the inconsistencies in their beliefs and criticise members who took the nerdy tolerance to the extremes. I became that person in the room and suddenly no one wanted to stand near me. Except the autistic girl, who failed to catch up, I guess. So now I'm absolutely sure it's not caused by upvote / downvote systems or anything like that. Exelerated for sure, but caused by geek culture itself. The culture created by social misfits desperately trying to have a safe space. And turning berserk at a slightest hint of danger to their comfortable bubble.
If you read the article, he does talk about the libertarian past and the Ellen Pao takeover
I share those thanks. This was a great piece.
I, too, am curious whether the Redditor REEEEs will be audible from space once it's posted there.
I never created a Reddit account (that I'm aware of, anyway). It looked like a combination societal black hole/galactic-level timesuck. I've run across a few threads from there, but it was typically in regards to some project or something I was working on (usually automotive-based), and was seeing if anyone from there might have had some useful feedback, since those ancient automotive-based message boards are all cranky antiques now, with at least a decade's worth of morons burying years of valuable, often-irreplaceable information under mountains of sub-90-IQ blather.
And given that I used to be one of those message board trolls who rode into town and started fights with practically anyone and everyone there just for a laugh (I've lost count of the amount of times I've been banned from such places) until Myspace and Facebook rolled into town like an internet-based Wermacht Blitzkrieg and made that sort of behavior an antique...I'd like to think that I've got a pretty good idea of what a timesuck looks like.
I'd like to think that I wrote the book on Toxic Online Disinhibition Effect (also the benevolent variety as well), but most of that became meaningless when the message boards really began dying off after 2010 or so, and it's fascinating how very few people are aware of that nowadays, and that someone actually did a fascinating study on why people behave like raging lunatics on the internet.
I loved internet pissing matches, simply because your opponent rarely ever realized that there isn't a winner in one of these wars, the guy who walked away first was the winner.
Love a good harmless old-school troll
What I find fascinating about the whole thing is that going back into some of these message boards is akin to a text-based archaeology dig, some of the die-hards often spent 20 or so years in some of these places with tens of thousands of posts, comments, and replies, and it's a complete 180 from the little bit of archaeology I did yesterday in regards to trying to dig up some history of a very distant relative of my wife's, the guy died in the 1950's and there's Jack and sh!t for information on the guy...and to quote Bruce Campbell from "Army of Darkness", Jack just left town.
This is the penultimate rabbit hole of history: We can't find anything on people who died less than a hundred years ago, as paper records were spotty at best (and are often shredded to make space or are destroyed when businesses close) we're drowning in a complete absence of information, but roll forward to the 1990's and beyond, and we're now drowning in a sea of too much information, entire lifetimes can now be spent in simply reading about other people just from the message board posts and comments they made before FB became a thing.
In other words, in less than a century we went from not being able to find information because nobody thought to write anything down, to not being able to find something today because everyone thought that it was necessary to write everything down.
I thought you said Hank green at first and had to take a double take
Didn't I?
the youtuber hank green I meant
Yeah me too.
oh damn! Didn't expect that. kind of cool
Good piece. I have/had a draft on something similar about how noxious Reddit is but more from a technological point of view. How the design of it and low barrier to entry helped kill the old style internet forums off (a few do remain) and contributed to this gay online culture that reddit fostered. It's something in the combination of upvoting, no permeance and easy account creation.
I’m very excited to read this because I really wanted to talk more about Reddit’s design in my piece but felt it was out of scope.
Dudley, I really appreciate your post. Reddit is one of the most vile websites to exist and I’m glad someone is calling it out. The amount of blindness they have towards what they are is astonishing. They harass anyone who dare not conform to their dogma, all while condemning people who supposedly do that.
Probably would have been hard to make such a digression flow right, but It would be great if you threw your thoughts into an addendum or a footnote.
You did a great job showing the absurd crowd funded morality of the redditor, the upvote structure was what let that poison vine grow.
It's more because they rely on volunteer moderators who are free to impose whatever rules they like, unencumbered by any tradition or sense of place (as NRP would put it). Combined with no limits on user moderation either, and you have a system in which the most fanatical, totalitarian and un-work-encumbered weirdos end up controlling the conversation.
The meltdown after the mod of /r/antiwork went on TV was redditors getting a reality check. Apparently the classic SomethingAwful goon isn't quite gone, and I'd bet that a lot of reddit mods are still like that. They didn't disappear, they got drowned by the massive influx of people onto the internet. The fact that Ghislain Maxwell was also a devoted reddit mod somehow also fits the type, even though she is a woman.
Unfortunately, as leftism is a fanatical ideology, it's inevitable that leftists will end up controlling any forum which resolves disputes by simply counting upvotes or waiting for one side to get exhausted and give up. Wikipedia has the exact same problem: it's completely controlled by a tiny number of ultra-devoted extremists, exactly the sort of people you DON'T want in charge of anything important. But they rise to the top because of their fanatical devotion to screen time over living a decent life.
I actually think AI might help fix this. If you were to build a competitor to Reddit or Wikipedia or whatever today, you wouldn't rely on user moderation to scale. You'd just throw LLMs at the problem. They have the infinite patience needed to do that work whilst implementing a written set of rules that won't drift over time.
Disagree that "it's inevitable that leftists will end up controlling any forum which resolves disputes by simply counting upvotes or waiting for one side to get exhausted and give up."
Most of those mods are paid. They just pretend to be working for free.
Look at it this way: I could believe one or two true believing fanatics could camp out 12-14 hours a day without pay, but beyond that people need money to survive. Leftists could not control Wikipedia and Reddit without paying those guys to do so. It's simply too much coordination and too much time without remuneration. People need to eat, you know.
Various orgs exist and try to control online discourse. George Soros, various left wing front groups, and Deep Staters. So when the opportunity arises for "volunteer" moderators, they deploy guys who are getting paid via these 3rd-party orgs but claim they are volunteering.
Its a bit like Antifa. Sure, a few druggies or youths who join a fight might do so spontaneously, but the majority of Antifa goons are being organized and trained. And such organizing/ training requires money. (Which is also why I know the FBI never bothered going after Antifa at all, even though the FBI claimed it was. Merely tracing the money supplied for Antifa training would reveal the orgs behind them (likely Chinese communists) and then the whole org could be shut down easily with mass arrests.)
But back to Reddit/Wikipedia: I don't have any hard evidence of payment, but simply there's no way you get that much coordination and that many people working that many hours *for free* and they all have the same communist hivemind. And we know Soros, orgs, Deep State, et al, are all about controlling the discourse---look at how much they freaked the fuck out when Elon bought Twitter and removed the mods and suddenly righties could speak freely.
Thus, I'm 100% sure the Reddit "volunteer" mods are a group of paid commie stooges. Who is paying them is another question.
N.B. IIRC Reddit's founder was some kind of open communist and has said didn't want to make any safe space for anything right of center on Reddit.
AI is highly malleable, as Elon Musk is currently finding out ....
I suspect it's largely down to the "hot" algorithm which prioritizes novelty over quality. Older online forums had a "bump" algorithm which lead to long, recurring threads that could get rather scholarly. They also had "off-topic" areas for building community.
It's not "easy" account creation per se, but rather "nonexistent" account creation since you can just re-use your existing reddit account. You're getting a tiny slice of lots of different subreddits instead of a deep dive into a single online forum. The old internet culture gets put in a blender, and the community feel is destroyed since you get fewer recurring unplanned interactions (preconditions for friendship formation according to sociologists). You don't hear as much about "online friends" nowadays, even though everyone lives their life online. It's rather dystopian.
Did you, an adult, just use "gay" as an insult in a piece on social commentary? Or did you mean literally "gay" to which I invite you to check out the majority of the users on Reddit who are, as I recall, still straight? Or do you mean to imply that "gay online culture" is a cultural etiquette/ movement most people on Reddit follow? All of these options are hilarious to me, but I am curious which one it is.
Fair criticism, thanks for reading!
That’s effectively Ted Nelson’s Project Xanadu, not that anyone ever really managed to implement that.
Much of argumentative geek culture used to exist *within* religion. Notice the hair splitting debates between Jesus and various Pharisees that happened in synagogues and in the Temple. Early Christianity had plenty of raucous debate which could even lead to riots.
Geek culture is so pervasively atheist in significant part because the churches became far less geek friendly when they dumbed themselves down in the 60s and 70s in order to be more Relevant. Reviving Vulcan-friendly Christianity is critical if we want to restore the America that was. https://rulesforreactionaries.substack.com/p/rule-7-market-christianity-to-college
This one is giving me a heckin' think!
I understand your comment and agree.
But this comment is still funny: "Reviving Vulcan-friendly Christianity is critical" 🤣
From the linked article:
Try this thought experiment: imagine Mr. Spock from the original Star Trek series attending a modern hip church service with its repetitive tunes and forced emotionalism. He would stand still looking over the crowd displaying a mix of confusion and disgust. The only way he would participate would be if some hostile alien energy beings forced him to participate. Then, Spock would indeed end up speaking in tongues – due to brain damage. Dr. McCoy would have to come up with a miracle cure, probably involving a Klingon nerve gas derivative.
Now imagine Mr. Spock attending an old school Catholic or Orthodox service in a beautiful cathedral. Order, beautiful art, beautiful music. Mr. Spock appreciated such things. In early episodes he played an electronic lyre type of instrument. In a later episode he demonstrated a thorough knowledge of earth art history, and the ability to sight read a Brahms waltz at a piano. And yes, I can imagine Mr. Spock visiting a Medieval Christian monastery as well. Mr. Spock meditated frequently…
Spock, hands raised, swaying: “I could sing of your loooove foreeeverrrr”
The extreme sabbath keeping denominations which split off from the Worldwide Church of God provide intellectual stimulation. But they don't build church buildings and their music has much to be desired.
Would make a good bumper sticker
The 60’s & 70’s saw a lot of proto-leddit types veer off into pure heresy. Besides the most prolific “redditter” of the reformation, Erasmus, doesn’t figure among the heroes of the reformation I hear bandied about.
Outstanding history and analysis of the Internet. Your writing makes the descent of Reddit into embarrassing retardation - which I watched in real time - more entertaining and less painful. I would note that the censorship and eventual banning of The_Donald and similar subs marked a decisive turning point, after which Reddit quickly and clearly became astroturfed. The instant about-face of Reddit on Musk, where he went from ultimate nerd hero to a villain only exceeded by Bad Orange Man himself in the space of about a week, illustrates Reddit's Current Thing mentality and utter inability to think beyond group consensus.
I wanted to cover The_Donald but it's tricky because there was some genuine harrassment going on in some of those subs around that time. Felt that it undermined my point.
A lot of those guys went off the rails once they hit microcelebrity status. Same thing with TheRedPill subreddit. Contrarian edgelord spiteful geeks on the right are almost as toxic as their left-wing counterparts.
I missed in this piece about state level support on reddit, or various other forces, which flood comments and updoots to glitch the algorithm and trick ppl with an alternate reality. You hinted around the subject in this comment. I wonder how much the reddit geeks opinions on things are a product of manipulation by various large entities equipped with A.I. and whatever else. Maybe that wasn't the point of this article, but is an interesting topic. I get the overwhelming feeling when I go the reddit that it's not a real place anymore.
There's definitely a schizopilled follow-up worth writing about this stuff.
There is no history, only the current thing. Something something orwell.
The "we are at war with Eastasia, we have always been at war with Eastasia" quote is so overused that it is itself a Redditism, but it does accurately describe the mentality
Yes! In Canada CBC the state broadcaster imitates Reddit (ama) and refers to it regularly. They love it. Our state broadcaster is Redditized. It’s awful. And they are pro-porn and trans to the max, and reflexively hate everything remotely conservative. Trump won to spite Reddit lol. But Canada is Reddit if it were a country now.
Great one but I take one issue with it. The importance of non rabid and non progressive geeks and nerds is undersold. There is no group Reddit hates more. Redditors can’t stand anybody who likes history and can call them out on their crap revisionism. They hate anyone who can fight back against the wokification and slopififcation of IP’s and fandoms or refuse to pay money for it. Finally, Redditors hate most of all that those horrible CHUDS can survive in their own spaces online. Many “reee’s” were had over these issues.
It cannot be overemphasized how obsessed they are with petty censorship, as anyone familiar with r/againsthatesubs will know.
Geeks and nerds can be considered different groups. https://slackprop.wordpress.com/2013/06/03/on-geek-versus-nerd/
I agree with you about Reddit, but this goes back decades. The 1980s gave us a great surge and acceptance of nerds, including (but not limited to) the band Devo, Revenge of the Nerds, Burger King’s Herb campaign, and even bland things such as Huey Lewis and the News’s hit song “Hip to Be Square”. That was just the foot in the door.
A lot of it had to do with nerdy professions being a great way to make a lot of money at the time (computers, defense, food preservatives, etc.).
Prior to the 80s, it was unacceptable to be a nerd and nerds had to masquerade as normal-people-ishly as they could unless they could form a pack.
Why didn’t I mention Star Wars? Because in 1985 it was for normal people, not outcast endocrine-case pedo goon freaks. D&D same.
You're absolutely right, there was a wave of this in the 80s that mirrors the mainstreaming of geek culture phenomenon I describe in the 00s.
Based on current demo trends the Scoth-Irish types may end up being the only white people that really exist in the west in 100 years. Slavs will likely still exist but they may end up being not far behind the Anglos and Germans and will have limited power outside of what will be left of Russia.
> "The geek is specifically the Anglo-Saxon, who lacks the clannishness and rowdiness of the Celt... ...however, if there's a sea or mountain or river between them, Anglos and Irish cooperate very well against foreign threats."
I'm not entirely up to speed on the Albion's Seed situation in the States, but I recall the OG vikings were pretty liberal with the mead and blood-feuds, and the entire history of the British Isles for the last fifteen centuries would raise a few eyebrows about "cooperating against foreign threats".
I think either the genetic landscape has altered pretty significantly over the last millenium or you're underselling the role of more recent cultural & political developments. Or, I dunno, maybe the Norman aristocracy did something dramatic, but that's basically germanic + celtic anyway.
EDIT: Oh- I should also mention that the Angles and Saxons did not, for the most part, physically eradicate the Britons and Picts and other pre-existing BI populations- there was some degree of population replacement but maybe in the 30-40% range on average. So... genetically speaking the modern-day Anglo-Saxons are mostly Celtic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_history_of_the_British_Isles#Ancient_whole_genome_DNA_studies
Great cpmment. Now that one comes to realise it, there is definitely a strong nerd undercurrent running right through the 80s and early 90s.
Is it Scots Irish to be against propeller hats ?
Don't know how to break it to you chap, but I'm Anglo-Sicilian.
It's not just nerdy now though, but nihilistic and ironic too. At least Alex P. Keaton was a cheerful go-getter.
In the 80s and earlier, it seems like the lesson of teen movies tended to be that the shy, awkward, nerdy boy could get the girl if he shaped up and stopped being a shy, awkward nerd. Revenge of the Nerds was the first one I remember that said nerds were great just as they were and shouldn't change at all for anyone. It took a while for that to become the mainstream view, though.
It was the advent and subsequent success of the execrable Big Bang Theory sitcom that changed everything, where being a geek was now a legitimate lifestyle and quirky. This is probably because Madison Avenue figured out that they stood to make a lot of money by pandering to geeks and selling them junk like Funko Pops. What resulted was cultural strip-mining where "geek" entertainment and especially behavior was made mainstream and basically lost whatever sense of meaning and authenticity it once had.
Hmm, but aren't WASPs known for being chads? Isn't the trope that non-Anglo arrivistes resented the square-jawed blondes of the rowing team?
IIRC, there's a really nasty streak with violence against women going way back in nerd culture, too. Proto-revenge porn, maybe???
Wait. Now Germans and Poles aren't blonde?
This is a fascinating perspective I've never heard before and really appreciate. I think you're on to something. The same line of thought that produced baseball runs through to Dungeons and Dragons, eh? There's definitely some kind of notion in Anglo thought that there is The Way to do The Thing which needs to be endlessly explicated. This can produce lots of technological innovation and invention, but also schism and in-fighting.
In the religious sphere, something like Independent Fundamentalist Baptists seem to be where the Anglo impulse ultimately winds up. As a convert from Evangelicalism to Orthodox Christianity, I've learned over the course of five years that those deeply ingrained impulses are very slow to die and desperately want to re-shape the vessel to a more familiar form. I think this is why much of online Orthodox culture, for lack of a better term, looks like Calvinism or Fundamentalism in its behavior and urges, but with those doctrines and practices swapped out for Eastern ones. Getting over that hump is challenging.
Interesting point. Yes, the 80s nerd had a heavy dose of Woody Allen to him, didn’t he.
Do you have some evidence for anglo-germanics having massive IQ advantages over other euro/aryan groups? It doesn't really show up in country-level data.
This is a great piece, but the most impressive thing is how you always pick the best pictures to drive the point home. None of the guys featured here have a pair of shoulders.
Also, "The strident New Atheist could safely lay down his katana" made me laugh out loud.
Came to NRP for the weekly thread recaps, stayed for essays like this.
Wow, what a fantastic essay, with genuinely profound insights. I'm glad you noticed Reddit is a death cult.
One thing that stands out to me about Reddit and the entire left is that they've made humor taboo. And I mean nearly all humor--pretty much everything that's actually funny is verboten. A decent heckin' human is one who never risks offending Satan's children. I feel in my bones that when you see a culture divided into a humorless side (currently, the left) and a funny side (currently, the alt-right and parts of MAGA), the former has to be the evil side and the latter has to be the good side.
Going a cut deeper, I think the spiritual root of the Redditor is a lack of love. Here I mean "love" in the sense of Christian love, what Jesus meant when he talked about love. You went into depth about the Reddit aversion to "responsibilities, duties, a sense of solidarity, a sense of belonging in a specific place, or transcendent beliefs", their "moral void filled by selfishness." That's a lack of love. Love defined as doing for other people what is best for their souls. (People in walking distance, not disabled lesbians in Palestine.)
We’re losing so much time. These fuckers have no idea how much time and civilization capital they are losing. It’s astonishing how people are willing to throw away so much for so little.
Agreed
What do they do for work?
Perhaps just the latest flavor of lives of quiet desperation.’
Well I can’t agree because I believe there are multiple factors. This could definitely be one factor though. I feel qualified to comment in that I have used weed extensively. Yes, it can decrease ambition and increase paranoia. It also triggers a certain creativity by altering perceptions slightly. These effects mostly go away with continued use but you still get mild euphoria. For the young, casual user it can be powerful enough to produce hallucinations. Some say it can induce schizophrenia, and that seems possible, if rare. Anything with that kind of power will be dangerous. IMO alcohol is many times more dangerous - I base this on the effects I’ve seen. Weed doesn’t take hold of most people like drink does.
I wish Americans would not look at the Ukraine War as some kind of liberal shibboleth, a "The Current Thing"... Here in Scandinavia, we have centuries of experience dealing with our neighbor Russia. Russia is our historical archenemy, so when we join NATO and support Ukraine these are acts of rational self-interest, not attempts to be "fashionable." We don't need Star Wars memes to justify our policy -- only history books.
Understandable. There is the very real, complicated, and high-stakes war and then there is "The Ukraine" the meme which is what I refer to here, a trite good guys vs bad guys narrative. The average American lib has no idea about the historical context of the war.
I strongly suspect that Ukrainian agents are moderating the WorldNews subreddit and shadowcensoring any comments which are even a little skeptical of Ukraine. Try leaving a comment like that, then wait a day, log out of your account and see if anyone has interacted with it or if you can find the comment to be visible on the subreddit. I tried linking directly to one of Trump's Truth Social tweets the other week and I believe it was automatically shadowcensored.
It's all predictable information warfare. The rational self-interest part isn't separate from the Current Thing part. It's in the Ukrainian national interest for their war to be America's Current Thing. The only problem is when they drink their own kool-aid, as in the famous Zelenskyy White House dustup. Redditors already hate Trump, and they have little influence in Trump's administration. Performing for them on TV gets you nowhere.
I find Ukraine much more sympathetic than Russia, but my enthusiasm for helping them has been seriously dampened by two factors:
(a) Lying about the contents of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum to say the US promised to defend Ukraine. Easy to verify for yourself, read the memorandum online, it's only a few pages. We promised very little. The entire internet is full of misinformation about this. I suspect it's being spread by Ukrainian cyber agents.
(b) Hating the US for not giving more. We're already very generous to Ukraine relative to non-European countries who have little stake in the war. Generosity shouldn't be met with resentment. We have no special obligation to Ukraine. I'm actually pleased that Trump is pivoting to helping the DRC with their war instead. There are nasty wars going on all over the globe. We've got to pick our battles.
RIP Gonzalo Lira
A lot of the pro-ukraine discourse is either driven by left wing retards talking up muh current thing or micronationalists from one of a dozen shitty slavistans.
I’ll be honest nobody gives a shit what you euros think, you’re very much not at the big kids table in the Ukraine business. You have all of jack shit for militaries and all of jack shit for industrial capacity.
Please say that to a Finn's face.
I doubt a Finn could handle anyone getting that close. They’d probably pass out from the social anxiety.
Let me tell you about Simo Häyhä, a.k.a. "The White Death" - a Finnish national hero. During WWII, this sniper single-handledly killed over 500 Russian soldiers - he is generally regarded as the deadliest sniper in history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simo_H%C3%A4yh%C3%A4
WW2 was 80 years ago, get fresher material boomer.
The shitty slavistans, lol. You are the meme of American ignorance incarnate. The shitty slavistans are at the moment the bastion of European culture and a growing military presence too. Given their natural affinity for US, it is extremely baffling to see right wing Americans constantly shit on the countries which would be most willing to be your active allies. Not only in military sense but on the cultural front too. Because those places are uniquely equipped to fight against leftist ideological bs that is currently ruining your land of the free and half of Europe. And let me disabuse you of certain illusions of being extremely self reliant most Americans seem to hold. The high tech company in one of shitty slavistans is currently providing Internet security to governmental institutions in USA. That's how things are in reality, not in your imagination. The world is smaller than it used to be. So maybe it's time to learn some geography you skipped in school. It's past time.
To understand Reddit is important to remember something: in the 20 years since founding Reddit always operated at a loss. In 2024, Reddit's net loss was $484 million.
What is the explanation for this miracle of survival in the capitalist jungle? It's obvious that they never had a path towards profitability but still they find people willing to invest and the stock tripled after IPO.
Someone is pumping lots of money in that ugly website that looks and works like an 80's BBS, that is filled with trite memes and AI generated slop.
At this point reddit exists to be paid for the right to use their stuff for training AI. That's literally how they make money today, not internet ads or anything reasonable.
Control freaks like to control minds not just money
Its not always about the money spiderman
> I attended a wedding a few years back. The vows were spoken in Klingon. A heavy metal band performed the wedding march. Taco trucks catered. I’ve also attended a Harry Potter wedding. Potter cocktails, Potter table decor, Potter photobooth. Dumbledore quote in the program. Apparently, Potter weddings are happening all the time.
Our family has a strict policy for the types of weddings we'll attend because of this mass retardation. It's gotten more than one couple angry.
I have been to a few weddings like this, including of family members. I don't think any of those couples are still together or have anything resembling a functional marriage. My husband and I are a lot pickier now, but I wish we would have figured it out a little sooner!
Sadly, I haven't seen much luck with more traditional marriages. Things are broke beyond belief.
This is true too! I am an old millenial and am in the demographic most likely to still get married (or be married, by this point.) Many people in my cohort simply have not bothered, but among those who have, the best marriages are among those where both spouses share sincere religious belief and practice, which is already not normal. Simply living on cultural exhaust doesn't cut it - you have to be willing to be weird, and try really hard, and find other weird people who are like you. It's a way higher barrier of entry than in generations past.
Good on your famille.
This is a heckin' good article, dude! Fit perfectly into my schedule, too, between eating a breakfast burrito and reading a Buzzfeed listicle on "25 Least Problematic TV Shows."
I agree with the overall point, but in no circumstances will I not find the idea of George W. Bush being "undisputably bright" for graduating Harvard Business School absolutely comical
You're not dumb if you graduate Harvard Business School. It's indisputable. Or undisputable if you prefer.
Agree to disagree!
There is no “agree to disagree”, you are simply wrong. To get into Harvard business school, you have to be a top percentile scorer on what is essentially an IQ test, among other things.
If you don't think they'll bump a man up a few percentiles just because he's the President's son, I have a bridge to sell you in Decatur
Was he known for being the dumbest person in the room at Yale and Harvard
Then how did Claudine Gay end up running the whole of Harvard?
These people can’t accept that someone with different views from them is very smart.
George Bush Jr is not dumb. I attended a business conference where he was a guest speaker. Unquestionably the quickest wit in the room.