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.
Reddit is such a bitch in this regard. It’s 90% awful, culture ruining slop, but 10% speed running detailed knowledge about certain subjects in a way that would have been damn near impossible before. Also, consumer reviews of products that have been scrubbed from basically everywhere else. I guess that’s its last remaining shred of “free speech” but it’s a sort of important one.
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!
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.
I've had a vision of an internet protocol that translated a raw feed of text content into organized discussion threads, and the algorithm that sorts the information uses curators - people you like and agree with that you select so that the content they read and prefer rises in visibility for you.
I have another idea where individual words, lines and paragraphs can be highlighted to branch off into an entire new discussion thread to debate that one element. Where content can be rated and sorted into factional preference (again referencing the curators) for easy digestion. So, you can see both sides of the argument, each side's own preferred "best comment" but also the other side's view of your side's "best comment" (either their steelman or troll). Then this all links to a kind of wiki format where all the evidence and summary arguments on comment topics is displayed so we don't have to rehash things over and over.
This decentralized system would have zero censorship. Besides the protocol, there would be custom browser software anyone could spin up their own version of. These could include filtering features. Again, curators would shape the reach of information, and individually you could adjust your curator profile, or even have individual tabs of your browser each set to a different curator profile.
I've heard guys like Carl Benjamin say that he's not convinced on free speech (well, he mean Mills's argument about it). I'm convinced that if there was genuine free speech, actual reach of certain information, UK politics would be totally different. If someone built the system I described above, the sort of thing I had hoped Reddit would be, it would probably be tremendously dangerous to the current order.
I’m glad to hear additional voices in the topic but this brings to light one of the central weaknesses of right wing discourse. This write up (and, I assume, your forthcoming take) do a good job of establishing the battle lines but people have been pointing this out for a decade.
We are stuck reiterating the stakes and constantly re-setting the table like a tv show that has to spend half the episode re-capping the ‘previously on’.
Unlike the left, we struggle to institutionalize our knowledge gains so that we can build upon them. It’s why right wing content can feel so stale for the jaded husks (like me) still haunting the digital halls.
Creators like Hoe_Math seem trite because the actual target audience is half the age of the average meme war veteran. The “new right” will reveal its efficacy if, in 10 years, we can finally move past descriptions of the battle space.
I think part of the reason the table must be reset is because more and more people are showing up to the banquet, so to speak. I am a 58 year old mother of 5 now adult children and I have watched my oldest child get really sucked into the Reddit universe. Until reading this particular piece, I couldn't get my hands around the attraction of it, but now, at least I have some idea of how my son has ended up preferring that "community" to interacting with his large family.
I do know the stakes and as a first step, I cut off access to Reddit on our home router so NO ONE can get on it if they are using our wi-fi. My oldest is too lazy to get his own cell phone plan and figure out a way to get unlimited data access, so while he is living with us, he has been cut-off from what I see as an addiction. Reddit is foul and soul-destroying. I won't willingly participate in my son's destruction.
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…
For some of us, the dichotomy you present is just the circling around the drain of American Christianity. Old Yankee meetinghouse Christianity was fine, but it died long ago, and the rest of you are just fighting over crumbs.
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.
I just did a deep dive into protestant history. The strong middle of the battle lines in American Christianity was the Northern Baptist church. It was extremely well balanced between liberalizing and conservative forces in American society. It kind of just petered out by the 1950s. There was no middle, so that's why what you had left do these massive navel-bound spirals into obscurity.
There's this whole thing of Preterism and non-Preterism and dispensationalism and these are the evangelical churches, 1001 denominations, best friend co-preachers will disagree on one verse and split their congregation in half. Utter madness.
The theology nerds went into Presbyterianism pretty early, and extremely anti-creedal stuff was entering in even before 1800 in New England.
But, once the Northern Baptists fell, American Protestantism nose-dived.
Note that the 19th century gave us Mormonism, JW, Adventists. The creedal churches held the line and forced the experimenters into entirely new religious categories. It seems like that impetus failed once a stable normative Christian middle ground was lost.
But this is a flaw in Christianity. It always does this, because of how heavily it relies on its historical truth claims and how its theology ties those claims to the personal relationship with God. Stable Christian sociology requires censorship, it needs epistemological boundaries. Orthodoxy did that by being the religion of embattled ethnic minorities in a hostile Ottoman empire. Catholicism relies so heavily upon peasant ignorance, that it has made itself the church of the global poor.
The New England liberals tried to break through the epistemological problem in the 19th century but it didn't work because the bible's religion doesn't work. That's another topic though.
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.
It would open a can of worms, but is certainly relevant to the topic the way Reddit shut down redpill and manosphere subs. A year or two ago there were three mgtow forums left on the entire internet, one of them was forced to shut down, one of them was needlessly shut down by a bitter founder, and the last one is still out there but it sucks because its moderators are homosexual leftists.
Until it was clamped down on, there was a year where mgtow was one of the most popular topics on reddit and youtube. The Fresh'N'Fit and Andrew Tate stuff is what filled the vacuum it left. A key difference is late mgtow transformed into almost exclusive chronicling of poor modern female behavior, whereas the new Tate stuff leans more into "but we want to date these nasty women so here's how you do that". In other words, shifting focus back to male behavior and agency.
I think it is an important overall element of modern culture. You are not allowed to notice or discuss anything unflattering about women. Reddit is deeply tied into that, and one major utility of the site are all the "am I the asshole" and related forums where women go to validate their poor behavior in a curated echo chamber.
It's just interesting to me that the internet-wide shut down of mgtow content almost certainly had state level support. Our recent revelations about the community relations agency should tell us there might be elements within the state that do take quiet action on social issues. The framing of this now centers on "incels", but what's interesting is that the feminist activists who frame "incels" as a political force with terrorist aspirations, do us by referencing what late mgtow was doing. In other words, Fresh'N'Fit nor incels are focused primarily on the political topic of taking womens' rights away actually, but that's where late mgtow was going. An ongoing discussion on what rights or privileges needed to be curtailed for females, to address the problem.
This also intersected with gamergate, which was also partly framed as virgin losers threatening empowered women with violence. We know that Sorosian NGO stuff connected to DARPA was partly involved in seeding the activist groups behind gamergate.
This is an interesting observation I shared: the sudden, suspicious disappearance of MGTOW. The subreddits were lively for years, and the YouTube scene did massive numbers by the standards of its time. It’s actually wild that the most benign of all manospherian movements just “disappeared.”
It was the most serious movement that target women’s rights. It wasn’t about “how do I get laid” it was about “how do I protect myself from gynocentrism”.
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.
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.
The geek or dork is an instinctual invention used by Scotch-Irish kids to recognize social behavior that lies outside their own socialization, and create in and out groups in a way that other similarly socialized kids would "get" naturally. The geek is specifically the Anglo-Saxon, who lacks the clannishness and rowdiness of the Celt.
In the 80s, Jews appropriated the geek token and used it to gain entry into Anglo-Saxon society. "We're outcasts too." Reddit culture is very much the total Jewish cultural infiltration of the Anglo-Saxon remnant.
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.
You're probably right, and the Scotch-Irish will intermarry with Latins.
Anglo and Irish culture make good confederates, but they have to have boundaries and segregation. Ethnically speaking, genetic Anglo and Irish people will develop different social cultures that aren't compatible and end up clashing and trying to dominate one or the other. However, if there's a sea or mountain or river between them, Anglos and Irish cooperate very well against foreign threats.
Scotch-Mexican is basically the future race. I've noticed it's mostly men marrying Mexican women, sort of discarding their clan behind them. The Mexicans are way more family oriented.
Maybe there will be a fusion of Irish and Latin clannishness that will form the new race. Like, how it functions sociologically.
Anglo-Germanics just need to get everyone else the hell out of their societies. Completely. Our sociology doesn't function when others are around, and our ancestors clearly observed this and it's why they were so totally racist. Other races don't get our thing and call us dorks and use soft violence and in-group preference against us until we just shut up and fall apart as a people.
It's Scotch-Irish to be deliberately obtuse about a social issue that is used to define the boundary between in and out groups.
Tokens like the one you mentioned are just a way that the Scotch-Irish, Irish, and some Germans used to identify socially who is Anglo-Saxon like. To build clan boundaries in an environment with different social instincts at play, in a society that stopped paying attention to its roots and tried to blend all these cultures together as if they're the same.
It was really actually cruel for Anglo-Saxon parents to send their kids to school with Irish etc. without preparing them to react to and enforce their own in-group preference.
“It's Scotch-Irish to be deliberately obtuse about a social issue that is used to define the boundary between in and out groups.”
I guess I’m as Scots-Irish as it gets. Lol. I know I have that heritage, also Irish. Also knew it had clannish tendencies. My parents HATED this feature above all others, but apparently nothing could breed it out of me.
People can socialize into whichever culture, but Celtic instincts are to force everyone to one side of the line or the other, in the clan or out. Anglo-Saxons are more about revivalism, the sort of community epiphany that every aligns to, debates and litigates endlessly, reform entire tribal structures, draw up new boundaries, then follow the leadership of patriarchs until they pass and a new revival is needed.
The process of revivalism is social creative destruction, and it disrupts the positive aspects of Celtic socialization (stable clans with loyal members), so Celts pathologize it as “geeky” to protect their socialization from the naval-diving process.
As I’ve determined in the comments here, what binds Anglo-Saxon society is a robust middle that follows the revival cycle without committing to one of the cliques, balancing the divisions as best possible. The Baptists are a great example of this. Baptism is itself the principle of revived faith in a value-free action. Then you have Unitarians and Calvinists with strong specific opinions and consequent social values.
My theory is the demographic decline of WASPs relative to other white races broke the middle, causing the extremes of WASP society to be at odds, which was incredibly easy for international interest to exploit.
If your ancestors were Baptists, but your parents were evangelicals, then you can mark the exact timing of the fall of Anglo-Saxon America.
You're still being obtuse as a social signal that you clearly intend for the "right" people to pick up on, creating a sense of in group and out group. In group are cool people who are the good people and deserve to be with the good people. Out group are nerds who have stupid theories but more importantly are just uncool and keep talking and the more they talk the more they prove that they don't belong with the good people.
The right-wing in America is heavily socialized into this Scotch-Irish BS.
And, the UK demographically is incredibly Irish due to the industrial era immigration. Some lower class UK socialization will be Celtic.
Nerd culture happened because of the decline of the Anglo-Saxon demographic.
By the 1970s, Anglo-Saxon kids in school became outnumbered by German, Italian, Irish, Polish kids and so forth. Being Anglo-Saxon around a bunch of cretins meant that being normal now meant you were a "nerd" that needed to be beat up.
Anglo-Saxon youths didn't target classes of kids, but instead engaged in youthful violence at an individual level, to litigate personal rivalries and such.
Another way to think of it is that WASPs invented football and baseball. This is what happens when WASP males are socialized into their own culture without Celtic influence. You end up with endless driving down into rules and procedures and improvements.
The invention of the geek was so that non-Anglo-Saxon kids could litigate out male youth power structures and rivalries while filtering out the Anglo-Saxon mode of intellectual deep dives, which was both hard for them to compete with, but also didn't harmonize with their clannishness and rowdiness.
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.
That's very much what I noticed looking into WASP religious history from the lens of identifying social instincts and socialization patterns.
What seems to happen is that the schisms produce extreme camps, which then define a middle that wants to ride the energy of moment, but avoids either extreme. That middle only forms when:
1) The schism occurs and there's a season of in-fighting.
2) The middle isn't disrupted by another culture.
The middle filters out the good parts of the extremes and consolidates a position that protects society from the worse parts. As I said elsewhere, it's a generational pattern where the great awakenings create patriarchs who then die off and allow for a new great awakening.
I was saying that the geek was appropriated by Jews in the 80s so they could infiltrate Anglo-Saxon cultural production. The square-jawed blond private school kid was resented primarily by new money Jews.
You have to think about the geek concept from the 1950s and 60s. Poindexter. It was different than the 80s geek. The poindexter is very similar to the British boffin. I don't think either token invokes the sort of derision the "nerd" gets.
Not all WASPs were poindexters, but I think you get in the 1960s these non-WASP white who use the poindexter token to pathologize certain modes of Anglo-Saxon socialization as out-group, basically enforcing Scotch-Irish socialization among school kids. In other words, WASP kids could still be "cool" but they had to shed certain social habits, or conceal them, and prove their mettle in Celtic ways (the psychopathic bully).
Anglo-Saxon male youth culture was certainly violent, but it was the sort of thing where if a bully knocks you out he'd pick you up and then see the need to help educate you to be more of a man.
Idk, it seems like the 80s may have pioneered pro nerdiness, but within my lifetime I have seen the massive shift really start in the 2010s. As late as 2009 I remember getting overtly shamed by women with my buddy talking about PC building , and he was a USMC vet lol. Like we needed to talk about this stuff with no one around.
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 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.
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.
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.
I have a few relatives in their late 40s deep in Bay Area culture. They're single dudes who don't have any friends besides people who use them for things. They're completely committed to being "nice" and double down on it. They're not totally bluepilled on women, but they're incredibly committed feminists. Part of it is that the framing of corporate America as the devil is their religion, so it's their only source of meaning, and they're gleeful about being feminists because they project the sources of their misery onto the religious image of "fascists" and "patriarchy".
It's so incredibly pathetic. It's like they've been broken. They're like a whipped slave who says, "please can I have another". No wonder cuckoldry culture is big on reddit.
These guys are suffering, and have been abused and scorned for decades. Mistreated. They are pathologically incapable of directing anger at the source of their pain.
They're throwing away their own lives so I don't think they're thinking about civilization. They're so oversocialized it doesn't even register for them how bad things are. Until Trump was reelected, these are people whose entire world view was that "if Biden can just pass that infrastructure bill, then the world will be okay." They think social decline is a conspiracy theory.
“If Biden can just pass that infrastructure bill, the world will be ok.”
LMFAO this is so on point. Sadly, about half of my family believed this. I thought this way with Obamas first term and learned my lesson. Crazy how these older people chronically cannot learn.
Most people are extremely weak. They'll get into a place of safety and then lord over people they disagree with, like the little dog who has a fence between them and the bigger one and barks incessantly.
They're quietly desperate to keep a certain job, or stay in the good graces of a certain social circle, so they can't tolerate challenging ideas, because they're terrified. The only problem is they act like know it alls and treat you like you're a monster and a fool.
Yeah. Both of these guys coped with an LSD trip and regular cannabis use.
I remember people smoked weed in college, but there was the year before Obama was elected where it felt like everyone finally started smoking it. Like, everyone. It was everywhere. The timing of this can't be coincidental since I feel like there's a supply issue to it. After 2008 you started to get dispensaries, but before then it was still fairly risky to try and get weed. For example, girls would typically just date guys who took the risks. But that one year 2007 I knew tons of girls meeting up with dealers downtown like it was nothing. Like I said, it's as if weed was just everywhere, like this massive supply and everyone was a dealer. The timing is too coincidental.
People don't like talking about this though, because they're either a soft addict and get emotionally defensive about their habit, or they're just guilty at having experimented in college since it's not the sort of behavior they'd expect of themselves now.
I'll never stop blowing the trumpet that the capitulation of American youth to cannabis is more than anything else what explains the Reddit generation.
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
> 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."
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.
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.)
I was permanently banned from Reddit and it vastly improved my wellbeing. Honorable mention:
The Opie and Anthony subbreddit tardopera. Have watched a few documentaries about it, it's fascinating and retarded.
In 2013 Reddit admins revealed the Eglin Air Base was the '#1 Reddit-addicted city in the US'. Coincidentally a cyber warfare unit is also stationed at Eglin.
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!
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.
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.
Patriots.win moved over to scored after it was banned from reddit. Potential option there.
There's something fishy about scored admin and moderation, but it is a functional platform that's at least not reddit.
It's been tried many times. It's pretty clear either the feds or BlackRock/Soros money actively suppress this.
Reddit is such a bitch in this regard. It’s 90% awful, culture ruining slop, but 10% speed running detailed knowledge about certain subjects in a way that would have been damn near impossible before. Also, consumer reviews of products that have been scrubbed from basically everywhere else. I guess that’s its last remaining shred of “free speech” but it’s a sort of important one.
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!
Janny culture
If you read the article, he does talk about the libertarian past and the Ellen Pao takeover
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.
Great idea. Unfortunately, the same people who control Reddit will control AI. AI will do whatever its programmed to.
AI is highly malleable, as Elon Musk is currently finding out ....
I've had a vision of an internet protocol that translated a raw feed of text content into organized discussion threads, and the algorithm that sorts the information uses curators - people you like and agree with that you select so that the content they read and prefer rises in visibility for you.
I have another idea where individual words, lines and paragraphs can be highlighted to branch off into an entire new discussion thread to debate that one element. Where content can be rated and sorted into factional preference (again referencing the curators) for easy digestion. So, you can see both sides of the argument, each side's own preferred "best comment" but also the other side's view of your side's "best comment" (either their steelman or troll). Then this all links to a kind of wiki format where all the evidence and summary arguments on comment topics is displayed so we don't have to rehash things over and over.
This decentralized system would have zero censorship. Besides the protocol, there would be custom browser software anyone could spin up their own version of. These could include filtering features. Again, curators would shape the reach of information, and individually you could adjust your curator profile, or even have individual tabs of your browser each set to a different curator profile.
I've heard guys like Carl Benjamin say that he's not convinced on free speech (well, he mean Mills's argument about it). I'm convinced that if there was genuine free speech, actual reach of certain information, UK politics would be totally different. If someone built the system I described above, the sort of thing I had hoped Reddit would be, it would probably be tremendously dangerous to the current order.
That’s effectively Ted Nelson’s Project Xanadu, not that anyone ever really managed to implement that.
Cool. Thanks. Yes, a decentralized wiki with transclusion and ranked-by-curator content would be the thing.
I’m glad to hear additional voices in the topic but this brings to light one of the central weaknesses of right wing discourse. This write up (and, I assume, your forthcoming take) do a good job of establishing the battle lines but people have been pointing this out for a decade.
We are stuck reiterating the stakes and constantly re-setting the table like a tv show that has to spend half the episode re-capping the ‘previously on’.
Unlike the left, we struggle to institutionalize our knowledge gains so that we can build upon them. It’s why right wing content can feel so stale for the jaded husks (like me) still haunting the digital halls.
Creators like Hoe_Math seem trite because the actual target audience is half the age of the average meme war veteran. The “new right” will reveal its efficacy if, in 10 years, we can finally move past descriptions of the battle space.
I think part of the reason the table must be reset is because more and more people are showing up to the banquet, so to speak. I am a 58 year old mother of 5 now adult children and I have watched my oldest child get really sucked into the Reddit universe. Until reading this particular piece, I couldn't get my hands around the attraction of it, but now, at least I have some idea of how my son has ended up preferring that "community" to interacting with his large family.
I do know the stakes and as a first step, I cut off access to Reddit on our home router so NO ONE can get on it if they are using our wi-fi. My oldest is too lazy to get his own cell phone plan and figure out a way to get unlimited data access, so while he is living with us, he has been cut-off from what I see as an addiction. Reddit is foul and soul-destroying. I won't willingly participate in my son's destruction.
Fair criticism, thanks for reading!
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
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”
For some of us, the dichotomy you present is just the circling around the drain of American Christianity. Old Yankee meetinghouse Christianity was fine, but it died long ago, and the rest of you are just fighting over crumbs.
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.
I just did a deep dive into protestant history. The strong middle of the battle lines in American Christianity was the Northern Baptist church. It was extremely well balanced between liberalizing and conservative forces in American society. It kind of just petered out by the 1950s. There was no middle, so that's why what you had left do these massive navel-bound spirals into obscurity.
There's this whole thing of Preterism and non-Preterism and dispensationalism and these are the evangelical churches, 1001 denominations, best friend co-preachers will disagree on one verse and split their congregation in half. Utter madness.
The theology nerds went into Presbyterianism pretty early, and extremely anti-creedal stuff was entering in even before 1800 in New England.
But, once the Northern Baptists fell, American Protestantism nose-dived.
Note that the 19th century gave us Mormonism, JW, Adventists. The creedal churches held the line and forced the experimenters into entirely new religious categories. It seems like that impetus failed once a stable normative Christian middle ground was lost.
But this is a flaw in Christianity. It always does this, because of how heavily it relies on its historical truth claims and how its theology ties those claims to the personal relationship with God. Stable Christian sociology requires censorship, it needs epistemological boundaries. Orthodoxy did that by being the religion of embattled ethnic minorities in a hostile Ottoman empire. Catholicism relies so heavily upon peasant ignorance, that it has made itself the church of the global poor.
The New England liberals tried to break through the epistemological problem in the 19th century but it didn't work because the bible's religion doesn't work. That's another topic though.
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.
It’s true, I remember this well from r/TRP.
Okay boomer
It would open a can of worms, but is certainly relevant to the topic the way Reddit shut down redpill and manosphere subs. A year or two ago there were three mgtow forums left on the entire internet, one of them was forced to shut down, one of them was needlessly shut down by a bitter founder, and the last one is still out there but it sucks because its moderators are homosexual leftists.
Until it was clamped down on, there was a year where mgtow was one of the most popular topics on reddit and youtube. The Fresh'N'Fit and Andrew Tate stuff is what filled the vacuum it left. A key difference is late mgtow transformed into almost exclusive chronicling of poor modern female behavior, whereas the new Tate stuff leans more into "but we want to date these nasty women so here's how you do that". In other words, shifting focus back to male behavior and agency.
I think it is an important overall element of modern culture. You are not allowed to notice or discuss anything unflattering about women. Reddit is deeply tied into that, and one major utility of the site are all the "am I the asshole" and related forums where women go to validate their poor behavior in a curated echo chamber.
It's just interesting to me that the internet-wide shut down of mgtow content almost certainly had state level support. Our recent revelations about the community relations agency should tell us there might be elements within the state that do take quiet action on social issues. The framing of this now centers on "incels", but what's interesting is that the feminist activists who frame "incels" as a political force with terrorist aspirations, do us by referencing what late mgtow was doing. In other words, Fresh'N'Fit nor incels are focused primarily on the political topic of taking womens' rights away actually, but that's where late mgtow was going. An ongoing discussion on what rights or privileges needed to be curtailed for females, to address the problem.
This also intersected with gamergate, which was also partly framed as virgin losers threatening empowered women with violence. We know that Sorosian NGO stuff connected to DARPA was partly involved in seeding the activist groups behind gamergate.
This is an interesting observation I shared: the sudden, suspicious disappearance of MGTOW. The subreddits were lively for years, and the YouTube scene did massive numbers by the standards of its time. It’s actually wild that the most benign of all manospherian movements just “disappeared.”
It was the most serious movement that target women’s rights. It wasn’t about “how do I get laid” it was about “how do I protect myself from gynocentrism”.
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.
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.
The geek or dork is an instinctual invention used by Scotch-Irish kids to recognize social behavior that lies outside their own socialization, and create in and out groups in a way that other similarly socialized kids would "get" naturally. The geek is specifically the Anglo-Saxon, who lacks the clannishness and rowdiness of the Celt.
In the 80s, Jews appropriated the geek token and used it to gain entry into Anglo-Saxon society. "We're outcasts too." Reddit culture is very much the total Jewish cultural infiltration of the Anglo-Saxon remnant.
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.
You're probably right, and the Scotch-Irish will intermarry with Latins.
Anglo and Irish culture make good confederates, but they have to have boundaries and segregation. Ethnically speaking, genetic Anglo and Irish people will develop different social cultures that aren't compatible and end up clashing and trying to dominate one or the other. However, if there's a sea or mountain or river between them, Anglos and Irish cooperate very well against foreign threats.
My hope is that the Anglo-Celt/Latino combo forms a new ethos that will launch a global reconquista of the Americas and Europe. Deus ⚔️ Vult
Scotch-Mexican is basically the future race. I've noticed it's mostly men marrying Mexican women, sort of discarding their clan behind them. The Mexicans are way more family oriented.
Maybe there will be a fusion of Irish and Latin clannishness that will form the new race. Like, how it functions sociologically.
Anglo-Germanics just need to get everyone else the hell out of their societies. Completely. Our sociology doesn't function when others are around, and our ancestors clearly observed this and it's why they were so totally racist. Other races don't get our thing and call us dorks and use soft violence and in-group preference against us until we just shut up and fall apart as a people.
Great cpmment. Now that one comes to realise it, there is definitely a strong nerd undercurrent running right through the 80s and early 90s.
Anti-nerd culture on the right today is just the Scotch-Irish demographic expressing its distaste for Anglo-Saxon behavioral norms.
A lot of the right is just Scotch-Irish genetic social behavioral sensibilities.
Is it Scots Irish to be against propeller hats ?
It's Scotch-Irish to be deliberately obtuse about a social issue that is used to define the boundary between in and out groups.
Tokens like the one you mentioned are just a way that the Scotch-Irish, Irish, and some Germans used to identify socially who is Anglo-Saxon like. To build clan boundaries in an environment with different social instincts at play, in a society that stopped paying attention to its roots and tried to blend all these cultures together as if they're the same.
It was really actually cruel for Anglo-Saxon parents to send their kids to school with Irish etc. without preparing them to react to and enforce their own in-group preference.
“It's Scotch-Irish to be deliberately obtuse about a social issue that is used to define the boundary between in and out groups.”
I guess I’m as Scots-Irish as it gets. Lol. I know I have that heritage, also Irish. Also knew it had clannish tendencies. My parents HATED this feature above all others, but apparently nothing could breed it out of me.
People can socialize into whichever culture, but Celtic instincts are to force everyone to one side of the line or the other, in the clan or out. Anglo-Saxons are more about revivalism, the sort of community epiphany that every aligns to, debates and litigates endlessly, reform entire tribal structures, draw up new boundaries, then follow the leadership of patriarchs until they pass and a new revival is needed.
The process of revivalism is social creative destruction, and it disrupts the positive aspects of Celtic socialization (stable clans with loyal members), so Celts pathologize it as “geeky” to protect their socialization from the naval-diving process.
As I’ve determined in the comments here, what binds Anglo-Saxon society is a robust middle that follows the revival cycle without committing to one of the cliques, balancing the divisions as best possible. The Baptists are a great example of this. Baptism is itself the principle of revived faith in a value-free action. Then you have Unitarians and Calvinists with strong specific opinions and consequent social values.
My theory is the demographic decline of WASPs relative to other white races broke the middle, causing the extremes of WASP society to be at odds, which was incredibly easy for international interest to exploit.
If your ancestors were Baptists, but your parents were evangelicals, then you can mark the exact timing of the fall of Anglo-Saxon America.
Don't know how to break it to you chap, but I'm Anglo-Sicilian.
You're still being obtuse as a social signal that you clearly intend for the "right" people to pick up on, creating a sense of in group and out group. In group are cool people who are the good people and deserve to be with the good people. Out group are nerds who have stupid theories but more importantly are just uncool and keep talking and the more they talk the more they prove that they don't belong with the good people.
The right-wing in America is heavily socialized into this Scotch-Irish BS.
And, the UK demographically is incredibly Irish due to the industrial era immigration. Some lower class UK socialization will be Celtic.
Nerd culture happened because of the decline of the Anglo-Saxon demographic.
By the 1970s, Anglo-Saxon kids in school became outnumbered by German, Italian, Irish, Polish kids and so forth. Being Anglo-Saxon around a bunch of cretins meant that being normal now meant you were a "nerd" that needed to be beat up.
Anglo-Saxon youths didn't target classes of kids, but instead engaged in youthful violence at an individual level, to litigate personal rivalries and such.
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?
Another way to think of it is that WASPs invented football and baseball. This is what happens when WASP males are socialized into their own culture without Celtic influence. You end up with endless driving down into rules and procedures and improvements.
The invention of the geek was so that non-Anglo-Saxon kids could litigate out male youth power structures and rivalries while filtering out the Anglo-Saxon mode of intellectual deep dives, which was both hard for them to compete with, but also didn't harmonize with their clannishness and rowdiness.
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.
That's very much what I noticed looking into WASP religious history from the lens of identifying social instincts and socialization patterns.
What seems to happen is that the schisms produce extreme camps, which then define a middle that wants to ride the energy of moment, but avoids either extreme. That middle only forms when:
1) The schism occurs and there's a season of in-fighting.
2) The middle isn't disrupted by another culture.
The middle filters out the good parts of the extremes and consolidates a position that protects society from the worse parts. As I said elsewhere, it's a generational pattern where the great awakenings create patriarchs who then die off and allow for a new great awakening.
I was saying that the geek was appropriated by Jews in the 80s so they could infiltrate Anglo-Saxon cultural production. The square-jawed blond private school kid was resented primarily by new money Jews.
You have to think about the geek concept from the 1950s and 60s. Poindexter. It was different than the 80s geek. The poindexter is very similar to the British boffin. I don't think either token invokes the sort of derision the "nerd" gets.
Not all WASPs were poindexters, but I think you get in the 1960s these non-WASP white who use the poindexter token to pathologize certain modes of Anglo-Saxon socialization as out-group, basically enforcing Scotch-Irish socialization among school kids. In other words, WASP kids could still be "cool" but they had to shed certain social habits, or conceal them, and prove their mettle in Celtic ways (the psychopathic bully).
Anglo-Saxon male youth culture was certainly violent, but it was the sort of thing where if a bully knocks you out he'd pick you up and then see the need to help educate you to be more of a man.
Interesting point. Yes, the 80s nerd had a heavy dose of Woody Allen to him, didn’t he.
IIRC, there's a really nasty streak with violence against women going way back in nerd culture, too. Proto-revenge porn, maybe???
Is there? I can't think of anything other than panty raids.
Wait. Now Germans and Poles aren't blonde?
Idk, it seems like the 80s may have pioneered pro nerdiness, but within my lifetime I have seen the massive shift really start in the 2010s. As late as 2009 I remember getting overtly shamed by women with my buddy talking about PC building , and he was a USMC vet lol. Like we needed to talk about this stuff with no one around.
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.
It's not just nerdy now though, but nihilistic and ironic too. At least Alex P. Keaton was a cheerful go-getter.
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.
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.
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.
I have a few relatives in their late 40s deep in Bay Area culture. They're single dudes who don't have any friends besides people who use them for things. They're completely committed to being "nice" and double down on it. They're not totally bluepilled on women, but they're incredibly committed feminists. Part of it is that the framing of corporate America as the devil is their religion, so it's their only source of meaning, and they're gleeful about being feminists because they project the sources of their misery onto the religious image of "fascists" and "patriarchy".
It's so incredibly pathetic. It's like they've been broken. They're like a whipped slave who says, "please can I have another". No wonder cuckoldry culture is big on reddit.
These guys are suffering, and have been abused and scorned for decades. Mistreated. They are pathologically incapable of directing anger at the source of their pain.
They're throwing away their own lives so I don't think they're thinking about civilization. They're so oversocialized it doesn't even register for them how bad things are. Until Trump was reelected, these are people whose entire world view was that "if Biden can just pass that infrastructure bill, then the world will be okay." They think social decline is a conspiracy theory.
“If Biden can just pass that infrastructure bill, the world will be ok.”
LMFAO this is so on point. Sadly, about half of my family believed this. I thought this way with Obamas first term and learned my lesson. Crazy how these older people chronically cannot learn.
Most people are extremely weak. They'll get into a place of safety and then lord over people they disagree with, like the little dog who has a fence between them and the bigger one and barks incessantly.
They're quietly desperate to keep a certain job, or stay in the good graces of a certain social circle, so they can't tolerate challenging ideas, because they're terrified. The only problem is they act like know it alls and treat you like you're a monster and a fool.
What do they do for work?
One is an IT guy for a big 4 on their government contracts. Another is with a clean energy non-profit.
Perhaps just the latest flavor of lives of quiet desperation.’
Yeah. Both of these guys coped with an LSD trip and regular cannabis use.
I remember people smoked weed in college, but there was the year before Obama was elected where it felt like everyone finally started smoking it. Like, everyone. It was everywhere. The timing of this can't be coincidental since I feel like there's a supply issue to it. After 2008 you started to get dispensaries, but before then it was still fairly risky to try and get weed. For example, girls would typically just date guys who took the risks. But that one year 2007 I knew tons of girls meeting up with dealers downtown like it was nothing. Like I said, it's as if weed was just everywhere, like this massive supply and everyone was a dealer. The timing is too coincidental.
People don't like talking about this though, because they're either a soft addict and get emotionally defensive about their habit, or they're just guilty at having experimented in college since it's not the sort of behavior they'd expect of themselves now.
I'll never stop blowing the trumpet that the capitulation of American youth to cannabis is more than anything else what explains the Reddit generation.
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.
Agreed
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.
> 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."
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.
Control freaks like to control minds not just money
Its not always about the money spiderman
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.)
I was permanently banned from Reddit and it vastly improved my wellbeing. Honorable mention:
The Opie and Anthony subbreddit tardopera. Have watched a few documentaries about it, it's fascinating and retarded.
In 2013 Reddit admins revealed the Eglin Air Base was the '#1 Reddit-addicted city in the US'. Coincidentally a cyber warfare unit is also stationed at Eglin.