Yes to all the above, and probably a mix of bots and terminally online people getting involved. Not sure what year everyone started becoming unhinged but I think it was at least mid-2010’s.

People are now being perma banned from r/pics of all places for merely posting on the Asmongold subreddit. Yes, it’s become something of an anti-woke echo chamber in recent months, but it’s the main subreddit of Twitch’s most popular streamer.

And now we wondered why 74.7 million Americans voted for Donald Trump last week. Because maybe telling your voters that they’re Nazi scum if they don’t agree with you isn’t a winning strategy, like the world view that most Reddit moderators have.

Oh it’s been like that long before January 6th, and long before Trump even stepped foot in the Republican primaries eight years ago.

That wasn’t me defending Jan 6th either. Trump’s little Beer Hall Putsch was frankly inexcusable, and the fact that he’s likely not going to face any kind of criminal repercussions for it makes the US look weaker than the Weimar Republic.

Because American politics is weird and partisan a f.

Anything even remotely left will get you labelled a Commie or tankie by the right, while anything remotely right will get you labelled a Nazi by the left.

Final Fantasy XIV may lack the point and click tick based combat and semi AFK gameplay but it’s a solid MMORPG.

What puts me off is the lack of games this generation. I’m not spending £700 on a console where the only worthwhile exclusive that isn’t already on PC is Astro Bot.

If that’s the best thing that Sony and Microsoft can give us after three years of releasing their current consoles, then we’re well and truly on the verge of another market crash.

I don’t remember Digg being infiltrated by right wing conservatives. What I do remember was a website with a community that dickrode its power users so hard that unless you were a figure like MrBabyMan, your content would not get a single vote. The only people who actually used Digg’s social features (i.e. Friends lists) were blog spammers.

IIRC Digg v4 tried to address the issue by making users subscribe directly to news websites and dedicated content creators. They hated it and flocked immediately to their competitor.

Reddit has the same power user problem, albeit 1000x worse. Say what you want about the people who gamed Digg’s front-page, but they didn’t have the power to be judge, jury and executioner when moderating communities.

It’s hilariously ironic that I got banned from worldnews four years ago for criticizing the Saudi regime and how they use millennia-old scripture as justification to treat women horribly. Apparently that’s ‘bigotry.’

Everything I hear about the toxicity of worldnews these days is baffling.

They’d fit right at home on r/Asmongold. That place has become a KotakuInAction offshoot in recent months. So much right wing, anti-woke and anti-trans content gets posted there that I’m surprised the admins haven’t quarantined or banned it.

Yup, he wanted to say it, but 28 day modmail mute and all 🤷‍♂️

Actually, the screenshots of the ban messages were found via a Google image search and are not me.

But yeah, Reddit has a problem with rude power mods swinging their banhammer. It’s been documented for years.

I don’t think the “decentralize and federate everything” strategy is a good idea when it comes to online marketplaces.

We’ve seen how quickly bad actors can wreak havoc on the Fediverse like that one time when Lemmy Shitpost was closed for weeks due to people creating new instances of their own and spamming the community with CSAM. Imagine how much you open the community up to scams or criminal activity when money gets involved.

deleted by creator

If it’s not too late to ask for an invite…

https://steamcommunity.com/id/clbull

Nothing good will come of this.

At best this is a risky incursion which the Russian people will forget about in the coming weeks, that’s if the Russian propaganda machine hasn’t already spun it in their favour.

We seem to forget that making Putin look bad is a fool’s errand when we’re talking about a country where the state controls the media and where dissenters are either locked away in a remote gulag, or punted off a third-storey window in a way to vaguely look like suicide.

And at worst… this could lead to an escalation…

The closest we’ve had to a decisive blow against Russia was Prigozhin’s revolt.

He could alternatively go to…

Stackoverflow or Superuser, where the answer will be “use the search bar you imbecile, locked.”

Quora, where every question is blatant rage bait like “my 14 year old son got a B in his test. I took away his PS5 and chained him in the basement as punishment but his grades aren’t improving. How can I make him better at math?”

Yahoo Answers which is dead, and was basically Quora before Quora was a thing.

Or Reddit, where you can’t even post on 95% of subs without hitting a minimum karma threshold and where some basement dwelling mod will likely ban you for breaking hidden rule #263, then modmail mute you for 28 days without reply if you try to appeal.

I think any Q&A site is absolute dog water now.