No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
I've been on reddit since about 2008. My experience was that it's was very left/liberal, drawing users mainly from university students. There have always been people posting content that made it like 4chan lite, but not political talk. As best I recall I first saw anyone there identify politically conservative around 2014 and it seemed surprising.
I guess, I don't really remember the political atmosphere from when I created my account around 2013 or so.
My brother had been trying to convince me to create an account for some time, but it wasn't until I realized that there was a lot more to the site than cat pictures that I got around to doing it. Once I got rid of most of the default subs, I thoroughly enjoyed it for several years.
I remember it mostly the way you do. It certainly wasn't conservative in any sense of the word. Socially,
/r/atheismwas a default sub, most of the user base was LGBT friendly, and pornography was allowed. Economically, universal healthcare and the OWS protests were supported.There was a libertarian-minded free-speech-absolutist streak, which is why things like
/r/jailbaitand/r/watchpeoplediewere allowed. Some people like to blame the elimination of that type of stuff on "intolerant leftists" but in my estimation the real culprit there was the media catching wind and advertisers not wanting to advertise on sites with that sort of content.In my opinion, Reddit became far more hostile to conservatives when
/r/the_donaldtook off. That may be more a sign of the times than anything particular about Reddit; political engagement in general was rising during that time. But also most users didn't really appreciate the way that sub manipulated Reddit's algorithms, or being called "cuck" in their hobby subs.Yeah, the questionable porn and gore are what resembled 4chan Lite. There wasn't much hate speech, racism or non-liberal political talk though back then. I think reddit realized that having prominent subs posting photos of 14 year old girls wasn't something they wanted to be in their public image at all, which was probably a good move.
I don't feel like reddit became hostile to conservatives as much as conservatives who were hostile showed up, which of course made people not like them. It was also a time when political attitudes and discourse in general in the US was growing more contentious and less civil. The 'cuck' crap, the "liberal tears!!" type attitudes, death threats, arrogance and harassing people showed up when 'the donald' went big around 2016-17. Not really different than Facebook or IG in that respect - I finally quit Facebook entirely around 2017 because i was sick of having contentious politics in my face non-stop. I'm not sure if /r/conservative even existed before ~2015. Also strangely /r/conspiracy turned from a place to discuss MK-ULTRA and UFOs to a place where people talked anti-Democratic Party politics non-stop. Personally I feel like a lot of it was organized astroturf, not even necessarily from inside the US.
It's basically a non-starter; all "free speech absolutist" websites are. I think Moot said that 4chan didn't make any money because they were radioactive to advertisers. Voat died because they couldn't attract advertisers. The remaining right-wing social media sites are all running at a loss as far as anyone can determine.
Maybe a bad choice of words on my part. I 100% agree that conservatives basically invaded the site during the leadup to the 2016 election and proceeded to harass the existing user base until the admins were forced to step in. Even then the admins did the minimum they possibly could and slow-walked everything. Conservatives got every opportunity to course-correct and basically refused.
A lot of Reddit is hostile to conservatives now and they definitely earned that ire.
That sub was created Jan 25, 2008. Interestingly enough, it seems
/r/christianitywas created at the same time. I don't remember anyone being aware of either sub - much less caring about them - prior to/r/the_donald. Reddit was pretty fine with conservative subs before they started showing up in everybody's gaming and knitting subs calling everybody cucks and baby murderers.Everything about the genesis of
/r/the_donaldfeels like organized to me. That shit came out of nowhere. If I had to guess, it's something similar to Steve Bannon's strategy to target gamers and the gamergate fiasco.