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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 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.