I saw a lot of progressives turning into free market libertarians as soon as social media started censoring right wing opinions. Suddenly all I could see was “They’re a private company, they can do what they want!”

Couldn’t have said it better myself. The internet has essentially been in a wild west era since it was created, as the government has pretty much no laws or court decisions saying what information social companies can and can’t regulate. On top of that we’re in an era where the SEC happily rubber stamps every corporate merger under the sun. Now we’re seeing the consequences of that as a majority of information on the internet is controlled by a handful of companies. And on top of that, even if you want to make your “alternative” platform, that’s incredibly hard to do since services like web hosting and payment processing are also controlled by a handful of corporations.

Most major corporations have no business acquiring any other companies, and on top of that they need to be broken up. Just thinking of a few, Amazon owning Amazon shopping, AWS, Twitch, Ring, IMDb, and a fucking satellite internet company is ridiculous. The finance, energy, defense/aerospace, pharmaceutical/healthcare, and so many other industries are all guilty of this. Libertarians couldn’t be more right about one thing, competition benefits consumers, but for some reason the only thing US republicans and democrats can agree on is that we should never enforce anti-trust laws. And internet leftists, the people who you’d figure would be all for corporations being broken up, are silent on the issue. It’s infuriating to watch.

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This place is lame because it’s somehow even more obsessed with politics than Reddit. It’s draining to go to a social media site and constantly be subjected to negative headlines.

Based on two comments I made do you truly think I’m “biased toward the Republican side” or are you just assuming that because you automatically assume anyone who disagrees with Democrats on certain issues is a Republican sympathizer?

/r/antiwork, /r/murderedbyAOC, /r/leopardsatemyface, /r/politicalhumor, /r/blackpeopletwitter, etc. I could go on.

What’s the biggest “right wing echo chamber” on Reddit? /r/conservative has just barely over 1M subscribers, which puts it at a fraction of the size of those subs mentioned above.

You can’t actually be serious can you?

Reddit back in the early 2010s was infamous for worshipping Ron Paul. In the early and mid-2010s there were literally subreddits dedicated to racism. It was controversial in the 2010s to ban or censor anything, meanwhile today all of the big subreddits are run by a handful of mods who will ban anyone who says something they don’t like, or even ban people automatically if they comment in a sub they don’t like.

If you think Reddit is somehow more right-leaning today than in the 2010s, I think that might just mean that you became far more left-leaning since then and everything else looks right-leaning in comparison.

Yeah but Reddit admins are more than happy to remove mods if they don’t like them.

Is there really anything to say there that everyone in this comment thread would be surprised by?

Republicans care too much about culture war BS

Republicans are blatantly wrong on the issue of abortion, and it’s actually baffling that they continue to oppose abortion even though it’s going to cost them elections

Environment. Need I say more?

Republicans are guilty of supporting giant corporations and serving corporate interests just as much as democrats. The only reason I don’t say they’re more guilty than Democrats is because companies that I consider to be some of the most monopolistic and controlling are tech and media companies that get much more support from democrats. I consider it a tie until one party either blocks a corporate merger or breaks up a monopoly.

I touched on Democrats being creepily authoritarian regarding speech, but of course Republicans are just as eager to censor when they have the opportunity as well.

I could go on, but these are the glaring issues I can think of that immediately come to mind.

I always find it funny (albeit in a depressing way) when people on the left act like anything short of totally open borders is white supremacy.

Wanna talk about ethnostates? Check out the demographics and immigration policies for countries like Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Iceland. Wanna talk about racism? Ask the average naturalized immigrant how they feel about illegal immigration.

Supporting more secured borders isn’t racist. The reality is that the American government should prioritize the interests of its own citizens before prioritizing the interests of people from other countries. It drives me up the walls to see how much support our government provides to refugees when meanwhile our own cities are struggling, most often in predominately black areas. Yes it’s a slight false dichotomy to act like we can’t support refugees while also improving our inner cities, but the reality is that we usually fail to do both as they’re often competing interests.

Is it really “supporting a white ethnostate” to say I’d rather have our country let in more immigrants with college degrees or at least a willingness to work over a bunch of people who have zero desire to integrate or even work.

“Progress” doesn’t mean trying to increase the population of our cities and diversity as much as possible even if it means bringing in millions of people who will rely on the government to survive, refuse to integrate into American society, and are the literal opposite of progressive. “Progress” means working to improve the lives of the people we have already living here, regardless of their ethnic background. And currently our immigration policy isn’t accomplishing that.

Centrism is just being able to acknowledge that both parties have flaws. If you can’t find any issues with the party you support, that means that you got your political views from someone else instead of developing them yourself.

People on a left-leaning site don’t wanna hear it, but US Democrats aren’t perfect. Their policy on immigration is not sustainable. A de facto open border policy for refugees and people who cross illegally while people with college degrees can’t even get a work visa is absurd. As a nation we are not obligated to help others when many of our own citizens are struggling. Biden’s student debt relief plan would have caused tuition prices to increase at an even faster rate than before and guaranteed further debt relief executive orders would be required in the future. Plus it set an insane precedent that the president could authorize billions in spending without any congressional oversight. Democrats were frightengly authoritarian during COVID with stuff like vaccine mandates and online censorship. Things were labelled as “misinformation” and later accepted to be the truth… repeatedly, and people simply didn’t care. One day you could get banned from every social media site for saying COVID may have come from a lab, and the next day it was perfectly plausible. That stuff would have been unthinkable prior to 2020 and it’s just apparently normal today.

And then there is the stuff where they’re just hypocritical or simply providing lip service. Biden could remove marijuana’s schedule 1 classification today with an executive order, but he won’t. Instead his administion argued in court that marijuana users cannot be trusted owning firearms and the ATF is right to prohibit them from buying guns. Speaking of guns, Biden also signed an executive order declaring pistol braces to be stocks after years of the ATF saying they weren’t stocks, making millions of gun owners into felons, many who didn’t even know about the reclassification. A piece of plastic that was legal one day is now 10 years in federal prison. Democrats are guilty of putting corporate interests before individual interests, much like republicans. Democrats love to talk about how much they care about the environment and climate change, but would sooner pass a law saying people can’t set their AC below 80 degrees than dare invest money into nuclear power or stop subsidizing fossil fuels.

You don’t have to agree with everything I said here. But if you can’t find anything to criticize about your preferred party, or at least acknowledge that these are valid criticisms even if you disagree with them, you are part of the problem.

“Centrists” gets tons of hate online that’s unwarranted IMO. “Centrism” is just a label people like to put on independent voters because mocking them by acting like their political position can be summed up as “Democrats have some good points, but the Nazis do too” is an easy way to dismiss them, when the reality is that most centrists are voters who get no representation since we have a broken-ass two-party system. Admitting that the two-party system is bad doesn’t benefit you if you support one of those two parties. So here we are.

And the end result is that every site is an echo chamber.

The state of the internet in 2023 is more or less, “Do you want the left-wing circlejerk or the right-wing circlejerk?” And if you want a place where people are allowed to express their views even if it disagrees with the majority opinion of the site, that no longer exists.

I’m sure it must be great if you identify as left or right, but it sure as hell sucks shit if you don’t align completely with either side.

You know your political views are truly independent when both the left and right accuse you of siding with the enemy.

Don’t forget the classic, “You sure with insert political extremist group on an issue. At least my side doesn’t team up with them.”

Most commonly seen when talking about Nazis obviously. I’ve been criticized for supporting free speech on social media sites because obviously only Nazis would benefit from being able to voice their opinions without worrying about being deplatformed.

“Extremely” doesn’t go far enough to accurately describe that cesspool

Software subscriptions are what really bums me out. Back in the day you could just buy your software and have it forever. Now Microsoft Office is a subscription, Adobe Photoshop is a subscription, and so much more. Nothing pisses me off more than when I install a basic app on my phone and find out it’s actually a subscription app.

Literally the only major software I can think of right now that isn’t subscription based or insanely expensive is Apple’s Final Cut Pro at $300.

I couldn’t disagree more. This is what I hate about the internet in 2023. Everyone is expected to fall into one of two buckets, and if you don’t fall into the correct one, you’re just not welcome on certain sites and expected to make your own site somewhere completely separate. Nobody can handle when people disagree with them, so instead we just get horribly toxic echo chambers.

Back in 2014 you could express a moderately conservative opinion on Reddit without being banned from subs. Hell, back in 2014 you could express far-right opinions and people would just rightfully call you a moron. But today on basically every site, you have 3 options: Agree with the site’s opinion, keep your mouth shut, or get banned.

The internet was better when people were allowed to disagree with each other.

The upper Midwest really has some of the worst weather in North America. Get schlonged by freezing temps and snow for 6 months followed by heat for another 6 months.

It’s all intentional. They know that overall it increases engagement and that’s all they care about.

Even Instagram and Tiktok let people fast forward videos. YouTube needs to get their shit together.

Sharing location with an app is one thing. The crazies thing I see people do ALL THE TIME is sharing their location on social media. Using Snapchat I can literally see where someone lives and when they’re there or not there.

Seems like a really handy tool for stalkers or burglars. But so many people just don’t care because they’re used to having zero privacy all the time anyway.