The shift happened in 2016, specifically because of the U.S. presidential election. When Hillary Clinton "won" the DNC primary, all that money got unleashed, and Reddit changed overnight. It was like a switch was flipped. Reddit before was mostly libertarian leaning, and largely supported Ron Paul. However, after the switch, it went into crazy NPC leftist overdrive.
It mostly affected the politics subs, but it spread outward from there to infect the entire website over time. It was being done by companies like ShareBlue/ActBlue which was using bots and shills to push their message, upvote approved posts and comments, downvote wrongthink posts and comments, infiltrate mod teams, pay mods willing to do their work for them, and most likely pay the admins to censor and curate the content for the whims of the establishment masters.
It was glaringly obvious for anyone with a modicum of intelligence. People often tripped up the shills and bots, and posted ample evidence of the astroturphing. All of the shills/bots were identical. They said the same things, made the same arguments, talked the same way, and never deviated. It was like a script. Over time, this astroturphing began using non politics subs to push their message, and the Reddit admins curated the "popular" feeds to only include the approved message. Now, almost all subs have been infected, and it's driven most of the genuine users away, except for maybe a few niche subreddits.
There were other forces at work too. The anti-vaxx hatred being spread from all corners of Reddit also began after 2016. That was probably helped along by money from pharmaceutical companies, in addition to the pre Covid priming propaganda being put out by the establishment. It was just like the DNC takeover. It was that inorganic and obvious, using subs that had nothing to do with vaccines or healthcare at all would push posts to the front page that were pro vaxx and anti anti-vaxx. Lots of comments were asking "what does this have to do with ____?" that were drowned out by all the shill/bot comments.
Genuine people will generally only spend time in a forum if it's also genuine. If they know most of it's fake, even if it supports and espouses the same ideology as them, they'll usually leave. Only the die hards will stay, interspersed among all the other useful idiots who didn't notice, and the mountain of shills/trolls. Twitter, Facebook, and all other mainstream social media platforms have gone through the same thing. They're almost entirely curated and fake. There's good evidence that many of these platforms started out intending to ultimately end up where they are, while others were taken over and co-opted (like Reddit).
The shift happened in 2016, specifically because of the U.S. presidential election. When Hillary Clinton "won" the DNC primary, all that money got unleashed, and Reddit changed overnight. It was like a switch was flipped. Reddit before was mostly libertarian leaning, and largely supported Ron Paul. However, after the switch, it went into crazy NPC leftist overdrive.
It mostly affected the politics subs, but it spread outward from there to infect the entire website over time. It was being done by companies like ShareBlue/ActBlue which was using bots and shills to push their message, upvote approved posts and comments, downvote wrongthink posts and comments, infiltrate mod teams, pay mods willing to do their work for them, and most likely pay the admins to censor and curate the content for the whims of the establishment masters.
It was glaringly obvious for anyone with a modicum of intelligence. People often tripped up the shills and bots, and posted ample evidence of the astroturphing. All of the shills/bots were identical. They said the same things, made the same arguments, talked the same way, and never deviated. It was like a script. Over time, this astroturphing began using non politics subs to push their message, and the Reddit admins curated the "popular" feeds to only include the approved message. Now, almost all subs have been infected, and it's driven most of the genuine users away, except for maybe a few niche subreddits.
There were other forces at work too. The anti-vaxx hatred being spread from all corners of Reddit also began after 2016. That was probably helped along by money from pharmaceutical companies, in addition to the pre Covid priming propaganda being put out by the establishment. It was just like the DNC takeover. It was that inorganic and obvious, using subs that had nothing to do with vaccines or healthcare at all would push posts to the front page that were pro vaxx and anti anti-vaxx. Lots of comments were asking "what does this have to do with ____?" that were drowned out by all the shill/bot comments.
Genuine people will generally only spend time in a forum if it's also genuine. If they know most of it's fake, even if it supports and espouses the same ideology as them, they'll usually leave. Only the die hards will stay, interspersed among all the other useful idiots who didn't notice, and the mountain of shills/trolls. Twitter, Facebook, and all other mainstream social media platforms have gone through the same thing. They're almost entirely curated and fake. There's good evidence that many of these platforms started out intending to ultimately end up where they are, while others were taken over and co-opted (like Reddit).