Australia/NZ-specific subreddits, in particular, were always absolutely fucking awful (everything from city subs, to politics, to finance), but this is worse than even during ‘Rona…
For context, this week the Australian Tax Office (ATO) essentially declared war on small (but not big) business, and said that they will use every tool at their disposal to squeeze every unpaid tax dollar out of said businesses, no matter what consequences that has for insolvencies, the economy, and hell, everything that follows that.
I am not kidding when I say that they literally said “Well, if this destroys more businesses than the GFC, that’s too bad.”
In a normal world, such an announcement would have been treated with… At least some degree of disgust, but not on Reddit. On Reddit, people were literally saying they wished that the ATO could employ lynch mobs. In the AusFinance sub (the irony), they were saying they hope small business owners kill themselves over this, because they clearly deserve to…
It’s pretty crazy to me, to see how toxic this discourse has become.
That place is… Well, it’s probably worse than I ever expected it would become, honestly. And that’s just with me lurking, not even wading back in to discussions again…
Yeah, the RSL sale and everything else that happened in the fallout of the 2020 clown world revolution has been hard to take. It’s somehow even worse now - not sure if you heard about this one, but last year a player got suspended for 6 games because he called the (white) ref a “dumb monkey” (apparently a fairly standard way of calling someone a dumbass in belgian, which was the player’s native language) and a black player in the general vicinity heard it and got all butthurt bc he thought it was directed at him.
It’s sad, because there was some pretty funny, edgy shit going on in fan culture during the early days of the league. Two classic signs I remember seeing in the crowd back in the old days - one, in New York, where they hated this opposing player named Mamadou Diallo who had broken the NY goalkeeper’s ribs on a really dirty play a while back, and where there had recently been an NYPD shooting of a guy named Amadou Diallo, read “They shot the wrong Diallo”, and then another, in DC, that read “DC is Jaime Town”, in reference to their star striker Jaime Moreno, and also Jesse Jackson’s comment about NYC being “hymie town”, in reference to the large Jewish population. I can’t even imagine the pearl clutching if those signs saw the light of day today.
It’s a lot like every other fandom. In the old days nobody cared about MLS, and there was weird, interesting, organic fan culture. Then the money and the normies came, and now anything that’s not palatable to soy cucks and 15 year old girls is strictly verboten.
It was a real shame, I met some really cool people through /r/MLS, and through the fandom in general. I lost track of most of them, unfortunately, and it really isn't what it used to be. You summed it up very well at the end of your comment.