[Spivak]

Your phrasing could be a lot better but I think your main point holds some truth. Just like the conspiracy equation that models the difficulty of keeping a secret in terms of the number of people involved the same principal applies to online communities that have a significant number of hateful members but try to fly under the radar. It gets harder and harder for the community to moderate their members that /unjerk and then it snowballs once the seal is broken.

[Number157]

Reddit was great for a long time even when it was one of the largest most popular sites on the internet. Then it became a political platform for the US democrats.

[astrange]

/r/politics is extremely US "normie Democrat voter" (which does not align with the actual party, it's different and sometimes worse) but the popular financial subs like WSB/investing certainly aren't.

This is just a passing trend though, 10 years ago everyone on the internet was libertarian. Which is how you knew the internet wasn't real. Nobody's actually a libertarian in real life.

[_ktx2]

> Nobody's actually a libertarian in real life.

I'm going to assume what you mean is that nobody lives entirely by Libertarian ideals. While that may be true, it's true of every other political category as well, so I guess nobody is anything under that logic.

[astrange]

Almost nobody claims to be a libertarian or gets elected by the party. Justin Amash and Ron Paul are maybe the only famous politicians.

On the internet there's that political compass site that tells people they're libertarians, but it was made by libertarians so I think it's a recruiting tool.

But it's also true that people don't practice it in real life. Drug legalization, yes, that's going somewhere if slowly, but the right wing libertarians still tend to be NIMBY in local politics.

[_ktx2]

I don't know where you get these ideas. I was participating both online and offline in Libertarian communities.

[astrange]

Is the point of libertarianism to participate in a community? (Maybe it is.)

They haven't, like, done anything though. Not many politicians elected, no drugs legalized, noone freed from prison, state control over people generally not reduced. I have heard of a few attempts to start libertarian cities that failed because you can't get a Walmart when your taxes are too low to construct a sewer line.

[Spivak]

Kinda sorta. Reddit is an odd place on the internet. It's on average really really conservative but full people who distance themselves from the political identity of "conservative" or "Republican."

Reddit is where you go if you begrudgingly vote Democrat but think that liberals and progressives have gone too far.

I do wonder what the political landscape is going to look like in the next decade if/when Republicans realize that there's huge huge swaths of young and young-ish people they could easily convert if they just dropped all the gods & guns & murica branding and gave up on social issues.