[underlipton]

No, there was a concerted effort to radicalize the site.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7aap8/the-man-who-helped-tu...

My serious but unsubstantiated suspicion is that this was part of a neoconservative campaign, which included the likes of GamerGate, all in the interests of defanging and commodifying observant, critically-minded, tech-savvy young people (mostly men, mostly white) who otherwise would have found themselves on the progressive end of the political spectrum (as per their class affinity).

If you ask many of them, they will tell you that they were "red-pilled" after Occupy Wall Street so spooked the establishment that "wokism" was deployed to split the bottom 3 wealth quintiles and pit them against each other. My take is that the premise is correct (OWS did indeed push the elite to take class solidarity as a serious threat in a way that they hadn't previously), but that the conclusion is wrong. Rather, "red-pilling" was the intended remedy, and "meme magic" was the vector.

Case-in-point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39905726 and parent.