I’ve checked the Tennessee subreddit and it doesn’t seem very active. The first post is 17h old and about the special election. The news article that was posted, is not positive for the republican party. The reddit comments are overwhelmingly against Van Epps. The post itself was posted by a mod. https://old.reddit.com/r/Tennessee/comments/1pajj2w/tennessee_congressional_race_becomes_unlikely/

This doesn’t look like a rightwing echo chamber to me. Maybe the outsider that was calling for action, was removed because they take their rule about removing agitators seriously. Imo there may still be a problem of too strict modding, because of how inactive the subreddit looks.

The discovery is being cut up, wtf?

First time I heard about that, apparently Texas republicans want it moved to their state for populist reasons, irregardless of any practicalities. https://www.space.com/space-exploration/the-smithsonian-might-have-to-cut-space-shuttle-discovery-into-pieces-to-get-it-to-texas The space shuttles used to be transported on the back of a specially adapted Jumbo jet, which isn’t going to exist anymore, hence the cutting up + exorbitant cost to transport it.

A direct link to the article from op: https://larslofgren.com/codesmith-reddit-reputation-attack/

Reading that list of tactics was kinda depressing, because I could name a bunch of them with their debating name, even when they’re not being named as such by the author. Gish gallop, misrepresentation, throwing shade, ad hominem arguments. I never learned any of these terms in school, yet I know them now, bravo internet. But here they were used not for the low stakes of winning an online argument, but with real life negative consequences for a bunch of seemingly well meaning people. I hope kids now are being prepared in schools for this new online reality, but I fear that’s just not the case in most countries.

Demonizing outside influences is common to all cults. It innoculates the cult members to those outside influences, leading them to immediately disregard information that contradicts their cultist beliefs, keeping them trapped within the cult’s echo chamber more effectively. To keep the cultists innoculated, they have to constantly remind them that they and their beliefs are being persecuted and that the only source of truth, is the cult leaders.

That said, how “real” is r/conservative? I just checked it and every single thread is flaired users only. It’s a far more controlled echo chamber than the Donald was in it’s heyday, and when the Sint-Petersburg troll farm was brought offline during the usa elections of 2018, the Donald was gone from reddit’s front page for the duration.

To me it seems like r/conservative is a method of distributing the current narrative to cultists, but it doesn’t require actual input or discussion from those cultists. It seems to actually discourage posting by normal conservative users, since any kind of wrongthink will lead to a ban, and it’s hard to keep up with the changing narratives for normal users, so catching a ban is easy.

Imo that comment was made to reinforce your message, it wasn’t written as a message to you (because you had already decided).

It’s reddit though. How can we know how many of those people are real?

Even before the Reddit app debacle, reddit made very questionable decisions and if you went to look at that discussion at a later date, the answers that were artificially boosted to the top (this depended on how you went to look at the site, it seemed a lot less in old reddit) seemed as fake as a fake Amazon review, as if reddit was astroturfing their own website.

The change that broke reddit for me was this: https://old.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/s71g03/announcing_blocking_updates/?limit=500 I have no way of looking at the thread without using old.reddit, so I don’t know if it still looks as astroturfed as it did back then.