Within the wake of Elon Musk’s speech at Trump’s inauguration and its accompanying (ahem) hand gesture, the userbase of Reddit appears to have determined it is merely accomplished with Musk and his web site. As we reported yesterday, r/pcgaming has now banned X hyperlinks—and the identical factor is going on throughout an enormous variety of subreddits, main and minor.
Posts by common customers proposing bans have been met with large in style assist in plenty of Reddit communities, and in lots of circumstances mods have shortly instated the brand new rule. Now the subreddits for every little thing from World of Warcraft to Dungeons & Dragons to F1 racing to New Jersey have accomplished it, whereas many others are at the moment deliberating or voting on the change.
From a sure perspective, it isn’t an enormous shift. Below Musk, X has been reworking right into a refuge for laborious proper and extremist opinions for some time now, whereas Reddit’s userbase has lengthy trended in the direction of being extra left-wing and reasonable (to talk in broad generalities). The truth that X now requires guests to log in to view many of the web site’s content material has additionally rankled for some time with Reddit customers—folks don’t like having to join one other web site to get the context for a submit. So whereas Musk’s latest actions could have kickstarted the dialog, it is an animosity that is been brewing since 2022, and to an extent is as a lot sensible as political.
However alternatively, this is without doubt one of the largest and most well-known social media websites on the earth democratically blacklisting one of many different largest and most well-known social media websites on the earth, and that is form of wild to see. In the meantime, the precise workers of the positioning are merely content material to let customers make their selection on this matter.
It is taking place not simply in area of interest areas, or explicitly left-wing subreddits, however throughout an unlimited number of Reddit communities. Followers of the NBA could not have a lot in widespread with followers of Warhammer or Soccer Supervisor, however they positive all align on this. It isn’t typically you see such a spectrum of customers arrive on the identical web page to this diploma—particularly with a turnaround of simply a few days.
Musk has solely owned X for lower than two years, however in that point he is remodeled the positioning within the eyes of many from a comparatively impartial (if chaotic and fractious) discussion board and main supply of stories to one thing so inherently hateful and poisonous as to be prevented altogether. I will not maintain up Reddit as a bastion of good discourse, nevertheless it’s placing to see its customers taking such a agency stance en-masse, with only a few dissenters to be seen.
Whether or not that is an indication that there is nonetheless good left on the web, or simply one other instance of on-line communities changing into ever extra siloed and divided, I am going to depart to the reader to determine for themselves—however as somebody who left X early final yr and hasn’t appeared again, I am going to actually be glad to have one other place I can go to fully keep away from it.
