The left is elated over the recent shake-up of Reddit in which Victoria Taylor – the ‘verifier’ of celebrity AMAs (ask me anythings) – was inexplicably fired, resulting in the shutdown of several sub-Reddits in solidarity, rendering large portions of the site inaccessible. A more detailed explanation can be found here, in which I took a screenshot in case the thread gets locked or deleted. Forbes.com also sheds light on the situation, as well as an in-depth article by Business Insider.
I guess my question is why Reddit didn’t have an immediate replacement to handle celebrity AMAs instead of leaving the moderators unprepared? Had management been more careful, perhaps no one would have noticed. It could also be that the moderators of /r/IAmA were the first to know about this (having been told the news by Victoria Taylor), locking /r/IAmA in protest. The whole thing just reeks of sloppiness by Reddit for not doing a better job keeping this under wraps and not having an immediate replacement.
But why would the left be happy about this? Isn’t Reddit supposed a liberal site?
Reddit was predominately liberal up until around 2012 – but then there was the cataclysmic convergence of three factors that pushed the site to the right:
Fist, the stock market began to boom. The S&P 500 surged 33%! in 2014 alone and another 10% in 2014. The US economy, having brushed off the overblown sequester and fiscal cliff (which the Democrats instigated) not only recovered to new highs – but is running circles around the rest of the world, with a wealth creation boom that continues to this day. High-IQ, rich foreigners are buying America’s most expensive real estate, buying up America’s debt, and flooding America’s most prestigious companies and institutions of higher learning with applicants. This has made the liberal narrative of egalitarianism and wealth-redistribution obsolete. The millennials, who make up most of Reddit’s user base, saw the failure of OWS, the failure of the banking problem to user a ‘post America’ era, and the uninterrupted rise of the cognitive and financial 1%, so rather than resist they want a piece of the action. It’s advantageous to aspire to be like the rich than fight them, and with the stock market surging and with the web 2.0 boom, getting rich has never been easier. Being rich and smart like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg is the cool thing to be – not poor, angry and liberal. The world has also gotten a lot safer, in agreement with Steven Pinker’s thesis, which makes the crisis-seeking left angry, although this trend predates Reddit by many decades.
Millions of millennials, many of whom voted for Obama and had high hopes over the ‘change’ he promised, were letdown by the perpetually bad labor market and how healthcare and tuition costs have remained high. This disillusionment, along with Obama (rightfully) being deemed an ineffectual, inept leader caused many millennials who originally identified as ‘liberal’ to change their thinking and embrace (from the left) some combination of Eliminative Materialism, Effective Altrutism, Neo Liberalism, Classical Liberalism, or Utilitarianism (in contrast to welfare liberalism) – but also niche right-of-center ideologies such as Red Pill, MGTOW, Internet Libertarianism, Minarchism, Atheist Conservatism, The Pragmatic/Rationalist Right, HBD, Dark Enlightenment, Peter Singer Conservatives, Objectivism, Conservative Minimalism, Darwinian Conservatism, and the resurgence of Neo Conservatism, the later especially aided by the strong economy. Especially since 2008, nerd culture has gone mainstream, along with the celebritization of STEM, as further refutation of the political correctness that shaped much of the 90’s. As opposed to liberals, who tend to use emotion and wishful thinking, nerds use facts and logic – often making a lot of money, too. Millions of well-educated young people are trying to make sense of the post-2008 economy and are seeking explanations – even if the truth doesn’t come in nice, politically correct packaging – by nerds, wonks, quants and other smart people who tell the unvarnished truth and don’t care about sparing feelings. The result is that themes of HBD/biological determinism, in contrast to themes of the perfectibility of man by the paternalistic welfare state, are prevalent all over Reddit – and this is even spilling over to mainstream discourse. You can see evidence of this shift – of how Malcolm Gladwell, for example, is no long ‘hip’ on Reddit. That’s because Reddit users, who tend to be smarter than average, see through his pseudoscience poppycock (although he’s still quite popular among those on the left-side of the Bell Curve).
Most importantly, Reddit, through the rise of Red Pill and other ideologies (as mentioned above), has been instrumental in the post-2013 decline of the SJW narrative, with examples such as Gamergate, Shirtgate, and the UVA rape hoax – all in 2014 alone – ending badly for the SJW left. Posts with anti-SJW, men’s rights themes often receive thousands of up-votes and supportive comments, going viral on the homepage of Reddit and on its meme/image host Imgur. Other instances include many Reddit users siding with the police and Darren Wilson after the justified killing of Michael Brown and the riots that ensued.
As an example of how the SJWs are losing – of how unpopular they really are among the general population, in a recent AMA with Jesse Jackson, this was the most up-voted comment:
“How is your relationship with the illegitimate child you fathered in 1998 while cheating on your wife? Bonus question: How much money have you extorted from various people and companies over the years of practicing your shakedown scheme? Do you think Al Capone would be jealous of your business model if he were still alive?”
By trying to shutdown Reddit and turning Victoria Taylor into yet another ‘victim’ of the imagined ‘tech patriarchy’, the crybabies on the left are having a field day, inconveniencing millions of users and advertisers – kinda like a kid having a tantrum at a restaurant while everyone else just wants to eat in peace and quiet. If the welfare/SJW left, who claim to be ‘champions’ of free speech, cannot have Reddit on their terms, no one can use Reddit.