Tl;dr: have there been any writings, surveys, or studies on the political composition of Reddit shifting in large communities?


I logged out of my reddit account a while ago but still browse some subreddits without logging in and have recently noticed more far-right rhetoric in general. I’m curious to know if others have seen this trend or, even better, wrote about it or documented it. Some examples I noticed were r/sweden and r/exmuslim. These are two communities I used to frequent often and both of them now have descended into more upvoted far-right rhetoric of the “deport them all!” caliber.

I have a feeling (from my own experience browsing these communities) that such content used to be quickly addressed and downvoted, and both of those subreddits don’t tend to ban people on the fly nor overmoderate. Sometimes I see threads with the same title (likely posted by the same person) on both the subreddit and the corresponding lemmy community where the difference in opinion and the general political leaning is obvious.

So, not to succumb to my own biases, have there been any writings, surveys, or studies on the political composition of Reddit shifting in large communities?

  • @[email protected]
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    fedilink
    841 year ago

    It’s a total guess, but my theory is that people on the right are tolerant of enshittification and may even find it appealing, while the rest of us just leave. This seems to be the case with Twitter, so maybe Reddit is following?

    • @simulacra_simulacrum
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      151 year ago

      I reached my tolerance of how shitty the Reddit feed has become pretty recently and I’m on the anti-authoritarian side of things so it’s an interesting theory.