You an elder millennial by chance?

Same, seems like these are all from the 70s/80s/90s era basically.

The irony is that had the previous administration followed what Obama and Clinton and every other previous administration did on the border topic, they would have won in a landslide. But now the corruption of the last few years is being revealed and it’ll be interesting to see the fallout over the next few years.

Sad part is I find a lot of helpful random material (information about cellphone providers, accounts, all sorts of random edge cases in different domains) and still want to look at the threads, and find a lot of help that way. So I just switch to a VM that’s on a VPN just to check those. Sucks but some information doesn’t exist anywhere else.

You know a site is good when its mascot makes you feel intense uncontrollable rage deep in your soul.

The sad part is I still have a lot of random subs I enjoy, fringe stuff like r/OnionLovers and r/slowcooking, r/frugal… and subs like r/frugal immediately delete any comment that brings up politics in any way, so there are a few decent subs left with non-batshit insane mods but they are becoming exceedingly rare.

They sent me a warning of being flagged and monitored because I upvoted a comment about Luigi. That’s how cooked reddit is now. Seriously, only upvoting “rule violating comments”, not even commenting myself. Just a button click is all it takes, and they won’t tell you which comment or post you upvoted that flagged it so it’s like walking through a mine field.

For what it’s worth I use PIA and have never been shadowbanned or banned using any endpoint in any country on new accounts there. I use throwaway non-gmail email accounts to segment each account so they can’t track between them, all on different VPN endpoints per account. It’s sad that this is what it takes to prevent them from stalking me.

It’s hilarious that you made me curious enough to look up RDDT’s stock price today, down 9% today alone lol, -31% in the last 30 days. A third of their stock value lost in the past month, very impressive.

I’m on my 5th permban now I think. Some of them were because I logged in with an alt on the same IP by mistake so they flagged it and banned those too. I didn’t violate any ToS, they just didn’t agree because (I asked ChatGPT to summarize the behavior of reddit mods/admins):

Woke Authoritarianism

This refers to the enforcement of progressive or “woke” ideology through authoritarian means, such as:

• Censorship of dissenting views
• Cancel culture (public shaming and professional consequences for opposing opinions)
• De-platforming (banning people from social media or public forums)
• Forced ideological conformity (e.g., requiring adherence to specific beliefs in workplaces or academia)

Thought Policing

This term comes from George Orwell’s 1984 and refers to the control and regulation of people’s thoughts, often through fear, social pressure, or punishment for wrongthink. In the modern context, it can include:

• Policing language to ensure ideological purity
• Monitoring people’s statements (even from the past) to punish deviation
• Enforcing conformity through intimidation, cancelation, or ostracization

And a followup response:

Authoritarian Leftism – When left-wing ideology is enforced through censorship, suppression of dissent, and ideological purity tests.

Neoprogressivism / Woke Authoritarianism – Some critics use these terms to describe far-left movements that use de-platforming, cancel culture, and corporate-enforced speech restrictions to control discourse.

Cultural Marxism (controversial term) – Some argue that elements of Marxist thought, particularly in cultural institutions, are used to enforce ideological dominance. However, this term is often misused or overgeneralized.

Techno-Authoritarianism – When social media platforms and tech companies enforce ideological conformity through bans, shadowbanning, and algorithmic control.

Soft Totalitarianism (coined by Rod Dreher) – Unlike classic totalitarianism (which uses force and violence), this is a modern, decentralized form of control through social shaming, cancel culture, and corporate censorship.

ChatGPT seems to have hit the nail on the head, I didn’t even know “Woke Authoritarianism” was an actual term.