Reddit is an alternate universe on gender ideology

[SquirrelosaurusSoShiny]

I know that this is no news to MNers. Occasionally even I boggle at how absolutely removed from planet earth posters are.

One example - a thread about Graham Linehan being interviewed by BBC. Absolute outrage at how transphobic BBC are for allowing him to be interviewed and how outrageous it is that as he was 'cancelled' he should never be uncancelled or appear in public again.

The idea that the BBC / police / Labour Party / whoever are transphobic just shows how utterly delusional these individuals are. A man was arrested by 5 police officers for a tweet. Anything other than complete affirmation and self-prostration is transphobia.

Many are mentally ill, not because of gender dysphoria but because they exist primarily in online spaces which validate their every word. Every word of disagreement brings expulsion from the bubble or cries of transphobia. Then every encounter with reality is seen as a painful attack so they continue to exist only online in an endless circle jerk of validation.

Until all online spaces are legally obliged to allow a variety of viewpoints this isn't going to change. I'm so proud that MN held the line. The idea that it's an echo chamber here just makes me laugh. Not blindly swallowing horseshit by plop and run TRAs is not transphobia.

I cannot believe how many people have been harmed by this ideology. We haven't even seen the full consequences yet of people losing faith in our media, our political system, common sense. Don't even get me started on the Arts. It's like watching a horror film on 0.5 speed. It is genuinely depressing.

The people happy on Reddit are the ones seeking a no-debate space, the ones who need a comfortable nest. Enforce debate and that cohort will simply go elsewhere.

In fact I’m grateful that there’s such a public space for them; it’s like a zoo enclosure where others can see what’s going on inside.

I hope some of them also brave it up and come and read here.

I watched a TikTok by someone who claims to have known the Charlie Kirk killer at school, and he simply described him, in a very Gen Z way, as a “Reddit kid”. It came across as very plausible.

There's one lonely gender critical lesbian subreddit - lord knows how it has managed to cling on. I'm not gonna post the name as I don't want to jinx it. The description and rules at the top are all very much trans inclusive / play nice ladies, but the content is almost 100% GC which is refreshing.

I was banned from the Transgender-UK subreddit after what I thought was a mundane post about safeguarding was flagged as "hate" and removed.

Yes, I’ve seen that one! Was amazed.

I think it’s sometimes just because of where else you’ve posted.

Reddit used to take free and open debate much more seriously. Individual subreddits had differences in how they were moderated but the site as a whole would only ban you for abuse like sock-puppetry or truly extreme language directed at another user. Things changed with Trump 1.0 and a new activist friendly CEO in the mid 2010s and got worse with the Biden admin and the war on 'misinformation'. It hasn't improved, markedly (or at all) with the election of Trump 2.0. It's still very easy to get suspended for disagreeing with TWAW and just a few weeks ago a large lesbian subreddit, the lezistance, was banned for saying no to penises.

I don't know what the solution is, but there's no question that bureaucrat/activist/ngo lead campaign to suppress 'extreme right wing' views and 'disinformation' had a radical effect on the social media landscape. Reddit is important, not just as a center of discussion itself, but as a driver of internet search and AI LLM training. It's essentially embedding a highly toxic woke narrative into shared big tech infrastructure. There needs to be some counter pressure to that, ideally a renewed commitment to supporting open debate and a wide range of views, but if not that then counter-partisan pressure applied from the right.

I agree 100%. I think post Charlie Kirk we will see a lot more scrutiny of Reddit, Discord etc. There will be screams of censorship and fascism without any recognition that these sites were the ones who STARTED this with their own kind of censorship and this led to the inevitable backlash.

Reddit's a cesspit. I actually think it's worse than 'X' and don't know why it doesn't get the same condemnation (I am certainly NOT defending X). It's weird to watch these little gangs make something up, and then it just turns into fact and continues to be repeated. And if anyone dares say something that goes against the consensus, even if they're agreeing with almost everything and just point out one tiny thing is provably incorrect, they get viscously attacked. And the lies continue. It's weird, and very scary to witness. I think I'd be very worried if my child spent time on there, more so than probably any other platform.

It certainly has links to homophobia. Iran for example forced gay people to change for example as they believed homosexuality was wrong, so anyone fancying someone of the same sex must therefore be in the wrong body. Not sure if it still happens but I remember it being featured a lot a few years ago, before all the current pro-trans stuff. I'm not sure why it never gets mentioned anymore as you would think it an important part of the debate.

Other homophobic societies like Morocco, Pakistan and Bangladesh also allow sex changes, but homosexuality is illegal. Interestingly, Morocco is where sex change surgery was actually invented, as I was proudly informed by my guide who seemed very proud of how enlightened they were!

Tumblr was ground zero for TIFs, Reddit for TIMs.

It isn't just the trans subreddits it affects, either. The whole site is permeated with adherence to troonery, except those rare right-wing subs still clinging on. The worst propaganda spreads onto trivial subs like Faux Moi, where it's ostensibly about celeb gossip and pop culture but is really a means to brainwash young women into suicidal empathy and omnicausal politics.

There are no free-thinking female-majority subreddits left on Reddit. I watched in 2020 as every GC sub fell like dominoes and TRAs celebrated like a million Christmases had come at once. Idky people are shocked by the response to Charlie Kirk: terminally online psychopathy has always been there. Only now in the last decade, with the fourth wall steadily lowering between Internet discourse and real life, is real life being consumed by computer-obsessed porn and propaganda addicts, and I guess that shocks the more normal people still among us.

I actually started out pro-self ID and I very vividly remember my 'be kind' position on another net for mums. I cringe now at how utterly, utterly ignorant and uninformed I was. Then Rachel Mackinnon happened, and I did 'educate' myself. And all the TRA and liberal feminism melted away and took the scales from my eyes with them.

I've commented on that (odd) post on Facebook recently... women know now... and they are increasingly brave to speak out. I was quite cheered by the amount of women pointing out his mean, selfish, entitled, unprofessional behaviour too. They can see it and are judging him by woman's standards which funnily enough are much, much higher than he can conceive of!

What are ploppers?

People who come onto a serious thread without reading any of the posts, drop some nonsense and then leave. Quite often they will proudly proclaim that they haven’t read the posts and they won’t read any replies.

Just thought I would post this link as it shows number of users of different sm platforms https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/

reddit comes 12th and Xtwit 14.

So the real quesiton is why the interest in reddit given its reach.

Although more troubling is the MSM in using Xtwit as a source when it by number it is about as representative as constantly quoting the people who live on my street.

Anyone know how many users MN has?

Yes I think Jan Morris had surgery in Morocco way back in the 50s. I did like her travel writing - only ever knew Jan as a "woman". Often touted as a nice trans who just wants to live a quiet life etc. But Mrs Morris did all the dreary wifey stuff while Jan went travelling and mountain climbing.

Iran , Morocco, USA....a lot in common when it comes to homophobia.

I don’t think it’s just a question of how many users a platform has. Twitter/X and Reddit both allow users to be anonymous. Facebook not so much, you are supposed to have a genuine personal profile, but as the sole mod of a 10k special interest group I can say that there are lots of fake profiles. They don’t get in my group though!

I mentioned this earlier on my post, reddit is disproportionate in its influence because it involves long form, wide ranging text based discussion. The Internet used to be made up of 1000s+ of large active discussion forums, Reddit caused much of their traffic to migrate to their platform. MN is a practically unique anomaly for being as large and active of a discussion forum as it is, having continued to flourish. Reddit is also extensively used to train AI which creates a feedback loop, Reddit's own safe speech practices become embedded in AI, and AI is then used to moderate Reddit's speech.

In addition Reddit is highly integrated into Internet search, especially Google. Other social media is relatively hostile to Internet search, preferring instead to force users to sign in and use facilities native to the platform to search and curate content. Because of Reddit's contractual partnership with Google, Reddit popularity becomes conflated with search quality this affects the reach of ideas and is another way in which it affects machine learning algorithms.

The closest-to-home example of TRA homophobia is directed at lesbians, who are supposed to accept men who identify not just as women, but as lesbian women, as sexual partners. It's transphobic not to.

In other words, the concept of being same sex attracted, which is what lesbian and gay identity is, means nothing and is replaced by same self-IDed gender attraction.
Except of course that that's not how it works. Didn't the Supreme Court ruling say of men who hold a GRC that 'no one is attracted to a certificate'?
Being a lesbian means attracted to people of the same sex as you, and the SC agrees that that means biological sex.

So the trans movement - which is always on about denial of their existence and 'literal genocide' - rejects the category 'lesbian' insofar as it means 'women who are same-sex attracted'.

This manifests itself not just in theory but in practice as well, with men invading lesbian spaces, both online and IRL, and lesbians being forcibly ejected from Pride etc.

SquirrelosaurusSoShiny is right to pick up on the damage to the LGB community - all the excesses and transgressions [see what I did there?]
of the trans community are visited on us as part of the 'LGBTQ++++ community'.
Hence the LGB✂T campaign.

I mentioned this earlier on my post, reddit is disproportionate in its influence because it involves long form, wide ranging text based discussion

Only for those who bother to read it.

Apart from on FWR (which I always found really odd) I never see reddit referred to. So it is a platform that for some reason a tiny % choose.

The only reason I mention Xtwit is because even though it has even fewer users, it is endlessly quoted by the mainstream media. So in terms of influence it probably exceeds even the front runners such as facebook, in terms of numbers.

So even if some use it because it allows more words, in terms of influence (or sad tras) if 99% of users never bother with it, its not really relevant.

Accept to those who want to have discussion where you can use more words.

That was really the only point I want to make.

ie is it seen as more user friendly rather than a user will get to interact with a wide range of opinions.

Well yes, in your list there are personal chat applications like WhatsApp as well as public discussion platforms like Reddit and Twitter/X. Reddit is influential, particularly among certain types of men (left leaning Gen Z and millennials)

I read Reddit because I like to read opinions from that group to keep an eye on what they think/say, and a few personal interest subreddits. I don’t like the format myself or consider it particularly user friendly.

Twitter/X and to a lesser extent Bluesky are the platforms favoured for short, punchy political statements and one line takes.

Facebook and Instagram are much more popular but they’re more about curating a personal image to project outwards. Different tools for different groups, and different purposes.

@Abhannmoryou might be interested in reading about Jan’s daughter, if you haven’t already. Jan was awful to her and he sounds like the classic narcissistic, misogynist man who transitions in middle age.