Reddit in collapse as "safe spaces" backfires

Basement neckbeard hugbox Reddit continues circling the drain. After the new administration began removing subreddits critical of CEO Ellen Pao and her failed discrimination lawsuits slash Ponzi scheme, the site followed that up with the removal of another Pao-critical subreddit, but the real excitement was yet to come.

As if wishing to both flex its muscles and force its userbase into paranoid compliance by avoiding anything that might be considered "harassment," a term from Reddit's new rules which has never been defined and can be enforced at admin convenience by expanding its definition to include whatever behavior is at hand, Reddit then banned anti-obesity group /r/FatPeopleHate and, with constant prompting from resident SJWs, followed up by banning the subs which appeared in response to the original banning.

At this point, Reddit has banned over a dozen subs and yet allows vote-brigade and harassment groups like /r/ShitRedditSays, /r/BestOf and /r/SubredditDrama to continue operating as they were before. In addition, unnecessary extremity like shadow-banned all the mods of /r/fatpeoplehate and removing subs that defended GamerGate suggests how corrupt this entire process is. Under the guise of acting "to keep everyone safe," as if anyone believes that childish promise, Reddit is systematically removing anything which acts as opposition to SJW ideology.

Yishan Wong told the site's moderators legal content should not be removed, even if "we find it odious or if we personally condemn it".

"We stand for free speech... we are not going to ban distasteful subreddits." - Reddit, AD 2012

In the meantime, SJWs have caught wind of the new rules and are downvoting with impunity while simultaneously impersonating users of non-SJW subs to try to get those subs banned. This classic astroturf/agitprop attack involves a user pretending to be a regular, going into one of these subs and posting controversial material, then using other SJWs to report it to the authorities as "proof" the sub is bad and should be shut down. In addition, SJWs have been mass-downvoting and abusing the report feature to try to shut down content they disagree with.

This fits the Reddit agenda, which is "gentrification" of the site into a safe space where Reddit can accumulate a captive audience of SJWs who it can count upon to purchase novelty products en masse. As a revealing interview with a former advertising agency employee shows, SJWs are a desired demographic for many advertisers, but they will not congregate unless they are promised a "safe space," which means the removal of anything except their extremely uptight politically-correct SJW outlook.

SJWs spend an absurd amount of money on cheap, mass-produced lifestyle products. They buy these things so they can post photos of themselves on Tumblr with the product, and a referral link to where they bought the item. These people are prolific consumers on par with the “bourgeois” they claim to resent.

[...]The SJW phenomenon causes a type of gentrification of high-traffic parts of the internet. When they start out, most sites are occupied by people who have goals other than pure consumption itself. They tend to buy less stuff and not buy compulsively. This group is worthless as a target demographic for advertising. They make very little money, buy few products, and hate advertising, so the more you advertise, the less likely they are to buy. Business likes a simple formula of audience x advertising = profits. You can only get that with people who buy compulsively, and since SJWs compulsively buy whatever is trendy at the time, it becomes easy to follow trends, put them on products, and reap the “fat tail” of all the SJWs trying to catch up with their leaders.

Other sources have noted the SJW pathology and the desire of Reddit to benefit from it, at the expense of clearing aside the free thinkers, non-conformists and outsiders who make Reddit interesting in the first place. The cost of having a safe space is banality, apparently.

Reddit follows Digg in this quest for the perfect audience, instead of relying on the chaotic mix of different people that made it interesting. SJWs are not ground-breakers; they are followers. They show up when someone else has made something interesting and try to take it over. Pandering to them creates a space which will be inherently stale because those who can make new and compelling content will go elsewhere, perhaps to Voat, which is experiencing so much traffic at this point that the site takes several minutes to respond to requests for the homepage.

In retrospect, it becomes clear that Reddit hired Ellen Pao to do exactly what she is doing here: drive away the reality and create a hugbox for ego-damaged millennials who think that a combination of political correctness, trendy lifestyles and low-cost consumer goods with high-cost messages will assuage them emptiness in their souls. At that point, Reddit will almost certainly perform a pump and dump, much as MySpace passed itself on to a larger media entity to absorb its losses; Reddit attempted a similar move when originally purchased by Conde Nast.

All of this means the demise of Reddit not just as it previously was, but as a viable community for anyone but those who are decades late on a trend and show up after it has already been mass-produced into non-threatening conformity. SJWs are broken people with a pathology of desiring power despite having zero reason to deserve it. The result will be a very politically correct community on the surface, but with an underlying nastiness and smug pretense that will drive away anyone who is not already an SJW. Maybe that is Reddit's new business model.