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Comment by Dalewyn | Hacker News Reader

It feels like everyone forgot Reddit's roots as far as its politics are concerned. Namely, the place was Libertarian Central on the internet until 2015 when it got astroturfed basically overnight to swing the other way. I was there to witness it and the whiplash was something fierce.

Reddit has been basically unusable for anything concerning politics since, and nowadays with politics leaking out into every damn sub possible it definitely has a problem.

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It’s not a Reddit thing. I also remember the days when everyone online was a libertarian. But Conservatives then turned to nationalist ideologies that don’t emphasize the free market, that are anti-immigration, and that take a dim view of personal sexual freedom. There are fewer people expressing libertarian points of view all over the shop. There’s a good article about it here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/06/05/the-individual...

I used to be a libertarian too, when I was 17 years old and I thought I was the smartest person in the room.

Then I realized that my kindergarten teacher was onto something when she told us we should be nice and share our toys, and I grew up.

Libertarianism was never my thing, but I get the impression that it's not as popular with people in their teens and twenties now as it was in the 2000s.

Astroturfed by whom?

It's a shame it's become hard to make free speech arguments on reddit. RIP Aaron Swartz.

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