After the last election, one smaller local subreddit that has had the same overall culture for many, many years, seemingly overnight, at the snap of some fingers, lurched completely to the extreme opposite direction. If you dare to share any of the same ideas that were once widely accepted there for many years on end, now you instead get absolutely pummeled, ridiculed, downvoted out of existence.

It's just so blatantly, demonstrably, obvious the level of manipulation which was targeted at the sub. Somebody, somewhere, added it to a list of subreddits to be manipulated. But you can't even discuss it there, because how are you going to use a compromised communication channel to communicate about how it's compromised?

The majority of the population seemingly can't even notice that sort of communication manipulation, it's gotten so sophisticated. Bot accounts used to be much easier to detect, now they all have very cleverly built-up account history and posts that are near indistinguishable from humans. And of course not all manipulation is bots/AI, there's coordinated shill/sockpuppet/astroturf campaigns with real people being tasked with doing the manipulation.

The smart people have already left and gone on to the next place, which will never be allowed to grow large enough or significant enough without the propaganda fire hose eventually being turned on it too. The only way to fix things is a radically different framework for communication.