I agree that you have to be essentially anonymous to take part in counterculture these days. But the author claims that Discord and Reddit are examples of counterculture. I wholeheartedly disagree, these platforms are overly sanitized, moderated by the company, not the community. On Discord, people get banned for empty mass reports, and they can delete servers as they please. Reddit is valuable for driving communities to self-hosted, private forums, where I believe that counterculture has and will be born from.
Further, reddit is built from the ground up to force consensus. Counterculture cannot exist on the site by definition, as anything prevalent on the site is there by consensus.
>Counterculture cannot exist on the site by definition, as anything prevalent on the site is there by consensus.
That makes no sense - consensus must exist within a counterculture for it to be definable, therefore counterculture and consensus can coexist.
Being "prevalent" has no bearing whatsoever on being a counterculture. It's entirely possible for a counterculture to have a subreddit and not be prevalent. The vast majority of content on Reddit never even touches the frontpage.
You could say that a counterculture can't exist on Reddit that runs counter to the platform's terms of service, and that might be true, but it's also conditional.
I'd argue that the way reddit is currently designed is to hold on to it's user base without them having consensus. The way that subreddits allow separation of their user base (but they're all still users and seeing ads, buying gold, etc) allows communities to exist in a way other social media sites don't really allow (except maybe facebook groups).
Maybe Reddit as a whole, but what are your thoughts on WallStreetBets? It seems that WSB has all of the elements of a counterculture, although maybe diluted after the wide spread GME interest.
I’m really not sure “diamond hands” and “retard” count so much as another language. I think the big gap between there and other places on the same subject is on “gambling logic”, not right or wrong, I’ve seen more people there admit that than “Wallstreet Types” who would be trillionaires if they actually knew how to win.
WSB seems like the definition of a smart hedge fund that managed to manipulate the market transparently. Everything there reeks of fake, manufactured and engineered "counter" culture
No. Most "radical" subs will be suppressed or otherwise banned by selectively enforcing the rules. For every rule broken in r/thedonald or r/chapotraphouse you could find dozens of similar examples in r/news and r/politics.
Wait for them to grow up to even a modest number of subscribers. First they will be brigaded (with no action from the admins), then they will be quarantined and lastly they will be outright banned.
I'll add that Discord does not support right-to-read. They will occasionally remove a server and ban everyone who had access to that server, regardless of whether or not they had posted or participated in that server or contacted any members of that server. They view the act of reading the server posts as a bannable offense.
There are multiple occurances of that. They do that when they fail to identify the actual offender or they ban for a non-existent reason ("just to ban it"). If they find the actual offender, things differ and actual offender gets banned.
