alt Hacker NewsI agree. Interesting you’re being downvoted. I’ve been using Reddit for 16+ years and have watched it morph from a libertarian, centrist community dominated by developers and geeks, into a very left wing, violent, vehicle to export American political activism to the world. Redditors used to abhor censorship. People would practise debating all kinds of taboo topics because this is how we become wiser. Now just commenting on the wrong community will see you automatically banned from 30 of the largest subreddits.
They study this. [Gen Z is 10x more accepting of violence to suppress speech they object to compared to Boomers.](https://expression.fire.org/p/gen-z-is-10-times-more-accepti...) It seems history really does repeat. People are going to need to experience some authoritarianism to remember why we care so much about free speech.
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> They study this. [Gen Z is 10x more accepting of violence to suppress speech they object to compared to Boomers.](https://expression.fire.org/p/gen-z-is-10-times-more-accepti...)
Seems like this is a direct result of being more exposed to the internet. I'm not sure it's their fault when they are raised with ipads in their lap and multi-billion dollar corporations are shoving propaganda (both sides) down everyone's throat 24/7. I wonder if boomers and gen x would feel the same if they grew up the same way.
> It seems history really does repeat. People are going to need to experience some authoritarianism to remember why we care so much about free speech.
Not sure making people experience authoritarianism is the best way to make people remember why free speech is important. That seems more extreme than anything I've read on Reddit lately. Surely there are better solutions.
You can be libertarian or centrist, you can not be both. Also developers and geeks are left wing fairly commonly. You write as if all geeks and developers were right or something. They are not.
> Gen Z is 10x more accepting of violence to suppress speech they object to compared to Boomers.
That is direct result of practicing taboo topics like violence and normalizing them. A lot of effort was put into making them more aggressive, so success. Mostly on the right, contrary to what you are trying to imply. The violence aggression and censorship are much more common there.
> ... into a very left wing, violent, vehicle to export American political activism to the world
Reddit anecdotes and surveys don't currently reflect reality.
The far-right is responsible for *actual* violence by a large margin in recent history. https://ccjls.scholasticahq.com/article/26973-far-left-versu...
Over 80% of real world politically motivated violence between 1990–2020 is from far-right actors. Left-wing violence has increased over the past 5 years, but is still completely dwarfed by right-wing violence.
I think questions like this are so leading as to be useless, because they are presented in a way that don't trigger people to inspect their actual beliefs but rather their advertised beliefs. I could imagine a dozen ways to phrase to really bump that boomer contingent:
- [circa 2020] Do you think that the Black Lives Matter protests should be stopped by force?
- Do you think that a police officer should be able to physically prevent burning of the American flag?
etc
> libertarian, centrist community dominated by developers and geeks, into a very left wing, violent, vehicle
Now just figure out which of you changed over 16 years.
A true test of one's desire for truly free and open society and speech is whether or not one's willing to stand up and fight for that "other" person's right to say something they hate.
I can't watch soccer highlights from X because all the mods on reddit are sure Elon's evil.