https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/1ivt7sh/the_descent_of_reddit/
created by heckinbeaches on 22/02/2025 at 21:12 UTC
0 upvotes, 13 top-level comments (showing 13)
I’ve found myself increasingly disgusted by a troubling trend on Reddit. The brazen behavior of a fringe group of users who have crossed the line from radicalism into openly discussing violence as a tool to advance their political agendas. These redditors, often insulated in niche subreddits, treat the platform as a megaphone for extremism, plotting and fantasizing about harm as if it’s a legitimate strategy. It’s not just the rhetoric that sickens me, it’s the casualness, the way they cloak their calls for bloodshed in ideological jargon, as if that somehow sanitizes it. This isn’t discourse; it’s a perversion of what Reddit was meant to be, and it leaves a sour taste in my mouth every time I stumble across it.
Reddit was built as a place to share ideas, not to incubate violence. In its early days, it thrived as a chaotic but beautiful mosaic of perspectives, where hobbyists, thinkers, and even the occasional oddball could swap stories, debate, and learn. The beauty was in the exchange, not the enforcement of one-sided crusades. But now, these radical fringes twist that purpose, weaponizing the platform’s openness to amplify their venom. Free speech doesn’t mean a free pass to threaten or incite, it’s supposed to elevate us, not drag us into the gutter. When I see posts mulling over “who deserves to be taken out” or “how to send a message,” I’m reminded that this isn’t the Reddit I signed up for, it’s a betrayal of the original promise.
I’ve been on Reddit since 2011, back when the vibe was scrappier, less polished, but somehow more human. Over the years, I’ve seen communities wrestle with tough topics: politics, culture, morality, religion (or the lack thereof), without devolving into bloodlust. We argued, we memed, we disagreed fiercely, but there was an unspoken line most didn’t cross. Today, though, that line’s been trampled by a vocal minority who think violence is a shortcut to winning. It doesn’t have to be this way. I’ve had countless debates with strangers online that stayed sharp but civil, proof we can clash over ideas without clawing at each other’s throats. Reddit can still host passionate, even heated, discussions; it just needs to ditch the fantasy that brutality is a substitute for reasoning.
Radical ideology on platforms like Reddit has a curious way of backfiring, look at the latest Presidential Election, the proof is in the pudding. Shoving those teetering on the fence straight into the arms of the opposing view. When fringe groups spew unhinged rhetoric, like glorifying violence or demonizing entire swaths of people as irredeemable, they don’t just alienate their targets; they spook the moderates who might’ve leaned their way. The overreach turns curiosity into repulsion, hardening skepticism into outright opposition, as rational folks flee the chaos for something that feels less like a cult and more like common sense. It’s not persuasion; it’s a self-inflicted wound that hands the other side a win.
Reporting these radical users who flirt with violence can breathe new life into Reddit, restoring it as a space for genuine dialogue rather than a breeding ground for extremism. By flagging those who cross the line, whether it’s veiled threats or outright calls to harm, it’s ultimately the users who signal to the moderators and admins that the community won’t tolerate this nonsense, pressuring them to act. It’s not just about pruning bad actors, it’s about reclaiming the platform’s integrity, making it safer and more inviting for the silent majority who want ideas, not intimidation. But this hinges on Reddit admins stepping it up, no more lax enforcement or vague “context matters” excuses. They need to update their policies, sharpen the rules against incitement, and wield the ban-hammer with consistency. What good are the rules if you don’t enforce them? You just can’t continue to ban the side you disagree with, it’s what allows this poison to mutate. We need a clear, firm stance that would deter the worst offenders and prove Reddit is serious about being a marketplace of thought, not a megaphone for mayhem.
The platform’s salvation lies in rediscovering bipartisanship… or at least a willingness to see nuance. Too many of these radical voices paint their opponents as cartoonish villains, slapping “Nazi” or “Commie” on anyone who disagrees, as if that justifies their violent wishes. Not every enemy is a monster; most are just people with different lenses, shaped by their own lives. Reddit has to shed this tribalism and foster spaces where left, right, and everything in between can slug it out with words, not threats. I’m tired of the echo chambers and the extremists they breed. Give me a messy, loud, nonviolent Reddit over this dystopian shadow any day of the week.
tl/dr : OG Redditor wants a peaceful Reddit.
Comment by Express_Froyo6281 at 23/02/2025 at 05:06 UTC
5 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Once Reddit became a phone poster haven it was over
Comment by eatingpotatochips at 22/02/2025 at 22:33 UTC
25 upvotes, 1 direct replies
slapping “Nazi” or “Commie”
This is a silly "both sides" argument. Show me the last time someone made a communist salute on national television. Your entire post sounds like trying to downplay the obvious fact that political violence is much more common from right-wing parties than left-wing parties.
Comment by Inquisitor--Nox at 23/02/2025 at 02:14 UTC
10 upvotes, 1 direct replies
OP just trying to counter movement toward the only recourse many people have left. Preaching peace is how they plan to finalize the peaceful coup. I get it, and it doesn't fool most if us.
Maga started this. And frankly if they decide to support democracy again, there won't even be a problem. So maybe try that.
Comment by ghostpanther218 at 22/02/2025 at 21:20 UTC*
8 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Oh hell yeah, I have a ton of ironic joke subreddits, that become politicized since the economic issues and Trump became presisdent all the way back in 2016, and now they say the most politicized, heinious, ridicolous shit. I get being against bigotry and exploitation, but some of them are so far right or far left that they legitimately see everyone else as Hitler reborn, and think that their the only righteous person on reddit left, and I legitimately cant tell if their actually being ironic anymore. Its sad. Worse still is that there are many people online actually that feel this way, and gravitate towards these subreddits, making themselves even more radicalized since those places are echo chambers. And then there are the people who try to secretly insert themselves into reddit groups to either spread their propaganda or stir up trouble, like the debacle on r/optimistunite with the right wingers. Real dissapointing, because you can almost believe their reasonable, rational people who just want to discuss things before they shove a shit down of political views down your throat. Its all just sad. I barely use reddit now outside of niche hobbies.
Comment by MarquisDeCarabasCoat at 25/02/2025 at 19:33 UTC
2 upvotes, 1 direct replies
reddit is a shell of its former self. nothing new, it’s been this way since at least 2016 when politics became the primary focus of many ppl online. the Pao drama doesn’t even feel real at this point…oh how good we had it.
Comment by TheShark12 at 22/02/2025 at 21:53 UTC
4 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I just want to see people with opposing views actually have a debate and find common ground instead of threatening to kill each other over politicians who don’t even know they exist. Even local city/state subs have been turned into places where you can’t even ask for recommendations because they have become political circlejerks of people calling for revolution over the smallest things or acting hysteric. I just want to ask where to get X kind of food or where to hike without someone political soapboxing and throwing out topical statements like “well sorry sweaty everything is political” that add nothing to the discussion.
Comment by kawarazu at 22/02/2025 at 21:34 UTC
2 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Did the 2016 election not offend your tastes then? Because this has been an ongoing thing for years at this point, but in 2025 you're finding this to be all distasteful? Hate and vitriol has never been banished from this site. I find it in bad faith you'd believe otherwise.
Comment by rainbowcarpincho at 22/02/2025 at 22:08 UTC
2 upvotes, 1 direct replies
You think Donald J Trump won the election on the backs of offended pacifists?
Anyway, this isn't much a theory of reddit question. The ground has clearly massively shifted as the United States has turned hard into autocracy and maybe a little light genocide (we'll see), and reactions to that reflect what's going on in the broader culture.
Comment by Measure76 at 23/02/2025 at 15:25 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
It's human nature, as I see it, to wish death upon your opponents. For the purposes of this post lets call that a "Deathwish".
This is why we have laws and society, to help people mentally offload their frustration onto the authorities, as you are in these comments, (I'm gonna tell the FBI!) so that worse outcomes are avoided.
I see you trying to say there's a recent increase, and that I seriously doubt. I've seen regular Deathwish posts from my entire 15+ years at reddit. It's very easy to post a deathwish out of frustration and few people consider actually following through. (I'm sure people can post examples of deathwish fulfillment, but it is very rare compared to the number of deathwish comments)
As for the people accusing you of both sidesism - The major orgs on both sides do not endorse deathwish commenting, it's never been part of any major political platform I know of. Both sides, officially, are pretty reasonable.
There are deathwish commenters spread evenly across the political spectrum however. It's just too easy to post a deathwish.
Comment by DharmaPolice at 23/02/2025 at 23:47 UTC
1 upvotes, 1 direct replies
There are people (who rightly or wrongly) believe the United States is descending into some kind of fascist dictatorship. I'm highly skeptical of this but If it were the case, wouldn't violence be an appropriate response? You know what happened to the German SPD in 1933, right?
It's kind of like anti-abortionists. If you believe abortion is literally murder then doctors are killing children on a mass scale. If you believed children were being murdered down the street from you and the authorities weren't doing anything, wouldn't you try to stop it? I think anti-abortionists are lunatics but based on their beliefs their more extreme tactics seem like a natural consequence of their beliefs.
I'm reminded of that Trotsky quote - people who want peace at any price have chosen the wrong time to be born.
Comment by [deleted] at 26/02/2025 at 05:18 UTC
1 upvotes, 1 direct replies
[removed]
Comment by doesnt_use_reddit at 22/02/2025 at 21:39 UTC
0 upvotes, 0 direct replies
💯%. I've noticed the same penchant for casual wishes if extreme violence. It's appalling. I'm glad I'm not the only one.
Comment by ucantharmagoodwoman at 23/02/2025 at 05:36 UTC
-3 upvotes, 0 direct replies
It should be noted that I've upvoted every single person who's disagreed with me here, as far as I know.
That said.
In 7th grade, I took an SAT test without preparing for it at all, it was spur-of-the-moment, I knew about it about an hour ahead of time and didn't do any research or anything. I scored higher on it than the average person using it to apply for college in my area.
An IQ test has shown me to be in the 99.9th percentile for IQ. This is the highest result the test I was given reaches; anything further and they'd consider it to be within the margin of error for that test.
My mother's boyfriend of 8 years is an aerospace engineer who graduated Virginia Tech. At the age of 15, I understand physics better than him, and I owe very little of it to him, as he would rarely give me a decent explanation of anything, just tell me that my ideas were wrong and become aggravated with me for not quite understanding thermodynamics. He's not particularly successful as an engineer, but I've met lots of other engineers who aren't as good as me at physics, so I'm guessing that's not just a result of him being bad at it.
I'm also pretty good at engineering. I don't have a degree, and other than physics I don't have a better understanding of any aspect of engineering than any actual engineer, but I have lots of ingenuity for inventing new things. For example, I independently invented regenerative brakes before finding out what they were, and I was only seven or eight years old when I started inventing wireless electricity solutions (my first idea being to use a powerful infrared laser to transmit energy; admittedly not the best plan).
I have independently thought of basically every branch of philosophy I've come across. Every question of existentialism which I've seen discussed in SMBC or xkcd or Reddit or anywhere else, the thoughts haven't been new to me. Philosophy has pretty much gotten trivial for me; I've considered taking a philosophy course just to see how easy it is.
Psychology, I actually understand better than people with degrees. Unlike engineering, there's no aspect of psychology which I don't have a very good understanding of. I can debunk many of even Sigmund Freud's theories.
I'm a good enough writer that I'm writing a book and so far everybody who's read any of it has said it was really good and plausible to expect to have published. And that's not just, like, me and family members, that counts strangers on the Internet. I've heard zero negative appraisal of it so far; people have critiqued it, but not insulted it.
I don't know if that will suffice as evidence that I'm intelligent. I'm done with it, though, because I'd rather defend my maturity, since it's what you've spent the most time attacking. The following are some examples of my morals and ethical code.
I believe firmly that everybody deserves a future. If we were to capture Hitler at the end of WWII, I would be against executing him. In fact, if we had any way of rehabilitating him and knowing that he wasn't just faking it, I'd even support the concept of letting him go free. This is essentially because I think that whoever you are in the present is a separate entity from who you were in the past and who you are in the future, and while your present self should take responsibility for your past self's actions, it shouldn't be punished for them simply for the sake of punishment, especially if the present self regrets the actions of the past self and feels genuine guilt about them.
I don't believe in judgement of people based on their personal choices as long as those personal choices aren't harming others. I don't have any issue with any type of sexuality whatsoever (short of physically acting out necrophilia, pedophilia, or other acts which have a harmful affect on others - but I don't care what a person's fantasies consist of, as long as they recognize the difference between reality and fiction and can separate them). I don't have any issue with anybody over what type of music they listen to, or clothes they wear, etc. I know that's not really an impressive moral, but it's unfortunately rare; a great many people, especially those my age, are judgmental about these things.
I love everyone, even people I hate. I wish my worst enemies good fortune and happiness. Rick Perry is a vile, piece of shit human being, deserving of zero respect, but I wish for him to change for the better and live the best life possible. I wish this for *everyone*.
I'm pretty much a pacifist. I've taken a broken nose without fighting back or seeking retribution, because the guy stopped punching after that. The only time I'll fight back is if 1) the person attacking me shows no signs of stopping and 2) if I don't attack, I'll come out worse than the other person will if I do. In other words, if fighting someone is going to end up being more harmful to them than just letting them go will be to me, I don't fight back. I've therefore never had a reason to fight back against anyone in anything serious, because my ability to take pain has so far made it so that I'm never in a situation where I'll be worse off after a fight. If I'm not going to get any hospitalizing injuries, I really don't care.
The only exception is if someone is going after my life. Even then, I'll do the minimum amount of harm to them that I possibly can in protecting myself. If someone points a gun at me and I can get out of it without harming them, I'd prefer to do that over killing them.
I consider myself a feminist. I don't believe in enforced or uniform gender roles; they may happen naturally, but they should never be coerced into happening unnaturally. As in, the societal pressure for gender roles should really go, even if it'll turn out that the majority of relationships continue operating the same way of their own accord. I treat women with the same outlook I treat men, and never participate in the old Reddit "women are crazy" circlejerk, because there are multiple women out there and each have different personalities just like there are multiple men out there and each with different personalities. I don't think you do much of anything except scare off the awesome women out there by going on and on about the ones who aren't awesome.
That doesn't mean I look for places to victimize women, I just don't believe it's fair to make generalizations such as the one about women acting like everything's OK when it's really not (and that's a particularly harsh example, because *all humans* do that).
I'm kind of tired of citing these examples and I'm guessing you're getting tired of reading them, if you've even made it this far. In closing, the people who know me in real life all respect me, as do a great many people in the Reddit brony community, where I spend most of my time and where I'm pretty known for being helpful around the community. A lot of people in my segment of the community are depressed or going through hard times, and I spend a lot of time giving advice and support to people there. Yesterday someone quoted a case of me doing this in a post asking everyone what their favorite motivational/inspirational quote was, and that comment was second to the top, so I guess other people agreed (though, granted, it was a pretty low-traffic post, only about a dozen competing comments).
And, uh, I'm a pretty good moderator.
All that, and I think your behavior in this thread was totally assholish. So what do you think, now that you at least slightly know me?