u/GB819

I basically divide society into three tiers.

The low end: These people don't possess serious writing skills. They have little influence because they cannot write.

The medium end: These people possess a baseline competence, thus they are able to conform to society without seeing the downsides of conforming. They make good sycophants.

The high end: These people posses a degree of cognitive mastery that allows them to analyze society in a way that they can zero in its downsides and opt out of performative social status. These are the Edward Snowdens, Karl Marxs and Ted Kaczynskis of society.

The medium end is outflanking the high end socially. Public corporations totally run on the medium end. If this continues the result will be a brain drain to the alternative media underground - which I think is already happening. Your dissident writer is ahead of your average corporate middle manager in writing skills.

First of all Reddit was originally designed for the old web - the text heavy people who were anti-establishment and did not conform to the mob. That's changing.

But let's get into the mob.

There is a shared hostility towards, and often feigned confusion between, people who react to the mob tactics of hypergamous women with two very different strategies and approaches. I call it mob tactics because openly favoring the rich and successful is enforcing the power structures and conformity of society - and cannot be respected as the reflections of actual intellectual agency.

Both of these groups share this in common:

1. While I disagree with incels a lot, I do agree with them that mob rule isn't worthy of respect. In other words just because these women are attracted to and favor rich men doesn't mean I need to show them respect for that.
2. While I disagree with incels a lot, we both share the position that these women are not exempt from class analysis just because the liberals of the professional managerial class view women as a protected group and mutate class analysis as "punching down" on women.

But here is where the two groups diverge quite a bit.

Avoidants advocate what Isiah Thomas did to Michael Jordan in the all star game. A "freeze out." Isiah Thomas gathered a bunch of players and they all refused to pass Michael Jordan the ball. This is the dream of the avoidant - that men will just boycott hypergamous women. Based on how Meta went and how TikTok is going along with prevailing winds and norms, avoidants are not winning. Most men still suck up to these women.

Incels are different. They argue that men should "level up" which means conform to the corporate conveyor belt and gain the social status it takes to pull these women. They fail individually or notice that many men fail and then they attack the women. Attacks may differ. Some incels attack the society that engineers hypergamy but others just act angrily to their personal rejection.

I'm on the avoidant side, and no, we're not winning yet. So I see myself as somewhat of a pioneer of course I am not the only one. There is a MGTOW movement - but I held this position before the term was coined.

A public corporation is mandated to maximize the profit of its shareholders.

A private company can be happy with a healthy margin, breaking even, or even a revenue loss if cash reserves absorb the loss and there's some other non-monetary tradeoff. For instance Musk can lose money on X, because he trades money for cultural and media influence.

Regarding Karma, my position is that you do not need to aim for maximum karma on every post. Instead, you should occasionally post a contrarian and polarizing post that results in a net loss, but is absorbed by your buffer, for three reasons:

1. debate stress tests a thesis, leaning to intellectual growth
2. the raw thrill of knowing you didn't follow the herd and punched up instead of getting punched down on
3. traffic generation

The mistake I am not repeating with my web use that I made in the 2010s with Facebook is thinking that just because a platform is cosmetically decentralized that it is actually decentralized.

On its surface, Facebook LOOKS like it would support the wild west internet as a concurrent alternative to the high school validation loop based which revolves around the offline graph, so long as both ecosystems abide by real name policy.

On appearance, you have your own wall and you can add or delete whoever you want, so you should be able to purpose it either to classmate driven validation or old web style discussion, based on your preferences? Right?

In reality it runs from the center, because the feed faces a problem of scale, but Meta hides behinds that scale issue to favor certain classes of posters while suppressing others.

If you do not play into the system with performative likes and engagement centered around the popular female validation culture, you get nowhere. You cannot create a parallel lane where you the ecosystem runs on text heavy and anti-establishment techniques used by the old web, and where photos are just satire and not for validation. You cannot recruit people off forums and blogs, collect them on Facebook, and then run a parallel ecosystem that is friendly to the old web, because the central feed shadow bans and if somehow you get around the shadow ban by pulling people directly to your wall/timeline, if your posts are actually critical of the status quo you will get hard banned if the traffic hits a certain threshold.

The reason Facebook is losing relevance is that people just got sick of the artificial boosting of certain people and the suppressing of others, based on the style of how you post and how popular you are with the offline performative social graph. The point of the web was always to meet new people and Zuckerberg inverted that with his focus on offline networking over online matching/connecting.

Meta is panicking over TIkTok. The idea of being wedded to your offline graph and throttling of anything that is controversial is exactly what TikTok rejects (controversy can go far on TikTok if it's also entertaining) but Zuckerberg does not get it, he think it is just the video format that is causing Tiktok's success and Reels can work, sanitized and watered down as it is. He misses that the appeal of TikTok is not just the video format but the fact that it rejects this sanitized, watered down approach based on the offline friend graph. Actually, he does get it, he just ideologically opposes the old web and the wild west internet and wants to keep the web running the way it did in the 2010s.

PS.

I note the rule for professional discussion, if that means that a post has to be strictly about sales and marketing, then yes, go ahead and delete me. However, I looked at the existing posts and interpret the rule based on what has survived moderation to believe that rule is more of a quality standard that you must hit than a mandate to narrowly focus on sales and marketing. To be honest, if the mandate is in fact to focus on sales and marketing, that is some pretty serious subdomain squatting, because you and I both know a lot of people want the discussion of social media to be broader than just sales and marketing.

People come to this sub and related sister subs not to engage with unpopular/controversial opinions but to play internet janitor for the social insiders with mainstream opinions.

The actual social insiders do not do this, but the wannabees act as unpaid labor for that class with frivolous downvoting and childish reactions to actual unpopular and controversial opinions.

They react with hostility to anyone who argues that anti-establishment views should be actually backed up by real life actions and that people should actually defect from prevailing norms about the corporate ladder and dating (for example). This sub doesn't have a mod problem but its problem is vigilante (wanna be) mods who lower the quality of the sub by seeking places where they can downvote and snipe at unpopular and controversial opinion instead of actually contributing in good faith.

When you critique hypergamy, the lower end of the internet that has grown in the modern era views such critique as whining about personal rejection instead of an analysis about intellectual agency and class. From their perspective, the motive is "boo hoo, I wasn't selected" and not the motives I described in the previous sentence.

What people either are too shallow to understand or too offended is this:

I am not a publicly traded corporation on the dating market. I have absolutely no mandate to maximize my dating options like a publicly traded traded corporation maximizes profits. Like a proprietorship or private company, I have every right to be content with only serving a niche that pulls from a smaller dating market (the % of women who are not hypergamous and their geographic location in non-elite zip codes) - if I even want to date at all.

My motive is to portray hypergamous women as marionettes who blow with the wind. It's both a class analysis and attack on the intellectual agency of these individuals.

Low tier posters take the rallying cry of "incel" and turn it into an insult that they throw at anybody who makes this critique.

They focus on "rights." Women have the "right" to do it. You have the right to fail an IQ test too, by viewing social class as a proxy for human worth and high value cognitive traits.

The AI I was talking to said it best. People on communities like unpopularopinion, trueunpopularopinion and controversialopinions think an unpopular opinion is preferring cold pizza to hot pizza.

The good news is that the anti-establishment sees through this Reddit and TikTok garbage. The old web - rooted in vbulletins and wordpress blogs - and growing on Substack, totally gets it when the lower tier "new web" doesn't.

Do not suggest:

unpopularopinion

trueunpopularopinion

controversialopinions

changemyview

freespeech

intellectualdarkweb

anything that is just political

I'll avoid sniping any one of these, but sub must be somewhat relevant, not be overmodded and not be sewer in the comment section with frivolous downvoting and bad faith debate.

Not federation, but feeds - and the goal should be to link people without centralized corporate middlemen.

The small business sub doesn't work because it's not an exact match and because it has rules forcing it to operate in a q/a format. Also "unsolicited advice" should not be banned that is kind of the point.

I feel the downvote button is increasingly abused on reddit relative to its actual purpose.

Here is my analogy:

When two battle rappers go at it, the amount of respect they have for each other is based on their rhyme density, flow and technique.

In the same way, someone who writes a long form post with linear logic and defends their viewpoints from multiple approaches should be upvoted for the writing skill alone.

Instead people ask "Do I feel comfortable with this (my feelings)?" "No I don't." "So I downvote."

So unlike the battle rapper who gains respect for a stronger opponent, I feel reddit lately has been abusing the down vote to down vote people who increase the density of the defense of their arguments. Basically the stronger you come off and the thicker you lace your arguments - the more salty people down vote. If you post a low effort argument, they are less motivated.

With the IPO move, petty rules per subreddit that lock you out of subdomains that appeared logical destinations at first and the centralized clamp down on nonconformist subs administratively already motivating me - realizing this additional factor may be the final straw that finally causes me to view Reddit as hostile.

If people are not going to use the button properly, they should just remove voting completely and view it as a relic of the past that was necessary to determine which threads filled the feed in the past but people want a more personal and curated experience now.

You might say this isn't unpopular. My rebuttal to that is that if my opinion was so popular then the behavior wouldn't be so rampant.

I never stopped being a class reductionist. It is right in my flair. However, lately I have been warming to the position that there are actually three classes, not two. I still reduce mostly everything to class.

Marx covered the working class and the ownership class. However, I am quickly warming to the idea that there is a third class that represents the middle managers and hr departments associated with finalized corporations that either list on the stock market or take venture capital.

I once thought of the PMC as the old school labor aristocracy. A wealthy part of the working class, but still part of the working class. I thought they may be a bit odd with their heavy focus on social issues over economics, but still working class. That view is deteriorating fast. I am really starting to think there is a third class, the PMC, and it is actively hostile to both the working class and the ownership class.

When a company goes public, the PMC subverts the line authority of the founder and inserts itself. That is how it get in power. However, I am going to switch gears because this is not an essay about tactics to avoid running into the PMC by choosing the right employers. That is for another day.

My accusation is that the liberal left is the political arm of the PMC. We at stupidpol are part of the class based left, not the liberal left. The liberal left (not us) controls the socialist and communist subreddits and is pretty dominant on reddit even in mainstream subs and subs that claim to be for unpopular and controversial opinions.

Which I should warn you – other subs have tried to act as a sovereign island on a website that leans to the PMC (including the fake socialist and communist subs) and eventually excuses were made to quarantine them and then ban them. You better play by the letter of the law because they are looking for any reason to get rid of you/us. Especially if there is a mainstream media hit piece.

Anyways, what I am figuring out is that the PMC left is so insufferable that I would rather fraternize with the populist right than the PMC left. At least we share a common enemy. Honestly, when I am not on reddit, a lot of my time is spent in communities that lean populist right where I am the class reductionist guy in the community but I would rather deal with them than the PMC left.

People on the populist right make mistakes.

-pro white idpol

-initial Trump backing (and then they find out he’s a war monger and apologize)

-antisemitism instead of a hard class analysis that does not make excuses for Jews but does not specifically target them ethnically.

-petty infighting.

That being said – I view people on the populist right as people who are fundamentally in error but not people who can never be redeemed. The liberal left, on the other hand, tries to make the populist right the main enemy instead of the actual class enemies. I do not agree with that. Some working class racist is still not the main enemy, just a person with an ideological flaw.

Rant closing down. Bottom line is that liberal/pmc left is totally insufferable and worthless.

Before the rise of the internet and mass exodus of Millennials and Gen Z out of the middle and upper classes, the idea that your social position and its proximity to corporate power correlated to cognitive measurements like IQ and writing ability was a narrative that many people believed.

However, that narrative has shattered.  On the subreddit unpopular opinion, I tried to frame the idea that cognitive capability and corporate integration up the ladder are not causally related as an unpopular opinion and I got strong push back that my opinion was not actually unpopular and then thread was deleted for that exact reason. Granted this sub is suspect and mod heavy, but it was not just the mods, it was the users too.

Furthermore, with the modern internet, the writing (and speaking) skills of an unemployed, underemployed and/or economically marginal individual can be directly compared to those of the professional managerial class side by side in two different web browser tabs.  In my opinion, the PMC does not win.

Given that this narrative has crumbled with Millennials and Gen Z, women can no longer argue that they support economically integrated and "successful" men because they believe that corporate integration reflects cognitive merit.  This exposes hypergamous women as valuing social status, group think and corporate rank / consumerist profile as more important than actual cognitive traits.

The research about dating apps is clear - women aim for the top 20% while men cast a wide net and see who actually responds.  I think Meta (Facebook/Instagram) plays a role in this.  They have turned the internet into a giant validation loop where women get likes and engagement for low quality photos while long form text and speech is throttled.  This is something that people in forum culture warned would happen before it actually did. The modern internet creates the superficial confidence that allows hypergamous women to inflate their own ranks.

In my opinion, women do not have an excuse for this hypergamy because wealth has been thoroughly separated from underlying cognitive traits that “earn” it.  Just read the quarantined subreddit "Female Dating Strategy" if you want to see it right on display. You can also accuse women of being hive minded and bandwagoners who select their dates by committee instead of discernment on TikTok and watch the comment section when women justify it instead of deny it and attack the messenger instead of the argument.

Armed with this knowledge, the knowledge about divorce rates and a minimalist attitude that argues for exit of high cost zip codes and stepping off the conveyor belt of publicly traded corporations to work in private companies - I do not see what is so wrong with MGTOW (men going their own way) at all and it was probably banned due to hit pieces and Reddit's desire to make a sacrifice in response to the hit pieces and not actual rule violations.

These are my main critiques of Reddit and I think they are not the typical “moderators are mean” critique – which I agree with, but am not promoting here.

My critiques are mainly that Reddit replaced forum culture (the bulletin board) but in some ways downgraded it.

1: I am a very intentional user.  I come up with a thought, then I decide where I am going to post it.  Sometimes the choice is obvious – but sometimes subreddits that seem they should fit based on subdomain name introduce strict rules that get my hopes up and then force me to consider another option.  In old forum culture this was not really a big issue.  There were categories, but they were not so rule heavy.

2: As an intentional user, I do not want to doom scroll.  On the other hand there are simply too many posts to read chronologically.  To avoid being pulled into a bandwagon “hot” feed – I am forced to work around this by taking advantage of Reddit’s AI contracts and using LLM to query a personalized list of topics for me.  Reddit’s own AI does not do this well and its search is rather primitive.  I suspect this is intentional – Reddit wants you to doomscroll.  The workaround involves external AIs.

3: I appreciate that Reddit rejects shadow bans used in other major social sites.  However, I feel Reddit is too reactive to hit pieces from mainstream media and closes down rule abiding subreddits reactively.  In my opinion, this is why MGTOW is not here anymore and why StupidPol is under threat.  Two events made this worse a) the IPO and preparation for it b) the insurgent political campaigns of Trump and Sanders (big tech clamped down).  When Huffman became CEO people thought it was a step in the right direction – until he unveiled that he no longer supported the decentralized “free speech” approach.

4: I feel Reddit borrows from blog culture as opposed to forum culture in that the post is the main event and replies are mainly feedback for the poster.  In contrast, classic forum culture treats replies as relatively equal to the opening post.  This means posts have a short window for actual activity.  While they remain useful for passive viewing as an information library – they are confined to that, active commenting completely drops off.

5: I feel the upvote and downvote system is something I live with but something I would rather eliminate.

6: I feel Reddit trades persistent personalities for scale.  I hardly even notice usernames.

I was a big fan of the old school Samsung Chromebook.

Samsung Chromebook Exynos XE303C12-A01US

I stuck with devices like this until I got kicked out around 2022 by the simple fact that mainstream websites would no longer render.

It checked all my boxes. Cheap, no fan, internet based, screen in front of you for writing blog/reddit/substack posts instead of looking up at you like a tablet, quick boot, long battery, little operational overhead. Additionally I liked the keyboard and made fewer typing mistakes on it when compared to say the old Acer chromebook.

But there's no way to get it to use modern websites to my knowledge.

What chromebook would you peg the modern spiritual successor to this? My issue with tablets isn't power it's that they are useless for text posting; only good for photo and image social media. Tablets are not for writers.

While google has moved to a telemetric direction compared to the era of this device, chromebooks can emulate linux so that counteracts that. And no, I'm not asking for advice on this and see the pop up warning, but it doesn't directly apply to my post.