P.S. Also, let this be a remembrance of old Reddit of late aughts. The original iteration before gamergate and other reactionary campaigns, it was a nice if techie biased place online. I remember the hacktivists, the Anonymous, Occupy Wall Street, Aaron Swartz, the left libertarians, leftists and progressive circles being quite active on the site during the great recession. It was not a reactionary dump back then. It offered a good exposure to lots of new movements brewing. The internet becoming an outrage machine and Obama leading into reaction was not foreseeable. It's kind of wild how we used to follow authors en masse online. Now we have influencers and the internet is mostly AI slop and the information is becoming enclosed.

Once upon a time, a blogger or am obscure academic could go (relatively) viral and that was cool. The internet used to be a place you could go for an escape instead of being the mainway for interfacing with the society and becoming upset.

Parking reform, open borders, drug legalization and /r/ShitRedditSays were pretty good political influences for the time period. Later /r/chapotraphouse was great not because it was free of bad actors but because it did have a bunch of great posters I've followed elsewhere and it could laught at itself on occasion.