General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Why is DU's popularity waning? (Title edited, explanation within.) [View all]Prism
(5,815 posts)Everyone's a troll. There's only one way to think about a situation, and if you do not think about it in precisely that way, you're labeled some kind of -ist. New people are shunned or viewed with deep suspicion and made to feel incredibly unwelcome. The loudest and most ideologically (or partisanly) uncompromising tend to post the most and produce the most thread heat. Total crazy is rewarded by virtue of their thread endurance.
I lurk these days, and I have no investment in DU becoming better or worse. But the epistemological closure is so severe, I often find myself seeing a story on the news and popping over to see what the totally insane ideologues are saying.
No one I know in real life is as totally off the rails ideological as a lot of DU is. And I live in Berkeley.
It's not a welcoming environment, and the sane people leave over time. (And I don't mean sane in a liberal vs moderate sense. I mean, people totally impervious to easily discernible objective facts when it is inconvenient to their ideological "narrative" or what they want an issue to be "about" .
My personal favorite are the ACA threads, where monied, comfortably middle class people on the internet hound the poor about what they "should" be spending their money on, how they're obviously lying about their circumstances, and how these armchair financial advisers know how you should really be living paycheck to paycheck. It's fucking hilarious. How inhumane does your ideological and partisan identity have to be that you're railing against poor people? And using the same verbiage Republicans do when talking about "welfare queens"? And then they declare themselves the Democratest of the Democrats.
K.