Reddit users are officially as sick of Elon Musk as I am, with a number of popular subreddits completely banning all links to X
In the wake of Elon Musk's speech at Trump's inauguration and its accompanying (ahem) hand gesture, the userbase of Reddit seems to have decided it's simply done with Musk and his website. As we reported yesterday, r/pcgaming has now banned X links—and the same thing is happening across a huge number of subreddits, major and minor.
Posts by regular users proposing bans have been met with huge popular support in a number of Reddit communities, and in many cases mods have quickly instated the new rule. Now the subreddits for everything from World of Warcraft to Dungeons & Dragons to F1 racing to New Jersey have done it, while many others are currently deliberating or voting on the change.
From a certain perspective, it's not a big shift. Under Musk, X has been transforming into a refuge for hard right and extremist opinions for a while now, while Reddit's userbase has long trended towards being more left-wing and moderate (to speak in broad generalities). The fact that X now requires visitors to log in to view most of the site's content has also rankled for a while with Reddit users—people do not like having to sign up for another site to get the context for a post. So while Musk's recent actions may have kickstarted the conversation, it's an animosity that's been brewing since 2022, and to an extent is as much practical as political.
But on the other hand, this is one of the biggest and most well-known social media sites in the world democratically blacklisting one of the other biggest and most well-known social media sites in the world, and that's kind of wild to see. Meanwhile, the actual staff of the site are simply content to let users make their choice in this matter.
It's happening not just in niche spaces, or explicitly left-wing subreddits, but across an enormous variety of Reddit communities. Fans of the NBA may not have much in common with fans of Warhammer or Football Manager, but they sure all align on this. It's not often you see such a spectrum of users
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