From my own personal experience:

1. I can’t use my phone. I think they log the device ID (MAC address).

2. But I’ve gone through maybe 25-30 accounts on my work computer at work. Same computer. I use Reddit in a Brave private window and I even use a browser script I found to automatically re-add all my subs. It works. I’m not shadowbanned. I post and get responses for X amount of time until some dipshit mod gets me banned from the entire site. Usually a few months.

This is what will end Reddit.

AI moderation and AI bans.

We’re pretty much all here because of it. Reddit is actively driving their users to other platforms. Oh well.

Yup.

If I need to hop on Reddit for anything, usually to lookup how to fix a technical issue or something, I use RedReader and I don’t login.

My 13 year old account with 250,000 comment karma was perma-banned without warning for commenting “It’s ok to punch Nazis”. Since then, maybe 3 years, I’ve had probably 25-30 Reddit accounts. Pretty easy to create a dummy email account and set up a new Reddit account. I have a browser script that auto adds all my subs back for me if I just copy the link from my old account. I’m usually back up and running in about 10 minutes. But I finally decided to drop the platform after the election because it just isn’t worth it anymore.

Mods of individual subs can get you banned site-wide if they don’t like you. You can be auto-banned from individual subs if they’ve detected you commented in other subs they don’t like. Their block system is a joke that prevents people from correcting other’s misinformation. They banned 3rd party apps. And their co-founder/CEO is a trashcan of a human being.

Reddit is quickly becoming a cesspool. You should just give up on it. The internet is a big place.

This is the best answer.

I’ve been paying REAL close attention for the last 20 years and things have devolved so much I’m pretty much ready to stop paying attention and live in blissful ignorance as things collapse around me. But I still plan on showing up to vote every 2 years. It’s our duty. It’s the only thing I can really do. I thought trying to fight misinformation online would help, but clearly that isn’t working.

So yeah, live in blissful ignorance as much as you can to maintain your mental health, but show up for the only actual things you can do to actually make a difference. At least then, if total collapse happens, you can take solace in knowing you maintained your duty as a citizen.

But Americans have proven to be willing to just take it in the ass rougher and longer than I’d ever imagine.

For a nation known for being tough guys with guns who will fuck their government, or any government that messes with them, up if necessary, all I’ve actually seen all my life is a bunch of pussies that let the wealthy walk all over us. And I’m not exactly a spring chicken.

Just wait it out for a few more years and things will settle down.

That’s not at all how this works.

This isn’t anything new

It is. Yeah, we’ve had a civil war. We have not had creeping fascism, new rules that allow a president to be entirely lawless, a corrupt supreme court, a woefully misinformed populace, Nazis in the White House, and oligarchs buying legislation and creating insane wealth disparity all happening at the same time.

This isn’t a realigning of the parties. It’s fascism taking hold.

Well. You can. But we already passed all the opportunities to do so. Gotta nip it in the bud and we chose not to do so.

At this point? Probably not. Not if history is any indication. We’ve blown right past all the checkpoints that would have prevented this snowball effect. Our legislative processes are almost too irreparably damaged for a healthy democracy to exist. We’ve removed too many regulations regarding money in our politics and not placed enough regulations on the focus of power on individuals and entities within our government.

We’re probably going to go through a really dark period where the quality of life is going to decline, rights will be stripped, and a lot of vulnerable people are going to die and then, hopefully, things will get bad enough that a revolution happens. It won’t be like WW2 where more powerful forces come to our rescue. We’ll have to do it ourselves. And I don’t really have that much faith in our populace doing that. Again, it will take a really significant decline in quality of life for damn near everyone before that’s even possible. It looks like that’s where we’re headed though.

The part about our history you’re forgetting is that we never, through any of that, gleefully elected a guy that has made it abundantly clear he doesn’t give a fuck about democracy and will work to subvert or destroy it if it doesn’t suit him.

This is new territory.

And we’re about to experience the deconstruction of things that will be very difficult to build back.

Your point is that we’ve been around for a few hundred years, so we can bounce back. But history would like to point out that nations that were around much longer than us have ceased to exist many times over.

I wish I had your optimism.