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 arrive on the same page to this degree—especially with a turnaround of just a couple of days.
Musk has only owned X for less than two years, but in that time he's transformed the site in the eyes of many from a relatively neutral (if chaotic and fractious) forum and major source of news to something so inherently hateful and toxic as to be avoided altogether. I won't hold up Reddit as a bastion of perfect discourse, but it's striking to see its users taking such a firm stance en-masse, with very few dissenters to be seen.
Whether that's a sign that there's still good left on the internet, or just another example of online communities becoming ever more siloed and divided, I'll leave to the reader to decide for themselves—but as someone who left X early last year and hasn't looked back, I'll certainly be glad to have another place I can go to completely avoid it.
