Nowhere in my comment did I describe anything even resembling a conspiracy. You’re pretending I did because you couldn’t figure out a reasonable way to disagree.

Reddit is not leftwing

This just shows how detached you are from reality, and how deep into your social media echo-chambers you are. It doesn’t matter how much research I show you because you won’t let reality get in the way of your feelings. For anyone else who might be interested, here is some research.

• Pew Research Center (2026): 32% of Democrats/Democratic-leaning Americans use Reddit, compared with just 20% of Republicans/Republican-leaning Americans. Democrats are 60% more likely to use Reddit. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/social-media/?tabId=tab-3345cffa-94a6-4e74-9272-70dee1e0e213

• Rajadesingan & Chebrolu (2026): A peer-reviewed study classified 738,894 Reddit users as left-leaning versus 275,284 right-leaning, a 2.7:1 ratio. It also classified 332 political subreddits as left-leaning versus 148 right-leaning. This concerns the researchers’ politically classified sample, not every Reddit user. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051261462091

• PNAS Nexus (2025): Researchers analysed 117 million political posts across nine platforms and found Reddit’s political news-sharing was disproportionately left-leaning, with relatively little right-leaning content. The analysis concerned the 2020 US presidential election. https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf262

• University of Michigan (2024): Researchers examining local subreddits found both users and moderators leaned Democratic. On a 0–100 Republican-to-Democrat scale, the average user scored 58, while the average moderator scored 62. https://michiganross.umich.edu/news/new-study-reddit-explores-how-political-bias-content-moderation-feeds-echo-chambers

Now it sucks for everyone. That’s not an improvement.

I’ve used Reddit heavily for 16-17 years. The slide was slow and incremental and began at least 10 years ago. These are the reasons I would estimate have caused Reddit to become what it is now:

• Intentional political polarisation. The owners made their political affiliations clear over the years, and have not been shy about wielding their control. Every decision, from firing Victoria, to creating terms of service which excluded racism against white people, to hiring very left wing progressives as administrators and staff, to hiring Pao, to selective rule enforcement, has resulted in a place where even mild dissent is generally not tolerated. An echo-chamber in the truest sense. It’s so bad that it is now violent. We have cases of killers who became radicalised on Reddit. Something people may not know is that there is a very incesutous relationship between the moderators of the top subreddits and the owners and administrators. The larger subs are required to have administrators on the team, and they mostly control all of the large subreddits. It gets worse though, because the automated moderation system flags accounts which are banned by the moderators on those large subs. They get selectively tougher enforcement. Meaning that anyone who dares post in /r/Politics and doesn’t agree has all of their posts scrutinised to a much higher degree, and people are frequently banned from the entire website for innocuous reasons.

• The demographic became much younger over time. This is a product-led decision. Children are easier to manipulate and get addicted. They’re easier to control and indoctrinate. They’re an easy target to which to foment anger and “engagement.”

• The audience became much wider. Another product-led decision. The original demographic was male, 20-40, geek. Conversations were pretty mild, very respectful. With a much wider audience, all semblance of “Reddiquette” has disappeared. No one has a shared frame of reference anymore. The people who joined either didn’t care about civility, or were used to combative social spaces such as Twitter and Facebook. They brought those practises with them, and Reddit embraced it and encouraged it.

• Reddit embraced bots. They look great for advertising metrics. They foment that hate and engagement. I estimate that the majority of comments on Reddit are bots now. In some subreddits I would not be surprised if 90%+ were bots. Bots can’t be reasoned with. They’ll just keep spewing hate forever.

I honestly think Reddit is a dead man walking. Even the hyper partisan left wing people hate the site now. Everyone is waiting for an alternative. This is Digg all over again, but at a larger scale.

Nvidia booked $63.7bn operating income last quarter, and the equity gains you’re thinking of are a separate $7.8bn line underneath that. AWS made $17.8bn operating profit and Google Cloud $11.1bn in the same period, off customers who actually paid.

There’s nothing illegal or corrupt about Anthropic purchasing compute from SpaceX.

If this is a bubble, it’s not a very impressive one. The dot-com bubble was built on companies with little or no revenue, and the Nasdaq eventually fell about 78%. Today the S&P 500 trades on a forward P/E of 18.7, below its 5 and 10 year averages, with Q3 earnings growth at 29.5%. Nvidia, for example, arguably the epicenter of the bubble, just made $63.7bn of operating income on $96.2bn of revenue at a 75% gross margin. So this bubble is built on organic growth and insane real demand. Google Cloud grew 103%. Azure 48%. AWS 39%.

Also, neither OpenAI nor Anthropic are publicly traded. They can implode and it’ll leave barely a ripple in the stock market.

I read some research showing the average local voter was amenable to a $10k bribe. I think locals should be negotiating for electricity price caps. E.g. 10c/kWh. Anything over that is paid for by the data center owner. This puts money into the pockets of all locals over a long period of time, and insulated them from the demand surge causing price spikes all over the US.

There’s an element of that, or at least there was an element of that. Right now supply chain analysis shows they’re ramping up literally as fast as physically possible. It’s so bad that even basic things like valves, piping, and ceramic components are back-ordered for months or years. A laser tool maker is quoted as waiting more than 40 months for parts now. This is putting supply strain on tens of thousands of components which we never imagined we would suddenly require in much larger quantities.

I think the good news is that on the other side of this, we’ll have unprecedented production capacity for RAM and storage. If AI continues to gobble up capacity, it’ll mean abundant and cheap inference. If it doesn’t, it’ll mean abundant and cheap RAM and storage.

So many different opinions, so I might as well weigh in.

I’m a classic story of starting with a 1TB external HDD to now my 160TB server. I just kept going and didn’t know when to stop. It’s very affordable to make sure your server is extensible. Start with a decent case with lots of HDD bays. A Fractal R6 is excellent. A modern Intel CPU does great transcoding for x265 and AV1. No GPU required. Then you just need 8-16GB RAM (more is better, but it’s expensive right now). Maybe 256GB SSD (more is better, but it’s expensive right now). Get one HDD right now. Whatever has a good price/TB. They’re also expensive right now.

The more important question is the OS. I actually prefer Windows. It’s free (if you look on Google how to activate it for free). If you get more than one HDD you should consider DrivePool to pool your drives. Works great and cheap one time cost. If it’s data you can just download again you don’t need to worry about backup. RAID is a good intermediary step, and for that SnapRAID works really well. You’ll need one HDD for parity, and a good rule of thumb is no more than 5-6 HDDs per parity. RAID means that if a disk dies, you can restore the data. Much cheaper than cloud storage.

On the one hand, they’re not really competing on features right now.

On the other hand, I have heard (more times than I can count or remember), that Steam users will never use another launcher for any reason ever.

So they kind of have a point. If they invest hundreds of millions or billions into features, would Steam users really use the Epic launcher? I don’t think so.

This is what I use and it’s great. Low power, cooler, quieter, and in the current economy, MUCH cheaper.

Grok has bias but let’s not pretend the others do not.

https://trakkr.ai/bias/findings

https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/working-papers/measuring-perceived-slant-large-language-models-through-user (article: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2025/05/ai-models-llms-chatgpt-claude-gemini-partisan-bias-research-study)

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/29974100.2026.2667948

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10817610

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2026/06/24/are-ai-chatbots-like-chatgpt-politically-biased-we-tested-them

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11127-023-01097-2

I tell Claude to use DeepSeek when it encounters a moral quandary. DeepSeek has no moral quandaries.

I am particularly galled by the people who conducted the worst IP theft in history turning around and telling the little people not to do what they did. Either we’re cool with it or we’re not. Right now we’re letting the richest and most powerful people do whatever they like while we are all held to a different standard.

A surprising number of people go to the gym for cardio only or mostly.

China stands as a current authoritarian model which is being championed by people like Australian economist Steve Keen.

If you can handle the ethnic genocide, the lack of due process, suppression of information and free speech, and no democracy, you can look forward to clean streets, low crime, and high economic growth. Some people believe that’s a worthy trade. I do not.