It’s not even June 12 for me, yet I suspect many subreddits went dark based on UTC.
I moved to Reddit during the Digg migration. Thus, I got the default subscriptions from back in the day. Over the years, I’ve unsubscribed to things I felt were crap, and I’ve added a number of subreddits.
Already, many have gone dark. My old.Reddit.com homepage already looks much different than normal, and I know that a few subreddits that do show have announced they’ll go dark. I assume they are US based and timing that locally.
I’ve spent more time in the Lemmy fediverse than on Reddit since joining, but I’ve spent time on both.
I’ll admit to cynical skepticism of the impact of the darkening. I still don’t think it will make a difference in Reddit policy, but I now believe it will have a larger impact on Reddit traffic than I imagined.
I still expect it to have no change in Reddit attitude or really in Reddit users.
Free speech absolutists have nothing to do with free speech.
These just want to say what they want without having to bear the consequences.
The right to say what you want is a good thing. But in the end it doesn’t mean that the other side should be accepting of the speech you deem free.
If one is spouting vitrol/hate/intolerance towards a group of people under the banner “free speech” then don’t look up weird when the affected are not accepting of that speech you deem free.
For me the whole idea free speech is to express yourself how you want to (within what is reasonable, use your common sense) without the police and/or government knocking at your door.
At that point my boundary is at spewing or pushing for intolerance. I refuse to be be tolerant towards intolerance.
This is exactly it. They don’t want freedom of speech, they want freedom from the consequences of their speech. They don’t like that the people affected by their speech have a voice too, and that the hateful rhetoric they spew into the world is finally being pushed back on. To the privileged, equality feels like oppression.
The most aggressive free speech advocates I know are also some of the most horrible human beings I’ve ever met. They believe horrible shit. They want free speech because they know what they say is horrible, and want to be able to continue to say it with no real consequences other than being socially ostracized.