In group/out group dynamics are fueled by insecurity and ignorance. Reddit (the internet/humanity) is full of people who are scared of being outcasts and do not know themselves well enough to be confident. Often for good reason because there are swathes of people who will punish them for not going along with the group. The punishments are almost always disproportionate to the transgression, and continually escalate as the in-group feels completely justified in their actions due to confirmation bias.

In the case of reddit’s main demographic these are young, typically nerdy men who have experienced being outcasts, and not a whole lot else - who now relish the thought of finally being part of the in-group. They will go far out of their way to prove they belong, even if it means handling themselves in a hypocritical manner and giving up their unique interests to mirror the majority of the group. Those who do not either leave, get labeled as contrarian (and summarily dismissed) or actually go fully contrarian (not like the other girls~~)

The entirety of modern social media being built around Trends™ is all you need to see how weak people’s identities really are. It’s part of why people who are authentically themselves (Trump, Walz) are viewed as strong depending on which side of the divide you fall on. People are so busy faking it to fit in (in fear of real consequences), they’ve outsourced their entire being to the trends of the group they mostly identify with.

It’s fully baked in to small town American identity, and even those who can see how absurd it is will still be forced to choose between unjustified torment, conformity, or leaving. One of those options is safe, the other two are risky or outright dangerous. All three options reinforce the belief of the in-group that their choice is the way it’s meant to be.

In short: people are really weak and we live in a culture that has preyed on this for centuries under the threat of violence.

People like to imagine others beneath them. It takes no effort at all on their part

This is also how reality TV works and why everyone involved is so amazingly awful.

I’ve been saying this for at least 12 years now. 4chan has always been an interesting case study. There was (I haven’t been back to look in years) also the curious war on /d/ over eastern/western art with Dimitry’s works being accepted as eastern due to being Russian. Which fair enough, yea Russia is in Asia, but that’s not really the point. The point was creating positive association between dopamine mining (porn) and Russia for people who felt marginalized for their interests. That Bannon specifically pointed to 4chan as a vector for radicalization, well… It’s very interesting that so many interests that almost exclusively thrived on 4chan rose into mainstream acknowledgement around 2016.

This was all furthered on Reddit in the more offbeat porn-focused subs with blatant intrusions of racially charged ideas into any and all genres they could find but with a special attention paid to anything that repeatedly fetishized a loss of control/personal responsibility/agency (cuckoldry, hypnotism, coercion, etc)

Getting those messages tangled into things people have fetishized and generally felt shameful about is a hell of a way to hijack dopamine to create a false positive association between the ideas and the act.

In a way, we might have to feel gratitude toward OnlyFans models, Tumblr users, and maybe just gen-Z as a whole, for reframing a lot of those same interests in a more sex positive and silly manner - to the degree that it is not uncommon to see a blue collar working class man making light of himself wearing panties as daily wear on Instagram. Not exactly niche and shameful now is it?