V17

Imo it's the latter. It didn't start that way, but in the last decade they gradually shifted to being simply inflammatory on purpose because that brings clicks, and on top of that they regularly did dumb shit like complain about sexualization and male gaze one week (often, though not always, legitimately, but mostly it was literally just complaining without any further insight, which I personally don't care bout) and next week publish an article with photos of top male bulges in some sport that, apart from the gender being swapped, was literally worse than what they complained about with regards to sexualizing women.

Personally I say good riddance, but I'm biased by a deep dislike for people who use identity politics to create divisive clickbait.

I think that's willfully distorting the situation. Punching down should refer to jokes that seem to be or obviously are made with malicious intent, it's not about certain groups being protected from humor altogether, that's infantilizing. From what OP said and posted somewhere in this thread I don't think their jokes were in any way malicious.

In my experience from lurking around Lemmy, it seems that the big instances are largely populated by stereotypically "reddit-left" people, which includes finding a lot of things offensive (whether they're actually offended or not) and being relatively hostile to people who don't seem to share their worldview, seemingly considering it the default that everyone should know and accept. You can see it in this thread as well.

Not being an American and being culturally outside of american partisanship, this has been quite the disappointment for me, but what can you do.

What is seen as ‘left’ or even what conservatives call ‘the radical left’ in the US would likely be seen as center or center-right globally*.

*in most of the western world and pretty much nowhere else.

Pretty much the whole world used leaded gasoline and capitalist countries were the first to phase it out. US phased it out relatively early compared to others, Japan was afaik the first to outright ban it in 86. My ex-eastern bloc country only fully banned it in 2002.

The right might begin to become divided soon, but so far it definitely has not. Regarding worker unions (and the research I mentioned), I'm talking about the modern day, last 20-30 years or so, even though there's been a lot of fragmentation historically as well. There are no real leftist parties in my country with any success either because of the same thing, endless fragmentation, purity tests and ignoring the fact that actual workers are not socially progressive.

Even for the US this is insanely out of touch. But it is kind of sad that one of the main reddit alternatives is even more US-centric than reddit.

It's not that capitalism doesn't have flaws. It's that all the other systems so far have had worse and bigger flaws. Regulated capitalism with welfare is the least bad system by a wide margin.

It's not extremely left, but it's overwhelmingly more left leaning than right leaning.

I’ve never seen someone on Reddit or in real life suggest that capitalism is good or that freedom of speech should protect nazism hate speech.

Are you an American? I live in a post-communist country and most of my knowledge of the US comes from various media (traditional and social, new and old), but if you are, I honestly find this fascinating, considering that free speech is even in the US constitution.

We do have laws against specifically promoting nazism, so that doesn't really apply to me, but I'd say that about 3/4 of people here consider capitalism to be if not good than acceptable.

Why is it laughable? It seems pretty obvious that one of the main reasons why conservatives are still successful in the US is that they're able to unite much more than the left. I'm too lazy to go find sources, but there are multiple sociological studies that confirmed this - despite craziness like Trump and before that Tea party and other shit, the left has been considerably more fragmented the whole time.

They get shocked when you tell them capitalism is a terrible idea and their precious freedom of speech can get fucked when it’s used to protect literal Nazis.

These opinions in particular are considered far left by the majority of people in the western world.