This is exactly what happened to DIGG* and what's currently happening to twitter.
Conservatives get beaten down by the vast majority of users and get a chip on their shoulder. Then as the site starts to die and the users move elsewhere conservatives jump on the sinking ship and declare their the new captain. They start drilling holes in the sinking ship cause theres nkthing else to do, and eventually realize the echo chamber sucks and then move on to the other social networks that everyone else went to, and the process repeats.
I hope with federation that the cycle doesn't repeat but we'll see.
DIGG made their big DIGG 4.0 change to overhaul the algorithm because it was being gamed and brigaded by members of conservative forums at the time. It just so happened they did it with a user interface overhaul. For a while, after most everyone moved to reddit, the top posts were mostly conservative stuff.
Makes sense. I caught a bit of late Slashdot then went RSS to news sources for a while, then Reddit. I didn't have informed and fleshed out view of the political spectrum at this time to notice. Maybe I've gobbled up some shit that I had to undo later. This reminds me that I miss the Slashdot comment labels. A FOSS platform like Lemmy could be a place to experiment with it.
Then as the site starts to die and the users move elsewhere conservatives jump on the sinking ship and declare their the new captain. They start drilling holes in the sinking ship cause theres nkthing else to do,
This is a really clever metaphor. Someone with the skills needs to draw it in the style of a political cartoon from the 1910-20s.
(Also, I saw a great quote somewhere about how conservatives destroy things because they don’t have the capacity to build. Your “drilling holes” reminded me of that.)
They’re doing the same thing that Republicans in Congress are doing/proposing: gerrymandering and raising the voting age. Conservatism is at odds with democracy.