I mean if you want to cherry pick a specific phrasing I used instead of addressing the main point, then you should reconsider what your point even is or if you’re just having an emotional moment and felt the need to have a Redditor take and make a flippant gotcha comment to feel good about yourself.

I don’t like it when Matt has self-righteous and judgmental moments where he attacks people who hold the opposing belief, and not the argument itself, that don’t agree with his stance on certain political topics. It’s disrespectful, and yelling it out in spaces where no one will rebut is cowardly.

Saying “I agree with doing A over B” is respectful to people who believe the opposite and then moving on to his cars topic is fine. Saying “We should do A and people who want to do B are terrible people” is not respectful. It’s his platform and he can say the latter if he wants, but it’s just very obviously distasteful to simultaneously be so adamant and assertive in your stance that you dehumanize others with a different opinion, yet never open himself up for said views to be challenged respectfully as a topic. Simply put, “don’t dish it out if you can’t take it”.

It’s especially unpalatable given that a lot of the time for how judgmental he comes off you can find examples of him being a hypocrite to his own stances, as other people in this topic have given.

If you think this type of behaviour is acceptable just because the stances he’s taking are ones you agree with, then you need to go touch grass and get off social media echo chambers.

I mean if you want to cherry pick a specific phrasing I used instead of addressing the main point, then you should reconsider what your point even is or if you’re just having an emotional moment and felt the need to have a Redditor take and make a flippant gotcha comment to feel good about yourself.

I don’t like it when Matt has self-righteous and judgmental moments where he attacks people who hold the opposing belief, and not the argument itself, that don’t agree with his stance on certain political topics. It’s disrespectful, and yelling it out in spaces where no one will rebut is cowardly.

Saying “I agree with doing A over B” is respectful to people who believe the opposite and then moving on to his cars topic is fine. Saying “We should do A and people who want to do B are terrible people” is not respectful. It’s his platform and he can say the latter if he wants, but it’s just very obviously distasteful to simultaneously be so adamant and assertive in your stance that you dehumanize others with a different opinion, yet never open himself up for said views to be challenged respectfully as a topic. Simply put, “don’t dish it out if you can’t take it”.

It’s especially unpalatable given that a lot of the time for how judgmental he comes off you can find examples of him being a hypocrite to his own stances, as other people in this topic have given.

If you think this type of behaviour is acceptable just because the stances he’s taking are ones you agree with, then you need to go touch grass and get off social media echo chambers.

Usually they use the excuse of “I listen to this podcast to escape politics”.

Terrible take. No, this is not why people don’t like listening to his political views.

I really enjoy his podcasts and videos, but whenever politics comes up it’s by far the worst part about his entire platform and extremely insufferable for two reasons. Note that this is coming from someone who agrees with the majority of his political views too.

1. His content is not political content so he should stay in his lane unless he puts effort in. If he wants to not do that and talk about politics, honestly that’s not even a problem, but then he should be setting up the stage to actually talk politics. He doesn’t set up the stage for an actual discussion or his viewpoint to be challenged. He just makes strong statements and either has people on who already agree or kind of strong-arms them into not saying anything by being combative with his statements.
2. Whenever politics comes up, he often has the insufferable attitude that is prevalent on the internet, where he will take the opposing argument in bad faith, and present it as “I’m a good person for having this viewpoint - you’re a bad person if you have the other viewpoint.” It comes across as insecure and also contributes to the current social disaster of radical tribalism due to social media, which is just ironic in of itself to call others bad people while being a person with influence contributing to damaging the fabric of society.

Yep. Lots of users used Reddit primarily to burn a bit of time during their downtime on their phones, and the official app is extremely unpleasant to use, so it’s no wonder activity decreased.

Another problem IMO that I’ve seen over years is the way that this sub is moderated in combination with it becoming popular from the general userbase of Reddit overall. Due to the inbuilt nature of how Reddit’s algorithms function, it really incentives godawful behaviours and the people who notice and hate that disengage, so over time the user base will skew more and more towards those who are not self aware about it, creating this feedback loop where even more moderate people become adverse because “insanity” increasingly becomes the norm.

The moderators are also extremely hardass when it comes to “be civil”, yet I barely, if ever, see them ever do anything to improve the “culture” of the sub. They don’t remove replies that are effectively off-topic and only serve to circlejerk misery. They don’t remove comments that are soapboxing in a way that can’t facilitate discussion. They never remove clearly bad-faith arguments border-lining on trolling, or passive-aggressive argumentative and combative posts, but if those posts bother someone enough for them to take a shot back in a more explicit manner, they’re hit with “be civil” and the original bad-faith comment starting shit to begin with stays up. It’s even worse when the bad-faith comment is some typical Redditor take so it gets upvotes since it follows the circlejerk, so then of course people who disagree and see it get fed up and just leave. I barely see any familiar names nowadays that used to be prominent, and the ones I do recognize are clearly becoming more and more agitated by the general culture here.

Some examples of what I’m talking about from the recent years:

• Review videos of the Type R: Top comments are all complaining about ADM instead of talking about the car itself. This is effectively off-topic - if you want to talk about ADM create your own thread to talk about it
• Matt Pharah review of the Supra calling it “affordable”: People projecting their financial insecurity and whining about the title of the video instead of talking about the car
• Any EV video: People insisting that EVs are shit because it doesn’t work for their personal life where they don’t have a EVSE and roadtrip their car around the world every month

Mix all that in with the sentiment that more than ever the average Redditor seems to be broke, unsuccessful, yet extremely vitriolic and assertive while morally grandstanding, it’s no wonder many people have noped the fuck out leaving the place more barren.