Usually their hot topics are bitching about housing and simping for TOP but these days I’ve noticed a lot more posts to the extent of “labour sucks and now I have no choice but to vote for national >:(”. Unsure if this reflects a general change in sentiment or if certain parties are spending their excess donations on buying out accounts. Worth mentioning I’ve noticed inflammatory topics posted by accounts that have been dead for years.
Okay ‘guided’ might’ve been the wrong word, but more just that they’re involved in the discussions more than most people are likely to encounter offline, and that’s going to affect the tone. We shouldn’t ignore it because these days a lot of us spend a lot of time hanging around r/nz and other places like it and forming opinions.
We don’t (and can’t) assess people who contribute online in the same way as people we interact with in person. When a trigger topic comes up, and everyone who’s attracted to it converges on each other, we’ll get more exposed to those views and dopamine kicks from interactions with people we’d never have encountered the same way elsewhere. For anything resembling murky common ground, they encourage us and we encourage them, and there’s none of that inconvenient stigma to deal with from knowing who the other person really is or what they’ll take from it.