The Dark Enlightenment subreddit has roughly doubled in traffic over the last year, although if you go by the numbers from April, it actually doubled from April-August 2014, and has nearly leveled off at another doubling as of this month from August 2014 to March 2015.

As a mostly backseat moderator, I have access to the numbers. The rest of the moderators gave me permission to share them with you:

This jives with unique user numbers that I see on my site. The majority of the engagement probably happens with a minority of users, most likely a core group of 4,000. Of those, maybe 2% are active writers, which would be a typical ratio. Users also don’t match precisely with actual individuals — so these numbers are really only good for showing the shapes of trends, and are a lot less precise than they seem.

Nemester, the most active moderator, had this to say about the growth and the general state of the subreddit:

I know that the NRXN generally isn’t very happy with the sub. For some reason. I am guessing it is because my personality is almost entirely unknown. I can see why it is hard to trust /u/nemester since it appears like I don’t contribute anything to the theory of the community…

That aside, however, I don’t think anything better could have been put together given the platform, honestly. Every other far right sub on reddit is pretty much just another version of /pol/ and has lots of shitty quality posts and comments. Policing the community to remain intellectual requires a lot of work, and that work has borne fruit here. It also pisses off a lot people who have to be dealt with firmly and sometimes harshly. The hardest part is having to ban someone who otherwise could contribute productive ideas, but they are such an acrimonious shitbag that they can’t be tolerated. Anyway, when I compare the quality of the submissions here to the quality of the comments of acknowledged neoreactionaries on twitter, there is a world of difference and it does not favor twatter. (I have an account which I don’t participate, I just look for links) That said, sometimes reasonable conversations are had there occasionally.

He also credited the creation of /r/DebateDE as being effective at sapping some of the energy away from trolls who would otherwise be disruptive. Nemester also credits these two posts (1, 2) on post-modern discourse for being good effective guidelines for channeling discussion.

Vakerr, the second-most active mod, added (to explain his lack of contributions outside the subreddit):

Speaking for myself, while I have 1/4 English genetic heritage I grew up in central Europe and English is a 2nd language to me (3rd or 4th actually but that’s beside the point). So I’m not practiced in writing lengthy essays in English. Keeping up with the output of the NRx community is using up my available time anyway. In fact, considering the volume of the output, curating and shepherding the discussion is becoming increasingly valuable.

Yup.

Scale and reddit mix poorly

Reddit was designed on democratic principles. Popular links rise whether or not they actually have other qualities other than mere popularity. The design of reddit also makes it easy for people from hop from sub to sub. This is good for raw growth numbers, but raw numbers are completely useless for most intellectual or community-building goals shared by most of you.

Reddit actually has a relatively small user base of maybe 3.2 million users of which maybe half are active. It just has some outsized influence because journalists and other people in publishing use it as a test bed to predict what will be popular. In this way it has a bit of a self-reinforcing effect — the clique of redditors is influential because publishers assume that they’re influential, which reinforces itself.

By comparison, Twitter has maybe 75 million active US users (of whom not all are individual human beings), Facebook has about 200 million, and Pinterest has roughly 50 million, all reported by the companies themselves. Someone should really audit all those numbers.

Links and posts that become popular can, if the subreddit is so configured, wind up in the feeds of users who have no idea hat the subreddit is. Niche subreddits with small user bases can generate some high quality discussion (much like old newsgroups dedicated to specific topics), but once they grow past a certain point, the discussion quality tends to degenerate quickly as the members stop being able to recognize most of one another.

Rather than grow one large subreddit to as enormous a size as possible, it’d be better to try to redirect as much traffic as can be to more specific areas of discussion. Reddit’s design makes this a little tougher.

Size in a subreddit can also be mitigated by imposing more rules on who’s allowed to submit links, but that doesn’t solve comment quality issues.

I think that in general people should not expect too much of Reddit as a platform. Private discussion on more specific topics is easier to manage and to control quality on. People who use Reddit tend to be of wildly varying quality, and it’s impossible to pre-assess that on the site itself.

Pageviews are next to worthless

Something to keep in mind is that pageviews and new warm bodies are next to worthless. They tend to be a cost. There are billions of people connected to the internet, and most of them are poor, ugly, and stupid.

Pageviews are only worth something when it’s a proxy for the attention of a valuable person, or a person with high potential value in the future.

There are plenty of places where you can buy pageviews for anything ranging from a few pennies to many dollars depending on what you’re looking for and who the people are. The majority of people in the world are useless or worse than useless, and getting their attention costs resources without returning anything positive.

As a general rule, effective human beings are harder to get a hold of, and far more useful. On the internet, because of the way that it’s structured, the tendency is to pander to people who are heavy users of low value. That’s because their attention and time comes cheap. Speculators also tend to overvalue the attention of worthless people, so executives respond to that irrational behavior by spending more time and resources manipulating the short term attention of said mostly-worthless people on the internet.

If the only numbers you pay attention to are web server activity, you will pander to the people who make those numbers go up more than the rest. You can write a bot or network of bots to make those numbers go up in arbitrary ways — and many do.

Display ad driven platforms like most social networks also will tend to try to condition you using notifications to feel a surge of pleasure when engaging in mostly worthless interactions. This is also a usual internet use pratfall that’s easy to fall in to.

Earnings are a slightly better metric, but that’s also tricky — you can spike short term earnings by scamming people, which involves the building-up of good will followed by the rape of that same goodwill. There are no perfect metrics.

But here are some guidelines:

• Numbers aren’t everything
  • When valuing numbers, value valuable things more than numbers which are tough to value
• Aim to attract people of the highest quality possible
  • Disqualify low quality people whenever possible or shunt them somewhere else
  • There are many measures of quality and virtue — they can be piety, wealth, intelligence, industriousness, cleverness, courage, good humor, chastity, etc.
    • Quality attracts quality. Low quality attracts low quality
• If a crowd forms, chop up the crowd until it returns to order, then chop up the crowd some more
• Put people to productive ends whenever possible

This is also how I’d also make an economics writ small argument against populism and participating in the election process. Directing people to vote is a high cost activity. It requires a big initial investment. The only economically rational reason to do it is to get repaid by the politician after he’s elected. If your primary goal is to reduce corruption in society, it makes no sense to pursue that goal in a way that can only be sustained by using corrupt means.

Commenter Ollie writes:

I have no complaint against the assertion that men are given to sacrifice, and I also find no objection to the idea that when channeled properly, this tendency can be very beneficial. The ability and will to sacrifice is often one of the primary sources of a civilization’s achievements.

However, I would make the case that the dynamo of noble sacrifice is neither a first cause, nor an inexhaustible resource. Something must exist to spark it and maintain it. I would posit that this will to sacrifice is catalyzed by a precious few types of macro and micro-cultural phenomena, including beauty, kinship, tradition, identity, and trust.

Without the elements on that list, the inborn capacity for determination and sacrifice lies dormant. I suspect those pushing the buttons on the establishment conservative propaganda machine are cognizant of this, but refuse to acknowledge it because it would give away too much – namely that they are working with the establishment left to actively undermine those elements. Instead of managing and sustainably harnessing the capacity for sacrifice, they appear to wringing out what they can from what little remains. It’s like watching someone intentionally drive a car (into oblivion) while refusing to provide it necessary oil changes and other maintenance.

Moving to the next issue you pointed out, NRx may be an elitist movement at heart, but support from a significant part of the general population is an indispensable part of any political movement’s power and viability.

The Tea Party and Occupy movements, as many populist revolts do, suffered from a lack of ideological coherence, and were accordingly divided and dispersed because of this. Exactly as you have said, they didn’t like the New Right’s (NRx’s) suggestions of what to supplant the current power structure with, likely because they are both still wedded to the egalitarian mythos underpinning that current power structure. The problem for Tea Party and Occupy however, is that while they disliked NRx’s suggestions, they hadn’t truly formulated any workable plans of their own.

In retrospect, I should have rephrased the question at the end of my previous comment. Both the out of touch nature of TPTB and the decreasing trust of the masses are readily apparent and almost one in the same when you think about it.

The real question is one of: Just how receptive is at least a physically and electorally significant portion of the general population to the ideas of NRx?

With higher general discontent and lower trust in established institutions, that receptivity grows, but is it enough to establish a functional power base?

If there is not enough support, NRx must remain an ideological backwater, subtly nudging the next generation of conservative leaders toward its ideals. If there is enough support, NRx can push to the forefront of political debate. This puts it in a dangerous but potentially advantageous position, where it will have to clarify and possibly re-conceptualize its platform for wider consumption.

Certainly the failure of the Tea Party and Occupy movements cannot be chalked up to the issues that created them simply going away. That pool of popular resentment has definitely increased. Leaders who see the value in the NRx platform will have to find a way of harnessing that reservoir without destroying the functionality of NRx concepts in the process.

First, a slight correction: the European New Right is distinctly different from neoreaction. There are some similar tendencies, but I think that the publishers who cluster around the ‘New Right’ term would like to maintain the distinction.

I would say that a large portion of the population would have trouble comprehending the ideas. A large proportion would be amenable to a return to European cultural normalcy, but most don’t understand what it would require. Most people aren’t ideological, shouldn’t be ideological, and ideology is not what moves most people. I’m not even particularly ideological, although I know what it’s like to be an ideologue.

In terms of national electoral success, that would be unlikely, and shouldn’t be given much thought at all. Pursuing that strategy misunderstands the nature of the Federal government and its inability to reform. Instead of trying to win over a political structure that has no desire to be won over or reformed, you change the shape and composition of the country instead.

Assuming that debate will carry the day is a fundamental mistake.

There was no debating the Jacobins. They had their debating partners murdered or run out of the country. The mistake that those people made was that in assessing the growing conflict as a debate and not a civil war. They brought their oratory and some money besides on the part of the aristocracy to a gunfight. Bringing words to a gunfight is not a good idea. We know that it was a revolutionary civil war, but they didn’t know that, which is why they did not act more forcefully when it could have made a difference.

Similarly, it’s pointless to debate today’s Jacobins, or to assume that condition of internal war are not coming. Instead of wasting resources on debate, instead it’s better to make explicit and covert appeals to wavering elites and sub-elites who are concerned about the instability in the American government and the increasingly erratic and hazardous nature of the American culture. Debating them just wastes time and results in your party being shot on a riverbank somewhere or near a ditch.

To the extent that debate is useful is the extent to which it persuades a sufficient number of leadership caliber people to defect from the progressive stairway to Heaven, which is really upside-down, because it leads straight to Hell.

To the extent that there is a political goal, it is to bring about successful secession. If that can’t be achieved, then it is to organize an exile on good terms.

Americans tend to identify politics with electioneering, but that’s just a tiny aspect of political action which is by no means the most important one. Since it’d be sort of zany for anti-democrats to focus entirely on building democratic consensus for anti-democracy, it’s better to seek other areas and methods.

Being small and badly-funded, the strategic approach has to be to seek and use points of leverage to achieve out-sized results relative to the input. High end people provide high leverage. Ordinary people, as important as they are in the scheme of things, are unlikely to be able to provide leveraged results. That is, unless some decide to rise to the occasion as ordinary men sometimes do.

Seek unfair advantages and exploit them as hard as possible. Press strengths against weaknesses and maneuver weak points away from the strengths of the opposition.

Populist groups like the ‘Tea Party’ tend to match weakness to strength and strength to weakness, thinking that mimicking the strategy of the opposition is the way to success. They think that they can become strong by imitating the strength of the opponent (hence all the Tea Party types who quote Alinsky and seek to use his methods for conservative political ends).

That can’t possibly result in success. That would be like the Germans building a second, crappier imitation Maginot Line to defeat the French Maginot Line. The way the Germans defeated the Maginot Line was to send something at it that could not be anticipated using a method that was thought to be impossible.

That reservoir of resentment of which Ollie speaks can be used for various ends, both good and ill.

Populist movements were more politically effective when mass military action was more effective. Masses and mobs are now politically and militarily ineffective. Employing out-dated political means that confer no advantage is a sure way to defeat.

Instead of attempting to set up a symmetrical conflict, it’s much better to develop a set of asymmetrical advantages, and then push them as far as they’ll go. People tend to think excessively in ludic terms, but nature is an open field, and unequal contests which are over in an eyeblink are the rule. Equal conflicts have to be contrived.

There’s a tendency for American conservatives to try to assemble equal, fair conflicts — which they lose, each time — and then they complain that it was unfair, appealing to the rule-book, as if there’s a referee who will call a penalty.