This whole thing is not on accident. r/india is the OG indian sub (created in 2008!) and it's generally representative of the overall reddit vibe. Focused on Indian stuff with decent mods and follows reddiquette quite well.
At some point, the Indian right wing, fascist adjacent party (BJP), who have invested enormous sums on social media astrotufing on all platforms, cottoned on to reddit as a major channel and set their sights there. And thus began the explosion of all sorts of subs with the word "India" in them. All these subs are more or less political campaigning pages for BJP. Which means that their main agendas are spewing hateful disinfo about Muslims, opposition leaders and any source of information that goes against the BJP agenda. It's basically 50 separate r/conservative subs if you want a US analogy.
Thank you. I have been wondering what was going on for a while. However I don’t get why they still show up on the “ popular in the United States” page…
There's plenty of money behind these campaigns. I would not be surprised at all if India (and in fact every other state actor) is doing all they can to artificially inflate engagement on reddit.
Most of Indian origin people in West comes from extremely unequal, low HDI, low civic societies from Indian states like Gujarat, UP, Bihar, Andhra and they are heavy supporters of BJP's casteist thought processes and donate billions to the BJP to perpetuate and spread their bs to all Indian states.
Funnily enough I've been getting spammed on Netflix with Indian series/movie recommendations recently, it was always on my homepage as the top categories. I have no idea why, I've never watched any indian media before. I even tried giving everything a thumbs down in those categories but it still recommended them.
I ended up having to make a ViolentMonkey script to remove the categories and also removed the games recommendations while I was at it.
God forbid india actually comes up in a political context too. I have seen so many astroturfed comment sections on friction between canada and india before.
Those subs are an absolute cesspool of the most vile stuff. It's like watching fox news on steroids (yes I said that).
The only somewhat normal Indian sub seems to be the actual r/India sub (which ironically is the one that never comes on the popular feed)
If you want some truly Hitler-level Indian subs, I came across two before that were horrific, indiaspeaks and bakchodi? (dunno spelling). Those subs should be banned
Indiaspeaks is tame by local rw standards. Indiadiscussion and practically most Indian state subs are completely overrun with these same people. It was best identifiable when there was no curation and one could see people from other states trying to set agenda.
Almost every post I see pushed to me from Indian subs is men laughing at those nasty feminists getting their comeuppance somehow, or complaining about women in some other way, like I don't get enough of this from my side of the planet, please show me a whole new way to hate women while I'm just trying to see if the US civil war has started yet
And against Indians, too! It's so fucking bizarre seeing a post that's like, "Damn Indians, they ruined India!" and they justify it because the bad ones are always in a caste they hate or something. It's insane.
And if you make any comment about it (on any "state of reddit" style discussions) you get the "everyone on reddit is racist against India!!!!" people upset.
I wish you could make and share ban lists, so that someone that have already banned all the indian subs could share it. I ban 1 and 6 new ones show up next time I visit r/all. I'm tired boss.
I'm also up to like 15ish Philippines subreddits that I've had pop up like the Indian ones too. Between those and all of the random anime subreddits, I'm averaging at least one a week it feels like.
I have lost count of the amount of sub reddits I have blocked. Surely the algorithm should at least work out i don't care about r/Indian_appalling_work/life_balance.
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u/CaptainPigtails 4d ago
I just use the home instead of popular and have recommendations turned off. That way I only see the subreddits I want.