Is Atlas significantly less ideologically diverse than it was 10-15 years ago?

[TheReckoning]

A while back, I made a post asking if Atlas had less active users than it had in its earlier past. I found out that statistically, the answer was no- there are actually more active users now (although not by much).

However, I think I figured out what gave me the illusion that Atlas had more users in the past. Looking back at old threads, I see a lot more blue avatars, yellow avatars, and “nones” than I do now, and left-wing talking points seemingly dominated threads a lot less. This makes me think that, while there are more Atlas users today, a lot of them are just generic Red avatars who have more or less the same ideologically consistent left wing beliefs. They all just blend together into one giant poster in a way that older posters don’t seem to.

Is this also just an illusion? Additionally, has Atlas also just shifted to the left considerably since its inception?

[TheReckoning]

I think part of it is basic demographics. Considering that young people are, overall, >60% Dem-leaning by presidential vote, and that these kinds of forums skew heavily towards college educated (or those on their way), you're looking at a much more Dem-leaning demographic. This is even more relevant in an era where both parties see little in common on just about everything, but even less than on political issues that interest them. A structural imbalance this sharp on a forum in the era of Donald Trump (even post) is exceedingly difficult for Republicans to weather given what Trump did to the GOP. I don't think this forum would ever likely be 50/50, but it probably had a better shot at maintaining a closer split had Trump not run in 2015.

Xahar really hit the nail on the head better than anyone else could. To highlight that with a recent specific example of modern discourse:  The conservative opinion that Donald Trump, the man who leaned heavily on the DoJ to investigate his political rivals, attempted to rig the census to boost Republicans, attempted to cripple the USPS in order to make all-mail voting unfeasible (due to common conservative belief that more voters hurts them), and generally went about as far as any modern president has gone in leveraging federal power to win an election, and then sent a mob of supporters to storm the capitol to shut down the EC certification, only "lost" the election because of massive fraud centered exclusively around battleground states he lost, implying he actually won in a landslide but had it stolen from him. Democrats counter this by saying that there is literally no evidence of meaningful amounts of fraud and that nearly the entire Republican Party now believes this lie simply because Trump stated it, and it of course fed into their pre-existing beliefs that elections they lose are stolen. Where does this fit in on a forum centered around political cartography and election results? This is literally YouTube comments section-level drivel. It's hard enough to believe millions of people, in the context I described, fully believe this. Not only is it difficult to have hope for America if this is the level of stupidity and gullibility present into the electorate., but it makes debate and the general exchange of information between said people ridiculous.

I think that touches on what Xahar says - that mainstream GOP opinion has become nothing but endless cultural grievances, troubling levels of racism and and nonsense conspiracy theories. There just isn't a whole lot to talk about unless you're already a partisan Republican, and the level to which others would have to suspend their disbelief to talk to people who in one way or another supported Donald Trump for years without getting irritated is just too steep. This is part of the price that must be paid for putting such a belligerent hypocritical agitator into office.

A while back, I made a post asking if Atlas had less active users than it had in its earlier past. I found out that statistically, the answer was no- there are actually more active users now (although not by much).

I don't mean to get too off-topic, but more than double the active users is considerably more than 'not by much.'

Certainly not nearly as much as other corners of the internet.