Political Weirdos

Confidence comes from it being persuasive on its own to a non-trivial amount of people. Like the people who post on AITA wondering if they were an asshole because someone who was clearly doing them wrong was upset they reacted negatively to it. They do not employ critical thought but just capitulate to whoever sounds the most authoritative.

On reddit, they can bolster their credibility with voting brigades and then later added mod/admin corruption to censor opposing viewpoints, if it aligns with the money. Neither of those are as effective here because votes are public and there is no single admin to corrupt and would theoretically turn into a game of whack a mole (though I'm not sure the fediverse as we know it would survive it if they did manage to corrupt or coup the major instances).

In any case, the votes show that a bunch of the propaganda that would previously be eaten up elsewhere is failing to gain traction here. Though it's hard to say if they are doing it still because it hasn't sunk in that they need to pivot or if they do that to keep up an illusion that propaganda doesn't work here. I don't think they've had any luck on that particular topic, but I wonder about some of the more controversial topics here, like how much of that controversy is genuine and how much of it is pushed in bad faith.