Meta Question
Do the demographics of Fluther skew white and middle class?
I’ve noticed repeatedly that Fluther has a bias amongst both users and sysops which seems to skew liberal (ie/ 5 degrees left of centre socially and economically authoritarian). This would account for why there are disproportionate numbers of female users here compared to other Q&A sites (which tend to skew conservative), since women are disproportionately liberal.
Internet users are a self-selecting minority who have enough money and leisure time to park their arses in front of a computer with Internet access (which accounts for the wildly disproportionate number of Libertarians; a poll conducted online during the last election showed Ron Paul would have won the Amerikan election had Internet users been the sole voters), which tends to skew them bourgeois, which in turn skews them white as a result of systemic racism.
I’m guessing this bias is not visible to most people here, for the same reason that fish don’t notice the ocean. To someone like me, who is far outside the socioeconomic class of the average user here, the bias is glaringly apparent in nearly every series of questions and answers.
I’d be interested to know whether people here have noticed this bias. When you give your answer, it would also be useful to know your sex, race, and socioeconomic class. If my guess is correct, those who see the bias will fall outside of the gestalt here.
(Note: I am well aware that middle class people don’t really don’t understand what “poor” means. Eating ramen in college does not make you poor. Having only one car, missing a mortgage payment, or not being able to buy a mocha soy latte with chocolate sprinkles every morning is not poverty. Unless you regularly miss meals and have to do without things like medication and weather-appropriate clothing, don’t say that you’re poor. Because you’re not. True story: I was on a bus once, listening to some loudmouth rant to his friend about “welfare bums” and how they were bleeding him dry. I asked him if he knew how much welfare paid. He said he did not. I asked him to guess. His guess was: “A thousand dollars? Every two weeks?” When I told him that welfare paid $500 a month – in a city where the average rent for a 1 bedroom apartment is $850 – he scoffed and refused to believe me, saying it’s not possible to survive on that. People who have never been poor have no conception of what the word really means, or that people actually live this way.)
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