I’m in the US and “lefty” might mean something different for me than it does for you. Where I live and the sites I go on - have leftys on there but no, they never use the term tankie.

As I mentioned, it’s used in discussion circles with leftists beyond center left (i.e. someone who’s more left than Bernie Sanders): Anarchists, Marxists, Maoists, etc. Lemmy might be the only site you go to that has a sizable proportion of these.

On Reddit, if you go to places like r/anarchism, r/socialism, r/stupidpol, you get to see it being used.

Annoying is an opinion yes, but I’m saying its annoying because of how often it is brought up.

It’s brought up a lot here because there are a lot of them on lemmy. You’d never hear people around your neighborhood complain about something that doesn’t happen in your neighborhood.

Maybe you are not seeing as many because your instance might block them. But I see them all the time is news articles about Ukraine or North Korea.

I see that there’s a discussion thread that goes on about this, not gonna get involved on that.

He didn’t read your username, the guy he was arguing with when you chose to butt in did call it a buzzword and the guy you replied to didn’t realize you were some unrelated person, so I feel your sardonic emboldening of “I didn’t call it a buzzword” here is quite undeserved on his part. Honest mistake.

And it gets brought up a lot becuse they’re everywhere here, they seep out from lemmygrad and hexbear and infect poor innocent instances who do not want to be constantly annoyed by them, your problem with the "over"use of the word tankie is in essence created by the tankies here on lemmy infesting people who would otherwise be just fine not saying “fuck off tankie” to a tankie that won’t fuck off.

Not that you mentioned who you see as causing the problem, but just to shed a little light on it, by complaining about people using the perjorative you’re essentially like the teacher punishing the victim for being fed up enough to finally hit the bully back who has been hitting the victim while the teacher has their back turned.