I think it's more about the way they express their opinions, rather than the content of those opinions.
Posting in ALL CAPS, posting fake news or insults to other members of the community, posting to incite anger, etc. does not make for good discussion, and hurts the sense of community. That, and bringing that to other subreddits via brigading, etc.
Plus heaps of users browse /r/all and the the_donald community is so large, and the upvotes come so quickly (some insist it's upvoting bots since it's so fast) that the top of /r/all is often the_donald. Right now the nr. 1 post and another one on all are from the_donald.
We're making some headway with /r/EnoughTrumpSpam though, which is often at the top of /r/all too. Personally I enjoy the /r/all war between The_Donald and EnoughTrumpSpam. Everyone has a "safe place" to retreat to now, so it's all more funny than harmful. (I read The_Donald, and EnoughTrumpSpam lets me post similarly-styled comments and get massive upvotes, so I generally enjoy it. Kind of an Internet performance art.)
Reddit is generally best consumed by selecting small subreddits. I really recommend against /r/all unless you enjoy internet drama and subreddit wars.
Claiming that EnoughTrumpSpam is making headway just supports that the Reddit of today is a cesspool. I greatly miss the Reddit of 5 to 10 years ago. I'd love to see a new community site spring that figures out how to maintain quality and grow. And no, small subreddits aren't the answer. Seriously, Reddit about oh 8 years ago was just fantastic.
HN for the most part does a good job maintaining comment quality, but it obviously has some advantages that a general community site would not have.
Maybe it is large? I mean, around 50% of Americans voted for Donald. Why do you want to find some kind of conspiracy... like it not, racist or not, but this is half of your society.
The real sensible thing to do would be to recognize reddit as a platform for open and free discussion. saying the wrong things or in the wrong way should be as far away from the admins concerns as possible, so long as the org itself is not threatened. I think reddit is far too obsessed with /r/thedonald, to the point where their obsession is actually becoming tangibly harmful (see: this post)
Well, the whackjob subreddit was a threat to the org because they were organizing harassment and slander/libel from there and it is a matter of time until there is a lawsuit for damages
And one can argue that the trump subreddit does the same in light of Twitter allegedly not being bought out because of the hate and toxicity. If Reddit can't secure investors and funding because of notoriety, they have to do something.
If reddit is trying to find investors and funding after 10 years of being one of the top traffic sites on the internet, well, that might be a pretty big red flag right there.
(ex-reddit employee, employed during the changes) - we'd been designing changes to the algorithm to not be just a few top subreddits, and to instead show more variety well before r/the_donald even started; in fact, it was one of the first things Steve took on when he came back. There's no anti-r/the_donald conspiracy; there's much less discussion about them internally than they'd like to believe.
I believe there were two edits from the time /r/the_donald became popular, the first was a more general edit as you say, but the second if I recall correctly was all about keeping the /r/the_donald from the top. Though it seemed to have backfired because after the second edit I saw more of them on /r/all not less.
The reason pretty much all posts in the_donald are upvoted by users is due to the fact Clintons Correct the record was downvoting the_donald posts in hordes.
Again if Reddit would not have aligned themselves with one candidate named Clinton they probably wouldn't have this problem now.
Except this thread and subsequent news articles being published on this event contradict that statement. If no one cared then why did the ceo care enough to slight of hand users posts?
I'm specifically referring to the algorithm, not Steve's database admin rights. If you're talking about my "there's no big conspiracy" - all I know is that Steve claims to be a lone agent, and I believe him. But, hey, I'm not there, dunno.
They modified it before the election (during implied they did it and then put it back, and unfairly implies it was because they wanted to "suppress the truth" or whatever), and to be clear it was to combat the fact that the_donald readers upvote all their posts with a huge amount of fervour that doesn't align with other subreddits.
This fact is what got me to learn about RES's feature to hide select subreddits from r/all. It's helped Make Reddit Great Again(TM) (or at least suck less). Now, when reddit's scroll jumps with many 10s of missing posts, I know T_D has been blasting and I smile in willful ignorance of their contents.
Not that it wouldn't appear, but that it would be weighted more harshly against. Specifically because their community upvotes in higher proportions than others (either due to upvote bots or just an over-enthusiastic / fervent community), to such an extend that breaks algorithms, and so the relative worth of their posts is set to be lower than other subreddits.
For real numbers, there are ~300k the_donald subs. If you are not a sub (and use their subreddit style) they have intentionally stopped you from up or down voting their posts or comments, and if you are a sub there is only an upvote button (seriously, something something safe spaces…). Looking at their front page, every single post has between ~3000-6000 "points" (which, taking spam magic out of the mix, means roughly that many upvotes minus downvotes).
Contrasting that, there are 9 million DIY subs, and most of their posts on their front page have <100 points, where a couple of ourliers have ~5k.
Or, there are 11 million r/news subs, and their front page consists of the top 4 posts being in the ~6000 points range, while the rest of that page is more in the hundreds.
I've looked at the_donald a few times to escape my own filter bubble and it's very much censored - stuff like Trump's recent reneging on the persecution of Clinton didn't appear at all, and comments calling out Trump's lie about having saved that Ford factory from relocation to Mexico were promptly deleted. It's in their rules and that's part of the package, it's extremely controlled.
Use uneddit.com on the_donald if you want to laugh.
But the point is, the_donald is obviously biased - it's literally in their name. On the other hand, r/pol is supposed to be politics in general, ideally free of bias, so censorship there is much more deplorable. I wouldn't care if r/leftwing_pol had a bias, but r/pol should be bias-free.
That was the whole point of The_Donald – to protest the perceived abuses of other subs by doing the same thing more blatantly.
That's what they mean when say they're a "free speech" subreddit: they're protesting against restrictions on free speech, they aren't providing a place for free speech.
That is just ridiculous. Creating false stories, calling out anyone who doesnt agree with them with insulting names, going on witch hunts etc is not protesting the restrictions on free speech. This only strengthens the resolve of people who want to restrict free speech even more.
That's the kind of site they're running though. Make your own community with relatively lax rules and freedom of speech, even if the speech is low brow. Kind of like some of the *chans.
If that's not what they want to have (as its clearly making the CEO on edge), why not enforce some strict rules? The people they don't like will simply flock to other communities that will allow it and it becomes their problem.
I agree. I get that free speech is important, but humans on the internet are vile. That is a fact and it hasn't changed in the decades of online communities we have trialed.
Only communities small enough, or moderated enough, to not be interesting to a troll or nefarious person are spared.
The idea of a completely self governed haven of mass free speech is a wondeful one, but no community large enough stays uncorrupted. It has never worked.
It is the ideals and application of those ideals through moderation that make any community bearable, just like in real life.
If I am to be part of a community I would rather it moderated, otherwise the people of the internet ruin all things in time.
I just want to have useful conversations, not circlejerk over freedom of speech while being interrupted by adolescent screaming.
Just to clarify, I believe free speech communities should exist and I am glad they do. I just find that the trolls inevitably take over, and that's no fun. I feel like reddit is currently battling this, and their decision seems to be to hold course, moderate more, and appeal to advertisers.
I disagree. The beauty of reddit is that it has subcommunities. That way, like-minded prople can flock together and even enforce strict censorship rules that make their community better, and reddit as a whole can still be a bastion of free speech (because they allow such diverse communities). Too bad that's not how it actually is...
That is the idea definitely. It mostly works too, just like you said it's a diverse group of subcommunities all with their own rules. But they found that free speech platform wide meant some truly nefarious subcommunities could exist on their infrastructure, these subcommunities didn't self regulate enough. Quite reasonably they have decided they don't want that to happen and have stepped up the platform wide censorship.
The contention seems to be where they draw the line, and just how free their version of free is.
I got an idea. Current machine learning techniques should be advanced enough to detect trolls. What if we have a community that is completely moderated by an unsupervised AI?
The good thing is that the AI can be completely open: how is it trained? what are the parameters? This AI can still have bias, but that bias will be obvious to anyone joining this community.
> Current machine learning techniques should be advanced enough to detect trolls.
So your idea to counteract people playing psychological games on others is to put something without the common sense of a three year old in charge of moderation. That's just glorious.
That you think they're actually expressing their political views instead of shitposting to rile up actual trump voters while pissing off the rest of the internet is fairly naive.
Fair enough. Your question sounded leading to me and given the atmosphere i failed to provide benefit of the doubt.
That particular sub-reddit is a mixture of real people, and trolls who pose as trump supporters to egg the supporters on, as well as scaring and pissing off people against trump. The result being that with little effort and prodding on their side they get to see glorious internet mudfights.
However due to the way they're doing it, it's hard to tell which is which. That puts reddit admins in a bind and they have to balance things. Do they keep distance and let subtle trolls go unscathed? Do they take harsher measures and hit actual trump supporters? How much of this spills over into other reddits? How to handle the /all pollution? Letting it get in there just increases the mudfights, but if they take steps they'll be accused of censorships.
The bigger issue is with subreddits like r/politics that you would think to be at least somewhat non partisan but was controlled by correct the record during election.
A couple months ago I was on the bus, and a religious person started preaching. Loudly. It was really annoying. I asked him to stop, and he hid behind some reference to his constitutionally protected rights. I did nothing, but I really wanted to do something. A certain subreddit reminds me of preacher duds on the bus.
I wish I had better tools to deal with assholes. Savvy leadership can come up with clever solutions sometimes, but it'd be nice to somehow reduce the need to be clever.
> As much as we try to maintain a good relationship with you all, it does get old getting called a pedophile constantly.
constant fighting and complaining with other subs as well (which normally they would just shut down, but (un)fortunately, the r/the_donald mods are doing all they can do prevent that being needed, so its a constant minor (but active) problem, instead of being a large one-time problem that they can just ban)
Its the whole concept of poisoning the well, you have some people acting bad, and then the other people act bad in return, and then everyone watching just feels bad for watching it, and it makes everyone feel shit
So you think wiping out a subreddit community is reasonable because some members of that community do idiotic things? People from a subreddit as large as The_Donald aren't some homogenous group.
I think there's also an argument to be made that acceptable behavior is socially learned, and having others reinforce destructive behavior is a form of legitimacy.
