I suspect this isn't going to accomplish much of anything and may even backfire. According to published statistics by Reddit as of this writing, this subreddit has 755k subscribers and over 45,000 members online right now. For comparison, the official politics subreddit has 5.2 million subscribers but fewer online members (42,000). r/the_donald has an extraordinarily high level of activity and engagement. So long as r/the_donald exists and is maintained, it can act as a sort of black hole so that official subreddits can be heavily moderated to support certain platforms, politicians, and advertisers. If it were actually shut down, though, the users there are so numerous and active that it probably wouldn't be possible to maintain r/politics or other official subreddits in their current moderated state.
Perhaps worse, this quarantined state -- which really doesn't accomplish or do anything of substance -- just creates a sense of martyrdom in the already extremely active userbase there. I suspect this will energize them 10-fold.
Hmmm... I think that the_donald is on its way to get banned. I wish I knew how much was real and what wasn't on that subreddit. I worry that the sentiment on that subreddit is genuine and by banning it we draw lines as to what is acceptable discourse that excludes a large segment of the population.
Of course I am not referring to the worst stuff on that subreddit, there is shit there, and much more than average, but if a sizeable part of the population has views like this is banning it really fair? I worry that banning public speech by a large segment of the population fractures the population that makes things even worse. And once fully separate it leads to even more echo chambering and divergent realities and more problems, not less.
But again that is assuming it is genuine and not trolls or foreign interference and it is truly sizable and not fringe.
> and r/the_donald drives too much traffic to reddit for them to seriously consider it for them
Ehh, it's not that, the sub is not really that active outside of a core group. Their user base isn't that involved either, none of the polls they post get any traction (that's why they stopped posting them) and for the most part frontpage posts get like 60-100 comments (unless it's a 'big' story). So it's not the traffic for sure, no matter how much they want to delude themselves about the 10 million invisible subs or whatever.
It's the press. Because like it or not they would be making a pretty big political statement by banning the sub, the main 'supporters club' for the currently sitting US president. Whatever ban reason will be picked apart and spun by either side of the press and the whole thing will become a big unmanageable mess, which is not something anyone would want to trigger. Better to wait it out until, for whatever reason, he's no longer the president. At that point I'm sure the rules regarding death threats, racism and witch hunting will be enforced a bit less leniently.
There are also several subs that I don't care for. We could get everyone to help put a list together and remove everything except for r/oddlysatisfying
Reddit tolerates subs that promote all out illegal behavior, so suspending the_donald for being obnoxious would be a bad move. If you have hate speech or whatever you handle that by banning the user not the sub.
Hmmm... I think that the_donald is on its way to get banned. I wish I knew how much was real and what wasn't on that subreddit. I worry that the sentiment on that subreddit is genuine and by banning it we draw lines as to what is acceptable discourse that excludes a large segment of the population.
Of course I am not referring to the worst stuff on that subreddit, there is shit there but if a sizeable part of the population has views like this is banning it really fair? I worry that banning public speech by a large segment of the population fractures the population that makes things even worse. And once fully separate it leads to even more echo chambering and divergent realities and more problems, not less.
But again that is assuming it is genuine and not trolls or foreign interference and it is truly sizable and not fringe.
There's a pretty big difference between the_donald banning people disagreeing and admins censoring /r/all. Reddit's biggest problem is abusive moderators censoring users of a community, or running a subreddit in a way contrary to how the vast majority of users want to use it.
That isn't really the case with the_donald. That subreddit has behaved in this way from the very start, and their bans over anything anti-Trump is sort of part of the joke/culture of the subreddit as a community. The vast majority of people in that sub want anti-Trump people banned. It's not a place for real discussion and the bans are pretty much just done for laughs. It's an example of a subreddit working well because of the moderators, when it's usually a subreddit working decently despite moderators stifling discussion and pushing their own agendas.
Additionally, bans on reddit are a joke. An account takes 5 seconds to make and even if admins want to IP ban you, it doesn't accomplish much. Censoring the most viewed listing of content on the entire site has a real, meaningful impact.
Interesting, /r/the_donald, which has, and continues to this day, explicitly called for perpetrating violence on minorities, people with opposing political views, democratic politicians, etc. etc ad nauseum, remains up and running to this day.
It is far and away worse than fph and incels in terms of content, but for some mystical reason that's totally not /u/spez vetoing any attempt to reign it in due to his conservative ideology, it has missed the banhammer.
It already did. Reddit banned virtually every "far" leftist sub when they banned the_donald. Stupidpol is probably the closest thing left and I guarantee you that will be banned within the year too
T_D is already banned from /r/all. During the election you'd see a T_D post bubble up to the top often enough that Command-F "The_Donald" would give at least 4 out of 200. Now there's not a single post in the top 300. And I don't think they necessarily ran afoul of vote manipulation rules and therefore got banned: the election demonstrates there are just a lot of vocal supporters.
It's something of a myth that T_D needs to be banned in order to appease advertisers. They keep to themselves.
Fortunately spez is smart. Bringing down the hammer on T_D could very well start a civil war. He seems to be wary of this.
You're right. The_Donald has been dead for months due to the above-mentioned restrictions on submissions, moderator removal, and moving to a different site.
If they're getting banned now it's for something that was done months ago.
For the longest time the argument for banning The_Donald wasn't to silence their voice. It was to tell their users to fuck off if they can't follow the site rules. They would constantly manipulate the vote counts or brigade smaller subs, more recently the spotlight has been about reddit's rules regarding advocating violence.
The problem was always that they hid behind the guise that they were the unofficial Donald Trump fanclub when there really never was an alternative one with a more moderate userbase. The_Donald is fine to exist but they seemingly refuse to stay in their playpen and ahve their fun, they need to sling mud throughout the rest of reddit while they're there.
And just to state it, I don't think TD is the only sub guilty of this behavior. I don't think its even an issue exclusive to politics but I really wish Reddit took a more hard look at their rule enforcement to make things clear and had clear transparency for their enforcement of the rules.
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