You say this as if the members of r/the_donald are just regular ol' folks just talkin' about their candidate. This was/is one of the most rule-breaking subreddits on the entire website, which has only survived until this day due to preferential treatment. Subreddits have been completely banned for much, much less.
If anything, the_donald has gotten preferential treatment compared to everyone else. They've routinely broke rules and ignored warnings from admins. If any other subreddit did what they've done it'd be banned instantly. Instead Reddit keeps giving r/T_D leeway because they don't want to seem biased.
Lots of people are complaining about r/The_Donald in this thread, wishing that it would be banned. The casual attitude with which people are advocating censorship of Trump supporters is troubling.
They claim that it's polluting the rest of the site. It's not a default subscription, so it's not on the front page. It's at most a handful of the posts on any page of r/all, which by the way, almost no one browses according to Reddit admins themselves. Yes, the moderators of The_Donald ban opposing viewpoints, just like moderators in other partisan subreddits do. It is advertised as a 24/7 Trump rally, and that's what it is.
They claim that the subreddit is racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. If you took a moment to even read it, you'd find post after post expressing the OPPOSITE sentiment, advocating for equality for all regardless of race, sex, and orientation. The problem is that the definition that the left is using of "racism" has been broadened to include basically anything they don't agree with.
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.
There have been exactly ZERO r/The_Donald posts on the frontpage, ever. It is not and never was a default subreddit.
You are talking about r/all, which almost no one browses according to the Reddit admins themselves. And as of a few months ago, at most 3-4 posts from any one subreddit are on each page of r/all.
Why exactly should they be banned? I can't help but suspect that the real reason is that you want to silence their politics.
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.
I'm banned from /r/The_Donald, and am/was a #NeverTrump person, and I find the subreddit to be hilarious and one of the few things Reddit has going for it right now. Everything is basically what people post on Facebook, the original content of Reddit is sparse.
You've left out the fact that The_Donald was banned from reddit for repeatedly and egregiously breaking site wide rules on harassment, brigading, and issuing death threats. Despite the mods efforts to keep it clean the subreddit was a cesspit that was only getting more extreme.
I don't agree with other subreddits automatically banning people based on post history, but I can see why the subreddit was banned, along with the left leaning subreddit chapotraphouse which engaged in similar behaviour.
The Donald would have been deleted under the old leadership too...
They got in hot water not for supporting Trump (there are plenty of pro-Trump subreddits) but actively breaking the most basic rules of Reddit, maybe you should actually look at their history.
Spamming the same images to the subreddit, interfering with other subreddits, trying to out whistleblowers in federal cases, gaming the content discovery system with sticky posts.
I'm tired of this narrative that The Donald was banned for censorship reasons, they were banned for being a virus that was infecting Reddit.
They could have been supporting the Dalai Lama and their behavior would have been against the basic expectations of Reddit, and that's exactly why they were quarantined/banned
In true fashion of people trying to push a made up point, every reply is nitpicking over which one of their many incredible misbehaviors was the deal breaker, from doxxing people to brigading other subreddits, instead of actually providing a rebuttal
It doesn't matter which one broke the camels back, anyone who can read their history of behavior and pretend Reddit didn't have a reason to take action, even by those 2012 rules, is in denial.
Removing the_donald sub was ridiculous especially when compared to equally if not more objectionable rhetoric on main subs like /r/politics. Additionally if you want to get rival subs banned on reddit you just post and report objectionable material icognito. Reddit is a dumpster fire of juvenile , woke idiocy now and I rarelt visit anymore. That said some of the content on the_donald was just as idiotic but if you are going to allow one you have to allow the other.
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.
the_donald made it very clear that they were a subreddit trying to mimic a Trump campaign rally. You could even be a conservative, mildly critical of Trump's policy and still get banned. It never claimed to be unbiased and proudly proclaimed the opposite.
On the other hand, we expect some level of fairness and professionalism from Reddit and its administrators.
You’re acting as if the_donald and their sister subs didn’t make their own bed with gaming the system and brigading every other day. They blatantly and regularly violated Reddit’s ToS, but Reddit lingered on that decision to ban for years over some vague notion of being a “free speech site,” which they never really were and don’t have to be, as well as to pretend they were “even-handed,” which they don’t have to be when your community exists to disrupt any and all perceived “enemies.”
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.
The Trump subreddit (r/The_Donald) prohibits any criticism of Trump or his supporters. It's purely there for celebrating all things Trump. I suspect it has the highest number of banned users of all the subs. The eager use of the ban hammer means you can't ignore the rules.
Lol why does it not surprise me to see this argument here?
/r/the_donald was a subreddit and it had its own rules -- which mandated being a supporter of trump.
You're thinking of a different subreddit, maybe /r/politics as an example, that are pretending to foster a broad discussion and selectively suppressing opinions it doesnt like.
/r/the_donald should have been closed a long time ago, due to their users and their mods breaking the rules (hate speech encouragement, mainly) that the rest of subreddits have to respect. Reddit has a dark incentive to keep it open, because it's a very popular community that helps Reddit make money, via ads and Reddit Gold.
reply