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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I hated the_donald plenty, mostly because they banned people for no reason or for stupid reasons. Which is the exact same offense that Reddit at large committed, but at least the_donald people were upfront about it.
I think we're on the same page overall here, just that I never put any faith in the sanctity of Reddit's database
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.
Reddit worked hard to keep alt-right viewpoints on the site, but subs like r/the_donald were so nasty that they had no choice. They also banned liberal subs at the same time.
Let's not act like Reddit is banning subs that discuss trickle down economics or debate the merits of a smaller government.
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.”
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.
Another fun factoid about The_Donald's love of free speech is that they immediately and permanently banned anyone who disagreed with anything said on that sub. Good riddance
/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.
The core of Reddit has become rotten not from the_donald; the site admins are 100% at fault. Trying to make their site 100% advertiser friendly has subsequently killed all transparency in what votes do, how subreddits are ranked, and killed a lot of discourse that was not corporate palatable.
I still enjoy the smaller subreddits. Unfortunately anything political becomes brigaded, but things like /r/gamingsuggestions and local city subreddits still make the site worthwhile to me.
Prior to banning /r/The_Donald, Reddit created /r/popular as a default alternative to /r/all to prevent posts from /r/The_Donald from making it to the front page. Interestingly, they didn't ban any of the other obnoxious political subreddits that people were complaining about.
(Not a Trump fan or even right-leaning, just pointing out that Reddit administrators went to great lengths to suppress a subreddit they disliked long before banning it.)
I actually don't think that Reddit wanted T_D gone - the Subreddit had a massive amount of subscribes and generated activity all over the site. It surely was controversial, but in the end it probably helped Reddit more than it damaged it.
It just seems that Reddit has a policy of cutting subreddits loose once they get mainstream media attention, in order to avoid overly negative press. It happened to T_D, WatchPeopleDie and quite a few other Subreddits; basically all bans came after they went into the spotlight despite existing (in some case, peacefully) for years. To me it seems that Reddit is totally fine with hosting controversial opinions as long as it doesn't generate press.
Indeed. I think the comment editing (and immediate capitulation afterwards) was horrible, but the fact that they allowed the_donald to continue to break their own rules was way worse. They constantly would dox, harass, downvote brigade (in posts stickied by mods), and in general act entirely in bad faith. Other subreddits were banned for much, much less.
Either they wanted their advertising money or were simply supportive of their platform/actions, but eventually it was enough for me to leave Reddit entirely.
ironically, the_donald is just one subreddit while there are literally dozens of specifically anti-the_donald subreddits that people complain about having to unfollow
Hard agree. I deleted my reddit account over the fact that they kept letting T_D exist despite its obvious flouting of the rules around brigading (they arranged brigades on discord and took over other subreddits, repeatedly, after being warned) and how it was an increasingly obvious alt-right funnel full of some of the absolute worst people on the internet.
They ultimately closed the subreddit about a year later, but I had already deleted my account at that point. I was better off in the end though, as the entire site is now just a giant meme dump with no redeeming qualities (it felt like all subreddits eventually saturate with memes on their main page as a function of their popularity, and it gets tiresome and same-ey after a while.)
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