Machine learning for automatic fact correction seems like a nice answer, until you realize it would definitely go wrong, or be used to control opinion in an even stronger way.
Machine learning for automatic fact correction seems like a nice answer, until you realize it would definitely go wrong, or be used to control opinion in an even stronger way.
I think the Trump subreddit is very childish (seems to be intentional). But I hate the thought of websites like Reddit, FB, and Twitter engaging in practices that clearly and systematically try to reduce the visibility and legitimacy of one political viewpoint. What if the table was turned against the liberal viewpoint? I would be just as worried.
Things are different for the trump subreddit because it's a subreddit that has actively engaged in hostility against other subreddits and particular reddit users. Calls for brigading, slurs and harrassment of other users and admins, I've seen it all by now. It's reprehensible.
The main Trump subreddit would have long been banned and nuked out of existence if it weren't as popular as it is today. Right now, Reddit would face too much backlash if it outright banned the subreddit for continuing not to comply with the site rules. So it's understandable that the admins are trying to handle the situation somehow -- that's not "an effort to reduce [its] visibility", it's a compromise that doesn't involve removing the sub outright.
There's plenty of pro-trump subreddits which aren't involved in this nonsense because they're not spamming, harrassing, using bots etc. You don't hear about them because they get lost in the noise.
I'm certain what will happen is that the admins will keep adjusting the anti-voting ring algorithms until they effectively nerf all of the accounts that frequent the_donald and vote there.
Then they have a cover for any backlash because they didn't do anything specifically targeting the_donald, it just happens to be the case that the_donald "unfortunately got impacted" by the new algorithm due to the community's behavior.
But it's a difficult problem.
It's pretty crazy: I started on reddit about 10 years ago and it has noticeably changed in their attitude towards allowing political opunions that they do not agree with
On top of this, the Trump subreddit wasn't even legitimately getting most of it's posts to /r/all. They were actively trying to manipulate things in order to flood /r/all - making a sticky of new posts to get rapid upvotes, saying they would upvote any post on the subreddit, etc. The result was that the usefulness of /r/all went down, because a lot of it was just posts from one subreddit. The posts in the Trump subreddit also aren't innocuous. After the U.K. parliament attack, for instance, they made a post with the title "But hey, it wasn't all bad. In the end a Muslim was shot." that got ten thousand upvotes.
The resist subreddits strategy is one of width: lots of subreddits where they focus on one or 2 posts in their subreddits network to get visibility on the front page.
The resist strategy is more annoying because there are too many different subreddits that they control to effectively filter them out
One of the subreddits I frequent is for a liberal major city. The the_donald shills are vastly outnumbered, but every single post has a few of them popping up to argue in their disingenuous signature troll style (tu quoque, gish gallop, rinse + repeat).
I used to waste time arguing with them, but now I just down vote and move on. These people aren't interested in any kind of real debate; they just want to broadcast their Breitbart talking points over and over again.