What’s /r/the_donald, and how did it »then happen«?
It follows the "safe-space" "you're not allowed to dissent" model pioneered by some "leftist" subs, and will ban people for having perfectly legitimate dissent.
It managed to exploit some loopholes in how reddit works to take-over the front page. The most interesting one was "stickying" new posts so they were shown on their front page. They did this to a new post pretty frequently. This let them
* Coordinate which posts got to the front page of reddit
and
* Exploited the reddit algorithm for determining "hotness"
For a while, 8 out of every 10 posts on the front page were from /r/the_donald.
It marks the first major incidence of the community engineering tools (that I believe were pioneered by subs like /r/shitRedditSays) being used by the right.
It used to be the front page while logged out was /r/all, but that was replaced with /r/popular a while back (which has a completely non-transparent filter applied to it)
Exactly -- and why I lasted only a week on Reddit. It's nothing but a collection of echo chambers. No matter how sincere and thorough I would try and make arguments, if they're weren't in line with the herd I'd get downvoted to oblivion (no counter argument except insults) if not outright banned (never had been banned before). It's no fun participating when the only accepted input is "me, too!"
Warning: once you see it, you can't un-see it.
Similar to another one in this thread saying "it's just the same as /r/politics", it's important to normalise the_donald in the eyes of potential subscribers and to imply that what goes on in there is no different than in any other political subreddit. The difference, of course, could not be starker.
No "these people are evil" is not an acceptable answer.
The people who voted for trump may be wrong, but they are still perfectly understandable humans, doing what they think is right. Or at least what they think they have to do.
It's understandable that people who post in the_donald are heavily biased and even think they are doing the right thing.
This American Life had a podcast where they interviewed these people at the DeploraBall, and one of them even said that he "Memed Donald Trump into the presidency". For some it seems this is part of their identity.
Even though they are generally heavily downvoted, I worry that their one-liner soundbites and gotchas will reach more people with weaker critical thinking skills.
They also game the reddit voting system so their stories and comments are constantly being featured in /r/all -- so much so reddit had to take action.
Their purpose is to troll, and they are damn good at it.
So, even though a massive amount of their userbase pushes for genocide against "Mdslimes" or "Kbabs", Reddit admins let them exist.