Hacker News Reader

Comment by malvosenior | Hacker News Reader

That's pretty ridiculous (and I'm sure counter productive). If you look at /r/politics, it's as bad as The_Donald yet remains a default sub.

https://old.reddit.com/r/politics/

View on HN

I rarely drop in on T_D but when I last looked it was kinda ludicrous. I had a head-scratching Poe's law moment with most of the comments. /r/politics does have some unreasonable frothing-at-the-mouth comments but not ones that seem like they're trolling.

Perhaps a better counter-example would be /r/ChapoTrapHouse, which routinely promotes generalized violence against landlords and police.

Wasn't that subreddit also quarantined a while ago? No idea what its current status is, but when I tried to click-thru a post there a while back it wouldn't let me in.

Edit: the Chapo one is out of quarantine. Apparently there were a bunch of posts soliciting violence towards slaveholders and once the mods removed them they lifted the quarantine.

>bunch of posts soliciting violence towards slaveholders

Slaveholders? What kind of violence?

The memes were about shooting slave owners, both in the American context and others. Similar to the Dave Chapelle skit.

Are they credible threats? The likelihood in the T_D case seems a lot more high.

Why do you believe this to be the case?

Well there was the Charlottesville rally which was stickied to the top of /r/The_Donald

For one thing, Confederate slave owners are no longer among the living.

That's not relevant to anything in this thread. Please stay on topic.

Yes it is. Dont presume to tell me what to do, you tendentious pedant.

/r/politics isn't threatening to murder police offices unless you think "ACAB" and "40%" memes constitute threats of violence.

people in /r/politics are not advocating the murder of police officers doing their job

I've definitely seen people there advocating for the deaths of police officers, often in the same roundabout ways that violence is referred to in the far right subreddits

/r/politics has become a race-to-the-bottom of polarization, but it's nowhere near as bad as T_D; a civil defense of Trump on the former will be tolerated (even if downvoted/flamed), whereas any anti-Trump sentiment on the latter results in an instant ban.

One could perhaps attribute to the difference to a supposedly neutral framing vs. an explicitly partisan one; but much of the opposition to Trump (including from conservatives) has to do with flaunting democratic norms and other such "meta-politics", rather than policy positions, which I think is certainly fair game for the /r/politics hivemind to have an explicit opinion on.

users get rate-limited on r/politics if their comment is downvoted too far, effectively silencing anyone who doesn't go along with the hivemind.

>/r/politics has become a race-to-the-bottom of polarization, but it's nowhere near as bad as T_D; a civil defense of Trump on the former will be tolerated (even if downvoted/flamed), whereas any anti-Trump sentiment on the latter results in an instant ban.

The problem is /r/politics pretends to be a general politics subreddit, while /r/the_donald is explicitly just for Trump supporters.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com