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Comment by nilkn | Hacker News Reader

I suspect this isn't going to accomplish much of anything and may even backfire. According to published statistics by Reddit as of this writing, this subreddit has 755k subscribers and over 45,000 members online right now. For comparison, the official politics subreddit has 5.2 million subscribers but fewer online members (42,000). r/the_donald has an extraordinarily high level of activity and engagement. So long as r/the_donald exists and is maintained, it can act as a sort of black hole so that official subreddits can be heavily moderated to support certain platforms, politicians, and advertisers. If it were actually shut down, though, the users there are so numerous and active that it probably wouldn't be possible to maintain r/politics or other official subreddits in their current moderated state.

Perhaps worse, this quarantined state -- which really doesn't accomplish or do anything of substance -- just creates a sense of martyrdom in the already extremely active userbase there. I suspect this will energize them 10-fold.

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I thought that would have happened too when other subreddits were quarantined or banned (and it briefly did when fatpeoplehate was banned) but honestly the banned discourse does not show up on the front page or /r/all, as they intended.

However, because of this, Reddit is becoming increasingly sterile, single-minded, and most importantly ad-friendly to the point where its fairly difficult to have an honest discussion about anything remotely controversial.

Unfortunately their selective banning of communities that I would associate with the "far-right" has seriously hurt any attempt to migrate away from Reddit (specifically Voat.co is unbearable for me trying to participate).

I don't know if there will ever be a straw to break the camels back, but I have been actively searching for reddit alternatives for years and have not found a truly viable replacement.

The FPH folks seem to have moved to /r/fatpeoplestories. A similar subreddit all things considered, just a lot less hateful (and not focused on the sort of doxxing that was ubiquitous on FPH), which is pretty much what we'd want I guess. Is a similar dynamic plausible for T_D? Not very clear.

> its fairly difficult to have an honest discussion about anything remotely controversial.

Like most media companies, reddit wants to promote its political agenda. It's natural and common (and expected of the traditional media), but since reddit doesn't pay for their own content, can only be done with censorship.

So they're making it difficult to have an honest discussion about anything they have an opinion about.

That's particularly concerning because reddit seems to be a natural monopoly, having operated for years with no successful competition. Perhaps this censorship will be the impetus that finally allows some competition to break through.

The best reddit alternatives are smaller subreddits. Ditch the defaults.

Voat had so much potential... shame how it is today. I still post almost everyday like I did so many years ago to provide actual content rather than vitriol but it's like shouting into a storm.

Still some possibility there, the leadership is open to fairness and free speech. It's the user base that has rotted.

In my experience when Reddit banned the more toxic subreddits many of the other subreddits I actually did frequent became better. I think the people who would be in those subreddits are already there and when there are bans in subreddits some of the people leave and the community is better for it.

Those subreddits tended to be very small and inactive in comparison. r/the_donald is one of the most active communities on the entire website.

The thing is that those people are also on other subreddits, people generally don't frequent just one. So those people always bring in Reddit to comment on the Donald is also leasing to more engagement on other subreddits. It's possible that the Donald would organize more and be more of an issue in other subreddits but that wasn't how it worked in the past.

The_donald is notoriously bot driven, the online user count is garbage.

It’s not the only subreddit with large bot populations, I’m just saying it’s one of the more toxic influential ones.

Is there actual evidence of this? My experience is those in r/the_donald claim the numbers are artificially deflated by Reddit, and those on the other side claim r/the_donald is mostly bots. I suspect both views are wrong.

Unlike most subreddits, their upvote count to comment ratio is really out of whack.

Usually a pretty reliable sign of botism. You see it on corporate driven posts on movie promotions a decent amount too. (Along with some pretty lame top voted comments)

The subreddit's culture for years has been based on aggressively upvoting everything posted there. This started back when it was small and the community tried to get pro-Trump posts on the front page of Reddit, which invariably caused a lot of drama. So I don't think this means anything.

Yes, I agree, their culture is contrary to the basic functioning of an online forum.

Your position seems to have backtracked from concern over bots to... disliking lots of upvotes within a community. Forgive me if I think you're being disingenuous with this latest statement.

Reflexively upvoting everything that comes into a sub is a bad cultural value. It may even break reddits' usage policy.

I'm not backtracking, you're the one who brought up that reflexively upvoting might be indistinguishable from botlike behavior. It's a feature (cultural value), not a bug.

The fact that the activity has been happening for years doesn't invalidate that it could be bot related. Also the fact that reddit admins had to change their site algorithms to remove it from aggregated results, because posts were being gamed to the front page, implies that the behavior was not normal human traffic.

> Also the fact that reddit admins had to change their site algorithms to remove it from aggregated results, because posts were being gamed to the front page, implies that the behavior was not normal human traffic.

It implies it's unusual traffic, but it does not imply it's inhuman traffic -- doubly so because the difference has already been explained in a way that doesn't require invoking bots.

Somewhat amusingly, after r/the_donald discovered it could push pro-Trump memes onto r/all by making every post on the subreddit about upvoting content, some other subreddits managed to pull off the same stunt in protest.

Would they be that obvious? There was an absence of actual discussion on the_donald threads I read. Just agreement or telling dissenters they were idiots. It was weird but could that be because of bots or just a lower level of discourse.

They’ve not paid much cost for their behavior in the past so why would they change?

Anyone who was not 100% supportive of everything Trump did/does was removed through banning.

And you think that doesn’t happen in liberal subreddits? I’ve been banned from /politics /News /worldnews all for disagreeing with people. All near instant bans. I’ve even been banned from non political forums because I shared unpopular view points, such as “femisnism has hurt dating dynamics”. Yes that got me banned. So you know full well wrongful and politically motivated bans happen all the time from both sides. So it’s a moot point.

/news and /worldnews are hardly liberal. /news leans pretty conservative on many days.

At one point reddit had an inconsistency between the normal interface and the one shown to advertisers. This revealed that the counts in the normal interface were being suppressed by a factor of 10, likely related to keeping the posts off of /r/all.

I guess an alternate explanation is a 10x inflation in the advertising interface, but that would be defrauding the advertisers.

I swear there are bots on the news channels run by various interest groups. But never have been able to prove it.

The 45,000 members of T_D online now might have something to do with the quarantine. When it reached 750K it was just 5,715 "winners" online https://old.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/bzau5s/we_just_...

Great point. We'll have to see if it goes down over the next few weeks. My fear and prediction is this will cause it to go up by dramatically enhancing the censorship lore that r/the_donald has been increasingly invoking for a while now.

A lot of those subscribers are sock puppet accounts though, and the quarantine function on reddit prevents accounts without email verification from posting or voting, so there's going to be a hit in activity. There are no quarantined subreddits that have come back from being quarantined, regardless of size, so I think that it's safe to lean towards this subreddit slowly withering away.

So we can push those users out of thier censorship-laden safe space, and into the rest of the 'public' so to speak, thus they can be engaged and in cases of rule-breaking, reported.

TD bans lots of people. When you are banned it doesn't unsubscribe you which is why their typical ratio of subs to active users was very low.

On the contrary. Deplatforming fascism works[1]. This removes a small number of tools that they use to recruit. It is step in the right direction.

1. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bjbp9d/do-social-media-ba...

Censorship is a step in the direction of fascism. You have become what you hate most.

How is a business censoring their own networks related to fascism? Is the downvote button fascist? This is the classic "paradox of tolerance."

Why is it more acceptable when a business does it than when a government does it?

The same reason if I go to a stranger's house and start debating with them about my own political opinions they are free to kick me out. Free enterprise and private property are generally considered fundaments of modern civil society. Im all ears if you have an argument to the contrary.

We're not talking about people's houses.

In the context of business, California has already made that argument for me, making it illegal to discriminate based on political views.

> We're not talking about people's houses.

I'm talking about private property and the right to do with it as one pleases so long as it doesn't infringe on the rights of others. When a group of people create a business this doesn't magically go away.

> In the context of business, California has already made that argument for me, making it illegal to discriminate based on political views.

Certain protected classes are legally protected from discrimination, yes. To my knowledge "advocating violence" is not a political view; this is what the r/The_Donald is being quarantined for.

Here's the original story accusing TD of advocating violence:

https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2019/06/24/A-pro-Trump...

Featuring comments with as few as 1 point.

Those are just an excuse to further restrict a community they've restricted several times in the past, without admitting it's for political reasons.

Okay, you've signalled that they do do it, but now there are not enough points of data. How many points of data is your burden of proof, before you agree?

"They"?

Those are comments from a few fringe users, buried so deep that most people never saw them.

Is that a reason to punish a community of hundreds of thousands of people?

That's like quarantining an entire city because a few people there are violent. That's not a good solution in the real world or online.

So is the burden of proof that the people commenting about inciting violence have to be "main" users before it's a problem?

What's your criteria for that? You're being pretty slippery right now by dodging questions.

I'd say handle it like we handle crime in the real world. Punish the offender, not the community.

Now will you answer a similar question? I spent a couple minutes looking through a single post on r/politics and found a couple of violent comments:

> Just do a 180 turn on gun reforms. They’ll take an armed population more seriously.

https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/c5og99/there_are_...

> It's because protests don't achieve anything. ... Riots on the other hand...

https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/c5og99/there_are_...

Do you think r/politics should be quarantined because of those two posts?

Unless that was an extremely unusual post, there are undoubtedly many more. How many more would make you want a quarantine?

That isn't a burden of proof though, which is what the question asked for.

You're basically saying that Reddit should never ban subreddits, which means that you don't even have a burden of proof for banning a subreddit. This means no matter what you're always against banning a subreddit on a privately owned website, yet you fawn at other reasons to justify it (fringe users, not enough data points, etc.)

Your proposed solution instead is that admins should police every user, when mods fail to, which just isn't scalable. Especially when the barrier to just creating a new account to bypass the ban is so low.

Privately owned doesn't mean they can do anything they want.

We've allowed privately owned companies to control the means of communication, without regulation.

It's time to bring back the laws that limited the phone companies and big three TV networks interference in politics, updated for the Internet.

That's not entirely correct. California makes it illegal for an _employer_ to discriminate against an _employee_ based on their political views. It does not make it illegal for businesses to discriminate against _customers_ based on their political views.

Companies are not free to choose with whom they do business. There are many constraints, not the least of which is it being illegal to refuse to do business with someone because of their race, sex, sexual orientation, and, in California, political opinions. Free enterprise and private property might have been fundamentals of civil society in the past, but that ship has long sailed since then.

> Companies are not free to choose with whom they do business.

For the most part, yes they are. For instance, every online business has a Terms of Service detailing many situations in which they will or will not do business with you. Race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, age, etc. are specific situations in which governments/society have decided that its worth restricting this freedom for the greater good. The existence of these relatively few exceptions does not negate their overall freedom to do business with whomever they please.

The quarantine isn't based off of political orientation though, otherwise r/republican and r/conservative would also be quarantined.

Allegedly it's based off a few fringe comments that Media Matters found, with mostly single digit points:

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/c5sbpm/reddit_q...

Those aren't representative of the sub. What's the real reason?

I don't think anyone has a scientific answer on what is "representative" of the sub besides it's clear support for the president, but honestly it doesn't seem out of line with my experiences of the_donald.

Thank goodness we don't run the country based on possibly biased anecdotes

Fortunately, reddit has not yet achieved statehood.

Wouldn’t it be invasive to demand that anyone handle anyone else’s business? There’s two freedoms being negotiated there, and the law origins basically boil down to — by emphasizing the business owners freedom the market should be able to support a solution for the other (or you go build that business, if it is needed). Total freedom in that system is higher than in the one that demands anyone do business with anyone.

R_TheDonald is a forum on someone’s product, there’s a low barrier erected here, they could go buy a url and some servers and continue their speech.

> Wouldn’t it be invasive to demand that anyone handle anyone else’s business?

Maybe, but it's a very common demand.

Because the business is choosing who they use their resources to rebroadcast under their name and the government has a monopoly on violence.

The government is not guaranteeing that they will rebroadcast whatever you want to say, they are just not giving you consequences for saying it.

Businesses aren't imposing consequences of violence on speech, they just are choosing not to be a part of it.

Someone not listening to you is not censorship.

It's a step in the direction to fascism, that doesn't mean it is fascist. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The downvote button is part of a ranking algorithm from the userbase, deboosting is part of the ranking algorithm from the host. Would you like it if a "platform" tied an anchor on your success/views because they didn't agree with your opinions? Since you believe in the paradox of tolerance do you agree that the US shouldn't let Islamic migrants come due to their belief in vile things such as throwing gays off roofs?

The USSR heavily censored content, were they stepping closer to fascism? I don't think you're using facism in the right context here, maybe you meant something else?

When you start from democracy, censorship becoming prevalent is a step towards fascism, authoritarianism, socialism, communism, technocracy, etc.

As someone else pointed out, Reddit's not a democracy so they're not starting as one either. Unless you count their private corporation as a democracy of sorts, but then they're most likely acting in their shareholders' interests. Maybe you meant the word authoritarian instead of fascist?

The US is a democratic republic and they are a US based company, so they should lean towards the laws under which they exist. I'm not playing this semantics game with you.

Has Reddit as a company inacted violence or imprisonment against anyone on /r/the_donald ? That's what government censorship consists of.

If you're not playing a semantics game then when why are you calling Reddit the United States?

> It's a step in the direction to fascism, that doesn't mean it is fascist.

Insisting a private business promote any and all content from anyone whatsoever, no matter how abhorrent or anti-social, in a specific way, seems like a bigger step in the wrong direction. Content is removed from Reddit every day for violating various subreddit policies; the only thing changing here is the way /r/The_Donald is presented with the rest of the site.

> Since you believe in the paradox of tolerance do you agree that the US shouldn't let Islamic migrants come due to their belief in vile things such as throwing gays off roofs?

This has nothing to do with the topic at hand.

Not necessarily. The Soviet government was engaged in significant censorship and was not fascist. Same with the CCP currently.

Fascism implies censorship, but censorship does not imply fascism.

You are correct that fascists aren't the only ones who censor. But that doesn't make it something that should be a normal part of a free, democratic society. (Your Soviet and CCP examples highlight that, which may have been your point.)

I said a step in the direction to fascism. I never asserted that censorship itself requires fascism. They usually come hand in hand though.

Deplatforming is to toxic mindsets as an immune system is to disease.

That's a good parallel actually. There are immune system diseases where the system kills the good cells too because it can't discriminate correctly. You're right!

You do realize that /r/the_donald immediately bans anyone that isn't 100% on board with the agressive propoganda right?

Well yeah: It's a sub-reddit for supporters only. Not an uncommon thing on Reddit. Everyone can lurk, but only supporters can post/comment.

It's the same as r/politics, just for right-wingers.

I disagree completely. This is the same thing as the paradox of tolerance. If you want a tolerant society, you have to be intolerant against intolerance. If you want a non-fascist society you need to be fascist against fascism. Otherwise the intolerant/fascist side gains a platform and turns the community intolerant or fascist overall.

"If you want a non-fascist society you need to be fascist against fascism." This statement says it all, the ends justify the means. Sounds like every terrible dictator or authoritarian society that has existed on the Earth so far.

You could also say that “not listening to speech you despise is a step in the direction of fascism,” and it’s an equally empty statement. I mean, I guess it’s technically true. But it also means that literally everybody is a virulent and unrepentant fascist in their social lives.

Remaining unbiased in the secular/science domain is critical to the future of humanity. If you are going to be biased, please at least do your research. Don't just browse twitter and think you are informed.

These kinds of comments make me so disappointed. You are out of touch. Labeling people that you don’t understand as “fascist” is going to lead you to a shithole.

Get out of your bubble, arm yourself with some compassion, and go try and understand what motivates people to disrupt the status quo. Most trump supporters hate fascism. You are deluding yourself by tossing a mr. yuck sticker on people you don’t understand.

I'm not GP, but your straw man is just as disappointing.

- Nobody here is saying trump supporters are fascists.

- Nobody here is even saying that the_donald subreddit represents all of Trump supporters.

So why are you playing that card?

GP is talking about the effectiveness of the deplatforming of hate speech in context to a subreddit that has been reported as inciting violence. The same subreddit that supported the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally that resulted in a Neo-Nazi murdering Heather Heyer.

Whether or not you think that extends to all Trump supporters, and are disappointed by that, is your own inference. Don't attack GP because of it though.

Literally the next comment (at the time I read this, by asdfgasd) literally begins with "Trump supporters are fascists". It's flagged and dead, but it's there (if you have showdead turned on).

asdfgasd is not the GP, who the commenter before me is propping up a straw man against and attacking. They commenter before me is the one talking about all of trump supporters being facist before asdfgasd even commented, so how is what you are saying relevant?

You said "Nobody here is saying trump supporters are fascists." I supplied a counterexample. That's how it's relevant.

Nobody was saying it until the person I responded to did. What you provided isn't a counterexample.

>>Nobody here is even saying that the_donald subreddit represents all of Trump supporters. So why are you playing that card?

Because of the following comments: >>“On the contrary. Deplatforming fascism works[1]. This removes a small number of tools that they use to recruit. It is step in the right direction.”

I regret engaging in this discussion. I guess it’s time to give up on trying to understand each other’s point of view, because disagreement is currently seen as a personal attack on HN.

On HN, please make your substantive points without personal swipes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It has extraordinarily high levels of bots, too. Unverified accounts can't get through the quarantine, so it'll be fun to watch that traffic tank.

TD cant be directly tother subs due to the volume of fake/bot accounts

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