Reddit purges 1/2 of The Donald’s moderators – replaces them with approved mods
reclaimthenet.org
reclaimthenet.org
You'll note that with literally any other sub-reddit, the response to this behaviour would have simply been to shut down the sub-reddit. How many second chances do you need? Personally I would've thought the first person shooting up a restaurant would've been the red line but apparently not.
The mods at T_D have followed every rule to the tee. Other subs are not expected to control all of their users, but at least to enforce the site rules, T_D mods have done this. I haven't seen any evidence otherwise. Guilty until proven innocent if we want to use the fairest judgement standard.
Of course you can change the link, any user in any sub can change a link and brigade, at that point the blame is on the individual, not the group.
I could show you many examples of rule breaking all over Reddit, that doesn't mean you quarantine the entire sub, there would be nothing left.
Neither side can say who is brigading for sure but only one side is getting banned.
The sanders subreddits and /r/politics brigading is prevalent from what I've seen. Hell, it was an issue on one of the Democratic debates about his supporters brigading. Warren seemed to think it was bad.
Anti-brigading rules were enacted on T_D and you can still see them in full force. I have never seen any pinned brigading posts. Other subs have not done the same an yet they haven't even been quarantined.
I don't have any links and you just said you don't have any links with proof of T_D brigading. Why would I keep track of that? I'm not the company banning users for their ideologies and pretending it was because of "brigading" while providing no proof. I'm the guy saying it's an unpassable purity test and no sub would be safe under the same scrutiny. It's targeted and wrong.
All of this is anecdotal and that's how you know it's targeted. There hasn't been one sliver of evidence that T_D mods supported brigading.
Yes there are probably a lot of reports, but that's because it's a political subreddit in this climate, of course there are, especially when everyone else on the site hates them.
Reddit is now officially 100% an echo-chamber. Congrats you're on the way to be Digg. Good riddance.
EDIT: OP edited their comment, I will leave mine as-is.
No you already said you didn't.
Aren't you doing that too right now?
I strongly doubt r/the_donald is being fairly treated by reddit when most of the admin team has a fundamental objection to the sub’s message. The admin team in the past have shown they cannot act professionally. For example the CEO edited user’s messages in the r/the_donald to try and create discord between users.
Do you really feel that's a fair summary of what happened, in spite of the discussion of that incident elsewhere in this thread?
This is inaccurate - it was very clearly not intended to 'create discord between users' and claiming that it was is at best politically biased and at worse a lie.
If it was a prank he would have done it and admitted it without getting caught in-between.
Also, it has to be funny to be a prank, otherwise it's bullying, where was the punchline?
> It was a pranking attempt that fell flat
You're spinning, not them.
Even assuming it was a "prank", it was meant to create discord, otherwise the CEO would have chose a different, funnier, more obvious edit.
Instead, he chose to make a subtle change and then only admitted it after getting caught.
Would characterizing that as "an attempt to turn democrats against each other" be fair?
The current policy applied is to stifle the sub without a full ban to eliminate publication of its death. The policies for new mods are designed to either force in people who are disconnected from typical subscribers and can enforce the rules without bias or demonstrate how much of a cesspool it is and strengthen the argument to remove entirely.
I dislike that subreddit as much as anyone, but that’s guilt by peaceful association and can be leveled at a lot of different websites, video games, and political parties.
Let’s not go there.
Everyone - every signle website, author, pundit, politician, etc who finds themselves mentioned favourably in a mass shooter manifesto should at least ask themselves how they got there and what has gone wrong with their messaging. There may not be anything they can do, but a lot of places seem to think that hate never leads to action.
And even if you think they should, it's neither yours nor Reddit's business to enforce it.
> if they try to do that [nominate someone other than Bernie at a brokered convention], forget the "political" part of the "political revolution" [1]
with thousands of upvotes and no moderator or admin action.
And some of the top comments on that post:
> If they do that it's time to revolt.
> This is a peaceful revolution. If they fight against it, they risk violence.
> Okay fine, a socialist revolution it is.
> Yeah the convention is a canary. If the canary dies we riot.
There's enough evidence of unmoderated site rules violations on that one post to shut down that sub if reddit wanted to.
But reddit doesn't want to, they're trying to tip the scales by censoring half of America.
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/WayOfTheBern/comments/f7ap56/plouff...
Also, there is a myriad of possibilities between "totally unrelated" and "have direct causal link which imparts responsibility". If somebody is on the left politically, is he "totally unrelated" to Lenin and Pol Pot? Not exactly, they probably share some ideas somewhere. Is he responsible for all atrocities Lenin and Pol Pot committed? I don't think many people on the left would agree to that. And here we have direct link between ideology and actions, acknowledged by everybody. You are extending it to actions of insane people which may be just using ideology to dress up their demented impulses - this is even worse distortion.
People are responsible for their actions. But if some crazy person mentions somebody in a positive sense, that by itself does not impart responsibility on the person they mention.
For that matter, look at the 2017 Congressional baseball shooting - should Pelosi resign over the impact her words had? (Along with the rest of the DNC's leadership?)
Point being, mentally ill people do weird shit for illogical reasons. That doesn't make it the fault of whatever they used to justify their actions.
(What was the essential difference between, say, the occupation of the Malheur wildlife refuge in 2016 by armed extremists and the occupation of the Dublin GPO in 1916 by armed extremists? Which could be considered mentally ill and why?)
(I also find it interesting that the most basic, minimal kind of critique - asking what the effect of the work is on the audience - has generated such outrage. I haven't called for censorship, I haven't even called for self-censorship, not directly attributed moral responsibility. All I said was should think about whether there was moral responsibility or not.)
The root said "The users of that forum have literally been linked to public shootings.", as part of an argument that /r/the_donald is a shithole and deserves to be banned. The reply was that all sorts of people find themselves in mass shooter manifestos, and that this doesn't imply any sort of culpability whatsoever.
You then replied saying that everyone who finds themselves in such a manifesto needs to reexamine their messaging. This would seem to imply agreement with the root - that since /r/the_donald was mentioned by mass shooters, it's bad.
Also, presumably not everything the KKK does is bad. Is it wrong that people in the KKK are all lumped together?
These are all questions of guilt by association, no?
I have in the past loaded Gab, 8chan, and Facebook in my browser. Am I “linked to” the users of those platforms that have committed mass murder?
Plus that's kind of two degrees removed from the original comment. If someone who does a horrible thing cites a community as a motivation/inspiration, yeah that group should absolutely at least think about what that says about them. It's not an immediate condemnation of guilt, but if there's strong evidence that that community's behaviour or ideology provided motivation, or if there's a repeated pattern, then it's a problem. The alternative is to say there's nothing wrong with white supremacists because all those people who commit racial violence citing white supremacy are just incidentally related, or that there's nothing wrong with gangs because we should avoid "linking" people who commit gang violence to their associates.
There was a lady who used YouTube in April 2018 who went to Google and shot three people. I recently engaged positively with YouTube. I also engaged positively with YouTube in April 2018.
Am I linked to a shooter simply because we used and enjoyed the same content on the same website?
>Prior to the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, The_Donald hosted a stickied post encouraging members to attend the rally and march alongside neo-Nazi and “ethnostate” groups, because, “In this case, the pursuit of preserving without shame white culture, our goals happen to align.” [0]
[0] https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/11/13/16624688/reddit-bans-...
Edit: the official policy is that only upvoting rule breaking posts will be cause for banning which makes sense. The Redditors I've heard from claim differently but are obviously biased. So take what I said with a grain of salt.
It pushes added responsibility on the upvoters to think before they upvote, but perhaps that is a fair request to make of forum participants.
(And taking off my "community moderator" hat and putting on my "sysadmin" hat---both dusty from lack of use---using sock-puppets or a like-minded collective to brigate-upvote content so that it is visible before it gets banhammered is a known attack vector against the infrastructure itself, and mitigating that attack vector via added penalty for the supporting accounts doesn't seem unreasonable).
That's nice in theory, but there's no clear guidelines for what you're not allowed to upvote, and there's no transparency on anything, just user reports.
For example, this post[0] from someone who claims to have received a warning from the reddit admins for upvoting a post titled "Reminder that the police steam more money each year than burglars. Totaly normal country", linking to a screenshot of an article about law enforcement seizing $181,000 from someone. In the comments, OP posted a screenshot[1] of the message they claim was sent to them, which states "abusive content is not acceptable on Reddit, nor is engaging with it".
This content doesn't seem abusive to me, it seems like a totally standard reddit post. There is _far_ more abusive content on the front page regularly. How would I have known not to upvote that?
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/ChapoTrapHouse/comments/f9idzr/just...
> Users that have more than 500 karma in quarantined subreddits outside of The Donald will not be allowed on the list of approved applicants [to be a moderator]
This is only for being a moderator. Simply upvoting posts (that don't break any rules) in quarantined subreddits does not get you punished.
> If the content that people are upvoting is bad enough to get banned over shouldn't it just be removed from the site and not left up to upvote?
What ends up happening in this subreddit is that the bad content doesn't get reported/deleted, which is what leads to the subreddit being quarantined in the first place. The whole point of a quarantine is exactly to push people to report bad content, and acts as a warning. This new change makes sense as far as pushing people to report said content and not keep promoting it.
I also don't think the content is being "left to be upvoted", but rather when found, they will retroactively flag anyone who upvoted it instead of reporting it. But the problem is that the content often doesn't get flagged/deleted until it gets to the top of the subreddit. This is the problem they are trying to fix with this change.
I'm excited to see the fallout on this decision.
[1] https://reclaimthenet.org/reddit-banned-for-upvote-policy/
> When we expanded our quarantine policy, we created an appeals process for sanctioned communities. One of the goals was to “force subscribers to reconsider their behavior and incentivize moderators to make changes.” While the policy attempted to hold moderators more accountable for enforcing healthier rules and norms, it didn’t address the role that each member plays in the health of their community.
> Today, we’re making an update to address this gap: Users who consistently upvote policy-breaking content within quarantined communities will receive automated warnings, followed by further consequences like a temporary or permanent suspension. We hope this will encourage healthier behavior across these communities.
Seems like their justification matches my guess in the parent post.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/f8y9nx/sprin...
The problem is that parenthetical, and determining it. Users were told that upvoting rule-breaking posts would risk a sitewide ban, without being told what content it was or what rules it broke.
Reddit says it gets to punish users by declaring any content "bad", by arbitrary or overly broad or even unspecified rules. That's the uproar.
This is not trying to improve behavior, this is trying to deplatform wrongthink.
The consequences are very gradual, starting with warnings, then going up to temporary and eventually permanent ban. So it won't come out of nowhere, you will have plenty of change to adjust your behavior.
> Reddit gets to declare any content "bad" by arbitrary or overly broad or even unspecified rules. That's the uproar.
Not really, they have very precise rules and content policy, which they use to take down content.
I do agree that being told which content you're being punished for, and what specific rules said content broke, would help users adjust their behavior, but you also run the chance, as with any sort of moderation, to teaching abusers ways to bypass the system. That's why things like shadowbanning exists.
At the end of the day, as yesterday's ruling for Youtube showed [0], these websites are not public forums, and they are free to have any rules they want. If you're not happy or you don't trust that they apply their content policy fairly, you can move to a different website with different rules.
That's Reddit's content policy, and it's not precise at all. Pretty much anything can be deemed to fall under "threatens, harasses, or bullies" if it speaks against any group or opinion whatsoever. And the enforcement has been entirely selective and biased, targeting conservative subreddits and supporters, while "eat the rich" type posts are celebrated.
Right, Reddit is a private platform and can choose to host or not any content it wants. I don't think anyone is disputing that. We can still wish Reddit would choose to act in favor of free speech and openness rather than choosing to deplatform opinions that fall on the unpopular side.
100% correct.
That was a requirement given for being a new mod at /r/the_donald. There is also a separate, new rule change revealed in the recent "Transparency Report" that says that users who consistently upvote rule-breaking content will be banned.
> The whole point of a quarantine is exactly to push people to report bad content, and acts as a warning. This new change makes sense as far as pushing people to report said content and not keep promoting it.
That may be the case. On the other hand, that may only be the pretense. Every four years we see the same thing happen on Reddit. We saw massive upvoting of anything related to Obama, which at that time it was just thought to be organic (and maybe it even was).
Then in 2016 we saw massive Bernie Sanders support to a swift and sudden change to Hillary Clinton support. That was followed by the "Correct the Record" movement and then later "Share Blue." These were all coordinated efforts to inorganically promote one political party and suppress another.
But that wasn't enough to keep r/the_donald posts from regularly popping up on r/all. That's when they quarantined it. Now they're taking it even further.
Before, political minority users may not post out of fear of being downvoted or targeted by those searching through their post history, but they felt safe upvoting content they agreed with. But now, there is this implication that they could face repercussions for simply upvoting the wrong thing.
Sure, we're told it's only for things like illegal content or racial slurs, and only in quarantined subs. However, we'd be stupid not to see the political bias on Reddit. There's ambiguity over what counts as the wrong thing to upvote. They don't tell you what content you upvoted that you're being punished for. The net result? The "wrong" type of political content will be naturally suppressed by users now being reluctant to upvote it.
Also, the Donald wasn't quarantined until a few months ago, which is long long after The_Donald peaked and started popping up on r/all.
If you cannot support a political position without consistently violating Reddit's rules that do not restrict any normal behaviors of reasonable political debate, then what you're supporting probably shouldn't be described merely as a "political minority".
Not at all. Even if Reddit was completely biased and never enforced the rules against liberal-oriented cesspools, that wouldn't make T_D's current norms and behaviors any more acceptable.
The only problem is if you believe that Reddit will go far beyond their stated content rules and start punishing civilized discourse on the basis of political alignment. That would have a damaging chilling effect, but I think it's pretty clear Reddit has their hands full with rebellious mods and users who aren't even trying to stay within the posted rules and are making plenty of posts that really should be removed no matter where you fall on the spectrum of political beliefs.
My point is that I think political minority users will believe that they may be punished for upvoting content that doesn't explicitly break the rules. It doesn't even need to be true. As long as users believe it, that will be enough to impact their behavior. In fact, it's already enough just to know that big brother is watching what you upvote. This passively results in upvoted political content being more in line with Reddit's political bias.
I also check out t_d occasionally and have never seen a single threat of anything.
On the contrary, the community seems well self-regulated. I have often seen comments that are overly harsh (such as unnecessary personal insults) being condemned by other posters for being disrespectful. I have never seen this on any other forum. IMO t_d is a model for free, open and respectful self-regulated discussion.
I see this claim often, and having been a Reddit user from back when there no comments and no subreddits, I can tell you what you're claiming is not remotely the most plausible option.
Right from the beginning Reddit swings left wing and libertarian, their first preference is someone like Ron Paul and Sanders. That's why you see competing candidates demonized, and those candidates idolized. They don't like the mainstream GOP at all.
The sudden swift that you're talking about happened it was clear that Sanders would lose the primaries and after he conceded the race, and told his supporters to support Clinton. Reddit didn't like Clinton in 2008 and in 2016, but they would take her any day over Trump or any other GOP candidate except Ron Paul.
Why would you expect Reddit to keep supporting Sanders after he conceded the race? Who would that help? That would help Trump. That's why a lot of right wingers including Russian trolls encouraged making Sanders supporters angry to suppress turnout. That's why you saw the massive shift after the primary because that sub on Reddit does not like Trump at all and would even have Clinton over Trump. Think of the typical Sanders or Warren supporter, would they support Trump or Clinton as President?
All these complaints about Shareblue and CTR are just noise, and what T_D and conspiracy subs convinced a bunch of people was happening.
Why couldn't CTR or Shareblue suppress Sanders support and chime up Clinton support on Reddit before Sanders gave up? The Sanders sub was regularly multiple times in r/all and Clinton support and subs weren't popular at all even in r/politics. If they were so powerful, why can't SB or CTR suppress Sanders support over the past few months when he has become a viable candidate?
No one can give a straight answer, because there isn't one, yet they are absolutely convinced of their version of events. It's the modern day version of an urban legend given how many people believe in the narrative you posted.
Advance publications is also having huge exposure to China through Condenast's business in China
> In February 2019, Chinese company Tencent invested $150 million into Reddit as part of its Series D.
"Reddit gets a $150 million investment from Tencent and users are posting memes to mock the deal"
The propaganda ministry razed the media landscape to the ground over the last 5 years. Even completely apolitical companies like publishers of professional literature, science textbooks, photo journals, and children books got a boot.
The state has also been said to forcefully breaking up big media groups, denying mergers in between ad/pr/media companies.
Seeing Condenast thriving in China, knowing how things there are now, is very suspicious.
Edit: and looks like OP edited their comment to clarify.
One doesn't get such concessions in China for just nothing.
And by the way do you know who is the majority owner of Tencent? Naspers, a South African media company.
Naspers does not own a majority position in Tencent. They own closer to ~31% of the company. A large position, however that means very little given it's a Chinese juggernaut (see: Yahoo vs China in the Alibaba & Alipay spats).
https://www.investopedia.com/news/nasper-set-earn-10b-tencen...
I've heard this thrown around, but I thought it was for upvoting posts that are later removed for violating Reddit's rules - not just upvoting any posts on quarantined subreddits.
I can't figure out if this is the case, though, here is what Reddit said, I think:
> Users who consistently upvote policy-breaking content within quarantined communities will receive automated warnings, followed by further consequences like a temporary or permanent suspension.
Reddit will ban users for upvoting RULE BREAKING posts on quarantined subreddits. In other words, they're going to ban the people posting rule breaking content and also people promoting it via upvotes (after warnings/repeat behaviour/etc).
To let others know about this without including the RULE BREAKING part is misleading.
Honeypot.
Anything said by supporters of this and the other subs you mention are coming from an echo chamber of self victimization. The Youtube related first amendment case form earlier in the week is directly analogous to this but Reddit Admins are trying to handle this on site and not draw media attention to their actions or the sub.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/f9g0t9/redd...
https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/f9xk6p/cont...
It's an echo chamber of self-victimization that probably sees the Youtube case earlier this week on first amendment application as both a win for private companies and a loss of what they consider their right to free speech.
It seems like you were rightly banned for being deliberately obtuse. Pretending that there's no difference between grassroots small money donations and the kind of money that Sanders wants to eliminate from politics is straight up trolling. Even if you believe that both categories need to be eliminated, you didn't start with anything resembling a lead-in to a reasonable discussion on the matter.
Hes running to get big/dark/foreign money out of politics ad is funded 100% by citizen/supporter donations not special interests.
He could push for a public funding system to eliminate both types but would need either careful legislation, a supreme court reversal, or a constitutional amendment (and probably both the first 2 to work long term anyway).
On top of that, the conservative subreddit literally has rules about it not being a place of debate or questions. Compare it to the Bernie sub rules and see if you can spot how once again both sides are not the same.
People end up in groups based on their journey to find someone who validates their hardship.
In 201x, the process goes something like this:
When we struggle, we reach out for help, and rather than finding articles that are soothing chicken soup, they're news articles that we are worthy of contempt based on characteristics we have. The reader may get angered, as preposterously, some how, a specified group of people's needs and niche circumstance eclipses everything else. The algorithms leads to a string of sensational articles about how society needs to be restructured honor the whims of people based on a trait and exceptional edgecase circumstances.
Respect is conditional based on tribal loyalty and repeating generalized tropes with religious zeal - if you dare to dissect it as a social construction - you're out of the club. You're not enlightened, don't get it, and generally what's wrong with society, somehow.
I think general miserliness and insensitivity create the conditions for people to resort to unifying over absurd polarizing generalizations above all else. If our feelings and worth are based on preconditions, I'd assume it'd be pretty hard to build consensus, cooperate and make everyone feel loved and cared for.
That said, when people squabble over rhetorical devices instead of unifying to improve the conditions of legal persons universally, it's great for the stock market.
Best action is to bring this to light. Make everyone aware that Reddit is not a free speech zone--its a closely monitored and profit-driven business.
When I was a kid®, this sort content lived in web forums or newsgroups hosted by interested parties. You were unlikely to find any of it unless you went looking for it. It is probably best if it goes back to that.
Internet pro-tip: If you don't want to be beholden to reddit, YouTube, Twitter, etc. don't use them, it is really that simple.
I go into more depth in a blog post here: https://www.plebia.io/blogs/site/uDIkCFPp2b8+Online-Discussi...
Under these new rules, users can be warned or even suspended for simply “upvoting policy-breaking content within quarantined communities.”
"""
That's an interesting policy. I can see the benefit if one's goal, as owner of a forum, is to constrain the tone of the forum.
I wonder how the tone of Hacker News, for example, is changed by users upvoting comments in clear violation of forum policy.
I always thought it was a clever maneuver on newgrounds' part. Not to say this doesn't already happen on any forums, but my real point is that overtly punishing users with disciplinary action for what they upvote (as Reddit started doing) really seems like the worst of all solutions. Like something that was specifically engineered to maximize user outrage.
It seems to me that Hacker News' singular focus doesn't allow for either strong, purposeful ideology nor for people intently metagaming the community to signal boost ideology. Maybe HN has this problem in a lesser capacity for PR submarines/advertising, but it's not nearly as severe as what the people in "the donald" are doing.
Currently I only collect submissions, but it isn't hard to also look at the users and their age/karma as well.
This is not the first wave of drama T_D mods have dealt with. They've dealt with quarantines, post-editing, brigading, and ranking algorithm changes, that's why they have a site already and are using it as a primary platform as opposed to a backup (although the subreddit still has a much larger user base, the content is fresher on the main site).
Also, half of America approves of Trump's job, it's not crazy to think that there's a large amount of traffic, they have to go somewhere online.
46.4% according to the RCP polling average, within the margin of error to say half.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/president_tru...
The average approval rating is strong enough to hold my point that there is a large number of supporters, do you disagree?
Let that be a lesson, if you conservatives gather anywhere in mass on our site we will drive you away.
If it's not our site we'll bitch and moan at the credit card and hosting companies until you have to shut down.
Be careful guys. First They Came…
Your comment is informative, especially since a lot of comments so far in this thread are "Where are the users going to go?"
https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/aayoxb/what_is_a_quar...
Whatsapp, etc is not nearly as powerful a recruitment tool as a service designed to create communities, like reddit. Not saying it's not a problem (it is obviously), but it's still limiting compared to reddit.
Reddit is a public forum, and it wasn't a nice place with T_D on the front page. T_D has mounted a coordinated effort to take over the platform for their needs to the detriment of others.
Reddit admins aren't doing it to stop Trump or his supporters. They are fighting to keep their platform alive for the other 99% who perhaps want to read about knitting and Linux without being called cucks.
I believe this would allow the civilized T_D members to continue having a presence on Reddit. It's for their sake too.
edit: why downvote this? I think the parent makes an important point. Is the goal of deplatforming to herd members into their own fortified echo chambers?
Pool funds for VMs and fire up phpBB or IRC if unhappy with the platforms available.
Here's a list from a year ago of rules they've broken: https://old.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/851r...
> “We’ve been running a research project over last year, and when someone relatively famous gets no platformed by Facebook or Twitter or YouTube, there's an initial flashpoint, where some of their audience will move with them” Joan Donovan, Data and Society’s platform accountability research lead, told me on the phone, “but generally the falloff is pretty significant and they don’t gain the same amplification power they had prior to the moment they were taken off these bigger platforms.”
> There’s not a ton of research on this, but the work that has been done so far is promising. A study published by researchers at Georgia Tech last year found that banning the platform's most toxic subreddits resulted in less hate speech elsewhere on the site, and especially from the people who were active on those subreddits.
> There are lots of examples of people who have been deplatformed and have seen their power wane. After he lost his Fox News show, Glenn Beck couldn’t sustain his influence—The Blaze reaches only a fraction of the people he used to. Milo Yiannopoulos, the former Breitbart personality, was permanently banned from Twitter for inciting targeted harassment campaigns against actress Leslie Jones, and he resigned from Breitbart over comments he made about pedophilia on a podcast. His general prominence in public discourse has waned ever since.
You are 1 American, not all Americans. Just because you don't know anyone doesn't mean there isn't anyone.
> But according to the Pew Research Center, the number of adults using Facebook plateaued in 2018, and WhatsApp user number decreased: Only 20% of U.S. adults use WhatsApp in 2019, down from 22% in 2018. This is vastly smaller than the 73% who use YouTube, and the 69% who use Facebook. The only social media network that was less popular in the U.S. was Reddit.
It’s not implausible that lots of Americans don’t know someone who uses WhatsApp. I only know one person, and they use it to talk to relatives in South America.
The mods of T_D have created a website, thedonald.win, in anticipation of T_D being shut down. Anyone who visits that sub regularly knows that that's "The new T_D"
>This page may contain erotic or adult imagery. You'll need to sign in if you still want to view it.
Fuck that.
They could easily have a button to bypass, but require signin. Same with YouTube and others following this asshole design pattern.
1. I develop a community dedicated to fascism. 2. I appoint moderators who are themselves avid ideological defenders of fascism. 3. Given the motives for belonging to the subreddit, the users naturally chafe at and violate the sitewide rules for reddit. They have their own interpretations of how to best implement and promote fascism. 4. Because of the moderators' sympathies for the underlying motives and tendencies, abuse and rule-breaking continues.
Is anyone at fault here other than myself, the moderators, and the users?
PS: This article is poorly written and doesn't actually explain any of actual things going on in the_donald, it just insinuates a political agenda to this happening.
The result is a cocktail of factors ripe for exploitation:
1. Some political subreddits have hundreds of thousands of users and are highly influential.
2. Mods have unrestricted power and virtually no accountability. Users have no way to check that moderation is fair and unbiased.
3. Mods are unpaid and anonymous.
If Russia or China specifically set out to design a way to influence foreign politics, Reddit would be a fantastic platform to do just that. If you can get mods in your pocket you can promote or suppress issues to suit whatever agenda you desire.
If Reddit were going to try to reign in the very worst of its mods, /r/The_Donald would probably be a good place to start. Most reddit users view that forum as a cesspool that was quarantined for good reason. However, the methods Reddit is using here are as opaque as that of the moderators themselves. There has been no direct communication to users. All the reporting on this "purge" is sourced from the purged moderators themselves. While I have no sympathy for the mods of /r/The_Donald whatsoever, the way Reddit is operating here is indeed reminiscent of a totalitarian state's propaganda ministry. They permit much, but certain things bring the fist down hard, and it's done in a way that most people are not meant to see.
If you rely on Reddit for political information then you are making yourself vulnerable to unknown influences. While reddit is a fantastic resource in many ways, it's simply not safe to rely upon for certain things.
With most traditional news sources now being owned by a small number of international conglomerates, there is a real need for alternative forums of political discussion. Reddit, as it currently exists, should not be that forum. However, with changes something like Reddit could be made to work. Such a forum would need to make moderation much more transparent. You can't give mods the power to simply disappear that which they don't like. Users need to be able to examine the actions of moderators and question them. Taking away the toy of unchecked, anonymous power would naturally make it harder to find mods, so they might actually have to be paid. How you make money like Reddit does without volunteer moderators is a problem worth solving, as is finding a way to select moderators that can be trusted by the community they serve and not necessarily the company paying them.
This is why Reddit sucks as a political forum. Along with more open and honest moderation, you would likely have to do some serious changes to the upvote system, or do away with it all together.
I'm going to shamelessly plug my own discussion platform https://plebia.io, where there is total oversight over all moderator action (a record of deleted posts and banned users), and users can actually change the rules of their forums and replace moderators through a voting system. If your mod is absent or abusive, you now have a mechanism to replace them with someone who is better.
Forums should work best for their users, not their moderators, and most importantly, not their advertisers (basing a discussion platform on ad revenue never ends well, which is why Plebia will never run ads of any kind).
Check out r/worldnews or r/politics for reddit's consensus view of "impartial moderation". The recent events are to be expected and certainly were.
No government agency is allowed to impede free speech (with a handful of exceptions). This rule does not apply to any other organization.
It's a very reasonable thing to be unhappy about, and a great way to lose users.
Everyone here is big government, anti-censorship, pro-speech, pro-decentralization, anti-corporation UNTIL conservatives are targeted.
As a conservative (libertarian) yes, legally speaking they can do whatever they want, but morally speaking, it's fucked up.
Ironic the quote below now applies to the opposite side.
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First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.
The “they” in that poem refers to the Nazi government. Reddit is not a government. It is people having discussions on a website run by a company. Everyone has a choice of whether or not to use it; not so with the Nazi regime.
Have you never had to throw unruly people out of a house party? If not, well then lucky you, but that’s basically what’s being done here.
Then you're blinded by bias.
> Maybe you could expand on what moral system would force people to interact with trolls.
The members overall aren't trolls and trolling isn't concentrated just in the T_D. Stopping all trolling is impossible and T_D mods did not encourage it in anyway. I have yet to see proof in this thread or the Reddit announcements.
> libertarian that doesn’t seem to have heard of the concept of freedom of association
I wouldn't mention freedom of association because it's heavily tied into freedom of speech in the US judicial system (NAACP v. Alabama). It rules that freedom of association is an essential part of freedom of speech because, in many cases, people can engage in effective speech only when they join with others.
> Reddit is not a government.
Well this contradicts your previous point above, but sure let's take this path. Yes, Reddit can do whatever they want, I noted that above saying it's legal. That does not mean if makes it right. If the government couldn't do it because it violates the Constitution then it's wrong in my eyes for a company to do it, even if they can legally.
> Everyone has a choice of whether or not to use it; not so with the Nazi regime.
No they don't, because they are being kicked out and the rules have been changing specifically for them.
> Have you never had to throw unruly people out of a house party?
Have you ever thrown a small get together and everyone in the block called the cops because they just hate you and want to see your fun shut down? That's more what it's like it my eyes.
> No they don’t
You misinterpret my point. Nobody is forced to use Reddit. It is a privilege, not a right or requirement.
> Have you ever thrown a small get together and everyone in the block called the cops because they just hate you and want to see your fun shut down? That's more what it's like it my eyes.
I disagree this is a better analogy. That would be more like Twitter/Facebook/etc wielding some power of e.g. regulatory capture to shut down Reddit.
But you do raise an interesting point. This is like the rule “if you run into an asshole on your way to work, chances are they’re just an asshole. If everyone you meet is an asshole, it’s probably just you that’s the asshole.”
If you really have multiple neighbors shutting down your house parties, chances are much higher you were fucking up, either with the party itself, or generally in your relations with those neighbors.
Same goes for T_D. It’s much more likely they are the assholes here. Split hairs all you want, they’re getting kicked out because they just aren’t pleasant citizens of the site in the opinion of the admins, which at the end of the day, are the only opinions that matter on their site.
I won’t hold my breath waiting for thedonald.win to adhere to your moral system of fairness. Nor would I expect them to with their own site.
The US may not be innocent, but it is nothing like China.
> Perhaps more authoritarian
Understatement of the century.
[0] At one point td was basically the only thing on r/all because they found out that by upvoting everything and stickying posts to get upvoted they could spam the rest of the site.
Except ... that the latter is pretty harmless and all in good fun for the people who are into it, while T_D is a venue for (among other things) radicalizing literal children with blind ideological hatred and shameless untruths.
I still like the analogy, though.
T_D is a cesspool. It's not the only cesspool on Reddit. It is a special cesspool with special attention and solutions that are tricky, especially in an election year. At some point, big tech companies are going to have to articulate their role (wanted or not) in tweaking society.
There's also some chance that they can get the community in its current form to die in a more organic and less sudden manner, by expunging enough of the worst users and behaviors that it is no longer such a self-sustaining cesspool. Banning mods who directly encourage "shitposting" by name seems like a reasonable step toward that goal.
If you want shitposting, why would you ever choose a platform that has moderation and content guidelines in the first place?
That's a totally legit argument. People shouldn't. But as someone that was on reddit from 2008 on there were a few years were it wasn't corporate run and actually celebrated free speech in both words and policy. Then that changed. I stopped. But network effect keeps groups there.