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Comment by botwriter | Hacker News Reader

The comments here comparing the_donald to fascism.

its a subreddit for people who support the democratically elected President of the US. Its not extreme its just shit posting and funny memes.

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That's an incredibly charitable description.

First, Trump lost the popular vote by millions.

Second, T_D has been a source of posts that incite violence, harass other users and general racism/homophobia

In response to this action the most upvoted thread was mocking WWII holocaust victims.

The sub got quarantined for numerous rule breaking actions including racism, doxing (inc. Reddit and Imgur employees), sexism, harassment of other subs, and violent threats.

The only way to believe that this has anything to do with supporting a political candidate is simply to ignore all the actual content and posters on that sub.

Is there a sub with 1M users that doesn't experience this? Or is it the nature of large numbers of people on anonymous internet forums that such things will always occur?

/r/hardware has passed 1M users, and is quite obviously afflicted by passionate sectarian disagreements between loyalists to different brands. There's also a lot of generally ill-informed and low-effort commenting there. But the mods there do put in some genuine effort, and a large fraction of that community seems to have a limit to the degree of BS they'll upvote.

Compare to /r/AMD_Stock which has a fraction of the size but basically exists to take sides in one of those contentious issues. Most of the time I venture there, I come away with the impression that an outright majority of the comments are shitposts that the community would be better off without. Though I don't think even on that subreddit that I've run into any egregious violations of Reddit policy.

> In response to this action the most upvoted thread was mocking WWII holocaust victims.

So what? Obviously, it is in poor taste and is a bad look but its just idiots on the internet trying to be edgy and generate outrage.

Knee-jerk reactions to shut them down are exactly what they want and feed off of. Trump himself does the same thing. He says and does things specifically to rile up journalists and the left to cause more chaos and entertain his followers. We should stop falling for it!

“Knee-jerk” is so disingenious, they’ve had warnings for over a year

You missed the point. It is knee-jerk in the sense that a panic is had whenever certain kinds of words or phrases are uttered on social media. It is like people really believe the content in question is some sort of real-life spell that could cause someone actual harm or someone else to cause physical harm. Words are just words.

Actions and words are two very different things and we shouldn't lose sight of that lest we be stripped of our right to speak our mind.

Unbunch you undies and stop trying to control everyone you don't agree with.

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