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Yeah, the ban of T_D is only symbolic; it has been dead for months. I think the real news here is the ban of /r/ChapoTrapHouse, (arguably) the most active leftist subreddit there was.

ChapoTrapHouse has been laughing for months about their incoming ban, though. They knew it was coming and they've been preparing for it by migrating to other subs, moving to Discord, etc... T_D users are probably doing the exact same.

the donald users are already on a another site (which i won't link because i do not remember the url lol) and have been for a while now.

For posterity’s sake, I believe the commenter is referring to thedonald.win, which I’m purposely leaving un-linkified.

I posted on cth periodically and while I think it was banned largely so the admins could claim "balance" I don't care at all. Nothing serious happened there, the daily chat threads were fun, but it was clearly eventually going to be banned and I knew that and didn't get invested.

+1 to this. Chapo wasn't bad at all, in terms of breaking actual rules. I saw people on the announcement thread claiming it was full of tankies, and that was reason enough to ban it, but it really wasn't. You wouldn't get very far on Chapo by unironically talking about what a great man Stalin or Mao was -- though, guillotine jokes, including applying them to the necks of landlords, would certainly get you upvotes.

I never saw any actual brigading on the sub itself. Others talk about "organizing brigades through Twitter," and I think it's kind of BS to punish people for that. Reddit doesn't get to police Twitter, and vice versa.

Never saw any actual advocacy of violence against any specific person, either. Sure, there were "kill the landlords" type jokes and memes, but the closest I think I ever saw it get to actual incitement of violence was stuff like "Kissinger needs to fucking die already," or "I would prefer that Trump exit the White House feet first, in a box." You can call that whatever you like, but it's certainly not advocating violence against anyone.

Meanwhile, there's literally a Stalin meme on the front page of r/fullcommunism that says "death to capitalism." Then, there's r/latestagecapitalism, which is a toxic shithole of a sub where you literally can't say "that idea is crazy and will never work because $REASONS," because they have a blacklist of words that are "slurs" of one sort of another that they don't publish, and which will get your post removed if you try and use them.

/r/fullcommunism is also quarantined though. I'm honestly a little surprised it didn't get banned in this wave. And late stage capitalism has had a bunch of mod coups and stuff over the years that have negatively affected the quality of the sub.

Oh yeah. They began advertising thedonald.win last year.

also banned gendercritical, which was an extreme left, radical feminist (as in, Valerie Solanas radical feminism) board.

Gendercritical was not "extreme left". It was an anti-trans (TERF) subreddit hated by actual leftist subs.

Just because something is hated by most of the left doesn't make it "not left".

As a trans person myself. All that subreddit did was target hate towards trans people. Anyone care to elaborate on what else they did with actual proof?

Asking for actual proof now is a bit of a tall bar since the subreddit is no longer accessible!

Oh I'm sorry that you don't know of https://archive.org/web

Seems a bit strange that you'd simultaneously ask for proof and expect others to accept your premise as fact without also providing something more substantive than "I'm X so therefore I'm an authority on Y"

Confusion caused by attempting to sort human beliefs in a one-dimensional space strikes again! To be clear I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with you or the parent poster, just commenting on the ambiguity.

TERFs falling out of favour with the "actual leftist subs" is also a relatively new thing... they used to be strongly TERF apologist at the very least, if not actively and heavily promoting them in the case of several of the more feminist-aligned ones. Think last few years. This isn't just a Reddit thing either; questioning their ties to the UK's main left-wing political party (which has actually influenced our laws for the worse) used to be way outside the range of acceptable leftism, but has suddenly become a controversial hot topic in the last few months.

The current mods killed the_donald.

The mods, not the admins, made it so that only a shortlist of approved users could post content in the subreddit.

It was likely a move to push the community somewhere else.

The current mods were appointed by the admins....

No they weren't. The admins kept the original mods and were trying to work with them.

The admins even said as much when explaining the ban.

>The mods, not the admins, made it so that only a shortlist of approved users could post content in the subreddit.

Admins banned virtually all the mods, without warning or explanation, so the remaining mod(s) had no choice but to lock the sub.

One of the tricks leftist groups like to do is they'll brigade right-leaning subs, post a ton of "offensive" content, then before the mods can remove it, they'll screenshot it, post it up on a blog, and then alert the admins to trick them into banning the sub. That's how they got the sub quarantined.

With only one or two mods left, they couldn't properly police the sub anymore, which had close to a million subscribers and tens of thousands of active posters at any given hour. Put yourself in their shoes. If it was the choice between accept random unknown (but admin approved) users as moderators, or lock the sub, what would you do?

Of course you'd lock the sub. It was just an attempt at a soft-takeover. Better it be outright banned than lobotomized by replacing its mods with Reddit users who likely hate Trump.

Here is what Reddit said directly, vs through a media outlet - https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/hi3oht/updat...

They forbid promoting the rape of women. But only of women.

> What's wrong with just saying that it's their platform and they have the right to set the rules?

1) They don't want to alienate people who care about free speech. 2) A lot of people liked reddit because it was user-driven, and don't like it when the content they see is selected by admins and mods. They want to keep the illusion of being user-driven as long as they can.

Let's give them user driven reddit then. Open the floodgates, remove all filters and moderators and bans and locks. Turn off the firewall. Let them see reality.

They'll be back.

Fully agreed. I think people get up in arms over "but they have the rights to do it", making it look like those opposing decisions of admins believe that admins don't have those rights.

Admins own the platform and they totally have the right to set whatever rules they want. No one is debating that. The thing that people point out is that despite admins having those rights, they might be exercising those rights in a way that people disagree with (for whatever reasons), which might ultimately lead to the demise of that platform.

I, personally, find your reasons against the ham-fisted approach they have been taking to be very compelling. While r/The_Donald ban was probably warranted, and I have nothing against that ban, the overall vibe of reddit definitely feels like it has changed over the past 10 years. It feels like it went from "user-driven content under the umbrella of basic global reddit rules" to "heavily-directed content that admins seem to approve of or content that they cannot justify getting rid of just yet (but probably will soon enough)".

There is waaaaay too much content generated on Reddit for the admins to approve or curate. And the success of Reddit is in user-driven communities and content. Admins do not want to be in the business of content curation. Reddit is updating its content policy.

Admins tell the moderators how to act, and remove mods when they don't comply. Most content is effectively invisible unless it's heavily upvoted, so mods only really need to act on a small subset of posts. Some subreddits are moderated pretty heavily, while others remain mostly user-driven.

The_Donald was neutered a long time ago. The real story is the 200 other subs getting shut down and Reddit essentially saying the wild west days on their site are actually over now. Several publications have focused on The_Donald at least in the headline because I assume it makes for a sexier, more political story than about a website cracking down on moderation.

You're right. The_Donald has been dead for months due to the above-mentioned restrictions on submissions, moderator removal, and moving to a different site.

If they're getting banned now it's for something that was done months ago.

I think it’s worth mentioning the Reddit reason for initial quarantine was “anti police” comments.

MediaMatters / ShareBlue wrote an article about how anti police the sub was referencing two downvoted but not deleted comments. The entire sub was always pro law and order.

Reddit put very heavy limits on the sub for that.

Which is pretty damn funny to me - because right now on every single popular sub there are “all cops are bastards”, “kill all police”, “the only good cop is a dead cop” in any thread that even sort of tangentially references police.

I don’t care much either way. But the massive hypocrisy is there. No one has the balls to say “we just don’t want this on our platform”.

A couple months after the quarantine, Reddit admins changed the reason on the disclaimer before entering from “anti police comments” to “rule breaking”.

It shows me the weak moral character of the people in charge... and why I don’t want these people getting to decide what is right and wrong.

Edit: initial warning, later chased for ambiguous “rule breaking” https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Scree...

This is quite not correct. What triggered the quarantine was the violent threats against Oregon state police for this:

https://www.kgw.com/article/news/politics/oregon-senate-repu...

And it wasn't just two comments, and they weren't downvoted. Proof here https://www.mediamatters.org/donald-trump/pro-trump-subreddi...

You know mediamatters wrote that article before Reddit took action right? Reddit used that article as the justification for something they clearly wanted.

It was the Oregon GOP rep that said [If you send the police to get us, send bachelors].

I think it’s a little more complicated than you make it out to be.

It’s a larger discussion of what can mods with a large subreddit be responsible for. Is it reasonable to assume that in a sub that is typically pro police that some users that posted comments get the sub shut down? If that is the standard, can we prove mediamatters didn’t make those posts to point to for effect?

Maybe you are right; but mediamatters is BEYOND extreme bias so let’s not use them as an authority, and there is clearly hypocrisy at Reddit if threats against police “were” a problem.

>About the same time, Reddit placed r/The_Donald in "Restricted mode", removing the ability to create new posts from most of its users.

I think this is wrong, IIRC it was the mods who chose to do that, not Reddit admins. The mods wouldn't choose other mods even though the rules made sense, like having a certain karma threshold in t_d etc.

The mods were put in place by the admins so effectively it's Reddit doing it.

No, those mods weren't put in place by Reddit, they were hired a while ago by the top mods, some of who got banned thus making those the top mods. Reddit admins added zero mods to the t_d.

No. The lower level mods were forced in by the Reddit admin a while back. There were warnings about these sock mods long ago. The subsequent banning of the top mods effectively put these sock mods in control.

I don't think that was the case but I am open to sources.

I am also open to the sources that the low level mods were "hired" by the top mods.

That's the default of how it works on Reddit.

https://mods.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/360004273892-M....

You made the claim that the admins added mods, what made you think so?

That link doesn't say anything about hiring, and doesn't have any evidence on the top mods paid to "hired" the lower level mods. As for the sleeper mods being added by force, there were definitely warnings about them before, but then the whole sub is wiped out now. Very convenient to get rid of all the evidence.

There were no mods added by force by the admins.

Since the donald moderators removed the new moderators that Reddit added (that was selected from and voting on in the donald subreddit), it was clear the moderators weren't interested in rescuing their subreddit to Reddit's standards.

I think Reddit is trying to avoid appearing capricious when it banned subreddits. Reddit users do want a rythme or reason to Reddit admins actions, otherwise, there'd be further user discontent.

> What's wrong with just saying that it's their platform and they have the right to set the rules?

That would be a major shift in strategy for the site. It has always been billed a freewheeling place that belonged to the users, with the company that owns it being something of a benevolent overlord that keeps the lights on. That is what attracts users and content. But of course that version of the web is dead. Any website that relies on advertisers for revenue will necessarily be limited in its tolerance for controversy.

In the end, though, I doubt it matters too much for the site’s revenue. Reddit has been dying for years according to many of the posters and yet it sees growth YoY.

>What's wrong with just saying that it's their platform and they have the right to set the rules?

Because the admins still need people to believe they're the "good guys". And we all know the good guys don't censor people. That's what evil fascist governments do.

I would routinely visit the_donald. It was definitely a ruckus pro-Trump circle jerk, but it was hardly racist or abusive. It was mostly just silly pro-Trump memes. There's far more black Trump supporters than most people realize. The media does everything they can to hide them, so a lot of people would love to post photos of them with funny captions like "Oh look, another white supremacist Trump supporter!"

The admins couldn't have that, but they couldn't outright ban them without appearing draconian. So they instead tried just banning most of the mods, hoping the remaining mod would agree to the admin's terms of appointing only admin-approved puppet mods. Of course, the mod balked at that and just locked the sub and forwarded everyone to thedonald.win, the backup site.

So the admins ended up with the worst of both worlds. They still looked like the bad guys who shut down a sub on a whim, but now there's still a huge trove of funny non-racist pro-Trump memes sitting on their site for any Google searcher to stumble upon, which will only reinforce just how draconian the admins have become. By banning the sub outright, all that content gets deleted and hidden from search engines, so now when they vaguely label it "hate", you can't refute it.

Orwell nailed it. We've always been at war with ~~Eastasia~~ Eurasia.