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My perusal of Chapo Trap House was a lot of people un-ironically wishing that gulags came back and certain people were thrown into them. Just because communists did them, doesn’t mean you aren’t advocating for concentration camps, left-wing or not.

That was most definitely ironic, for the most part. Any irony on the internet attracts those that believe it un-ironically, however.

Way back when r/the_donald just started when his campaign began, many people including me thought it was an ironic subreddit and treated it as such. Then suddenly Trump gained momentum and the subreddit turned out to be for real.

I'm still convinced that it was a joke in the beginning, and then the subreddit saw an influx of people who didn't get the joke.

That's definitely also my impression. The only point against that theory is the moderation. I don't think someone who started that as a joke would let it become what it was at the end. unless maybe someone related to the Trump campaign bought those accounts of course.

Irony has always been a tool of the far right, from the nazis to the Christchurch shooter. How 4chan and t_d use it is not especially different.

I agree on that, but I think this case was a bit different. A lot of the early posts were making fun of Trump pretty thinly veiled.

There were some subreddits that were taken over by the people they made fun of, /r/gamersriseup started like that before it took a turn IIRC

Yep.

Consistent irony and in-jokes become real over time.

"Ha ha only serious."

a number of subreddits like r/ConsumeProduct were taken over by the hate mongers from the_donald. You would have post brigaded to the front page that had absolutely nothing to do with consumerism or product promotion

I should be the prime target for a community sarcastically titled “consume product” as I hate spending money wastefully and enjoy getting good mileage out of anything I buy. Instead I learned how to block subreddits on my Reddit app of choice because the content had absolutely nothing to do with criticizing wastefulness. I could never quite put my finger on what the subreddit was designed for (I never subscribed, I only interacted with it when it hit /r/all) but I knew it wasn’t a criticism of wasteful consumerism.

Social media has a trolling/brigading/hive mind problem in general across all platforms and I would add solving this problem to Paul Graham’s list of “frighteningly ambitious” ideas.

> but I knew it wasn’t a criticism of wasteful consumerism.

I'm fairly certain it started off that way. Unfortunately it doesn't actually take much coordination to brigade and take over a subreddit.

Can you link to an example? Oh right...it's all deleted, so we'll have to take your word...and your definition of whatever you consider "hate"...which has no definition...

You seem upset that the_donald and others have been banned.

“Hate” has no definition? That’s a new one. Maybe consider consulting a dictionary.

> /r/GenderCritical (anti-Trans)

This is not a fair portrayal of that sub.

Reddit can do what it likes about banning political subs but the banning of r/gendercritical is quite concerning, in my opinion.

Sadly current discourse does equate those two things. Being gender critical ("gender is fake and a tool of patriarchal oppression") is equated with erasing & attacking trans people - politically these two parties do seem to be at odds.

Is discourse regarding trans-gender really necessary though? It seems something a bunch of spoiled elitist bigots would discuss as their way to express distaste for plebs and pretends it's some sort of philosophical debate.

Someone's interpretation of their own sexuality or gender affects no one but themselves. You can discuss it over at /r/philosophy if your intentions are truly analytical.

> Someone's interpretation of their own sexuality or gender affects no one but themselves.

I don't feel you've really followed the debate. Some trans rights activists are demanding that they be legally defined as the sex they 'identify' with. This equates to biological men being housed in female prisons, biological men competing in women's sporting events, etc etc. It's an attack on women's spaces and the very meaning of what it is to be a woman and what women's experiences entail.

This is just a short summary but the idea that they are affecting 'no one but themselves' is way off base.

> Someone's interpretation of their own sexuality or gender affects no one but themselves.

This section was already covered by another user, but I'd like to provide an example too:

So, you fall in love with someone, and marry them. You have children with them and you have a nice family. Everything is going great until one day ... they confess to you that they have always felt like they were the opposite gender. This was not disclosed to you before you said your vows.

You want to support them because you love them so you encourage them to treat their dysphoria. You think it will be fine.

But then it turns out that when they begin to transition hormonally, you're no longer attracted to them. This is no fault of your own, sexuality is what it is, but you kinda feel like the person you were in love with has died. Your marriage falls apart. You're hurt. You feel vaguely betrayed even though you weren't really.

Whenever you try to talk to someone about what happened, just to vent, they all take your ex-spouse's side.

This is the content that was in a lot of the posts on GenderCritical. People who were hurting who wanted a place to vent about something a SPECIFIC person in their life did without automatically being labeled transphobic for working through their feelings.

Additionally, all the posters there were cis women. Men and trans women were asked to go somewhere else. Occasionally they would make exceptions and allow trans men to post, but for the most part it was cis women.

People who don't know better think of GenderCritical as aligned with the alt-right, but basically they are a despised part of the left. They would vote in the interest of women, being feminists, which meant NOT voting with the alt-right.

One of the main reasons they asked men to go elsewhere was because more often than not, those posters WOULD be aligned with the alt-right, and they would not have the best interests of women in mind when discussing things. Alt-right men would just see a subreddit that seemed to be for bashing trans people and be like "Sweet! This is my new home." and all the radical feminists would be like "nuh uh, out."

Source: I starting doing a deep dive into this community about a year ago to attempt to understand them.

I'll go ahead and say it's probably such an extremely rare occurrence that I highly doubt some sort of forum is required here.

Why an exclusive community about this subject necessary? This topic is not prohibited on /r/offmychest or any other "venting" subreddit. To me it seems like community of common hate and that's just awfully unnecessary. I'm pretty certain posts of "my spouse turned out trans an left me" would never be removed from any platform.

There's so little value here that negatives outweigh the positives by an absurd margin.

it was such a rare occurrence it was difficult to find people who had been through something similar who could relate.

"gender critical":"transphobic"::"race realist":"racist"

OK, I've updated the title above to have both sides now.

I liked /r/ConsumeProduct, it was funny to see them critics Reddit blattant consumerism and pornography.

/r/ConsumeProduct was antisemtic? I never saw that in the posts of theirs that made the front page. It was always memes about over-consumption, they might make fun of disposable make-up wipes for example ("And when you're done, just throw it away!" cue gallery yelling in a robotic voice: CONSUME PRODUCT).

Genuinely curious what the link to antisemitism is. Is the thought that consumerism = big business, and big business = "the jews"?

Edit: I made this comment early in the thread, before others started to weigh in on why this subreddit was banned. I'm willing to engage in a discussion if you reply instead of downvote.

I don't know how common it was, but I found this in the first comment section I looked:

> Could it be the Chosenbergs? Although a small group, they seem to control the majority of US record labels, as well as the news outlets, the pharmaceutical companies, the bank institutions, the pornography industry, the entertainment industry, ect.

(9 points, replying to "I wonder who runs these record labels?" which was setting up that reply)

https://web.archive.org/web/20200620202415/https://old.reddi...

Comment sections always have some garbage in them. At least there's a report button that does something.

I visit a number of conservative and libertarian discussion forums and the "blame the jews" conspiracy has completely lost its steam. Don't get me wrong I can see how it's offensive and unwelcoming to jewish people but I just don't see the same level of commitment to the idea that some secret cabal of jews run the world or run America as I used to, just random remarks.

On the other hand it could be these are the same people who were previously writing theses on the matter and they've actually been effectively silenced and only drop hints at the idea anymore.

I guess this is the risk of lurking the front page nowadays; Glancing at a subreddit's memes and never reading their comments apparently put me in the antisemtic camp.

Fuck the modern internet, I'm out.

It doesnt surprise me that the antisemitic stuff didnt make it to the front page, but for the record there was a LOT of it in the top posts of the subreddits. Caricatures in the posts, conspiracies in the comments. They also really focused on vasectomies, which strangely has become a strong signal for alt right presence in a community.

That's unfortunate, because I really liked the cynicism around consumerism, it made me question a lot of the purchases I was making.

You know, life is pretty good when you never 100% agree with everything random people are saying in any subreddit.

That’s the problem. The subreddit seemed innocent at first glance but was particularly awful upon closer inspection.

Things got dicey on that subreddit the further down a page you'd scroll

/r/cumtown was Chapo adjacent and also got the axe. Part of the dirtbag left or whatever they go by now.

Cumtown the podcast is chapo adjacent, /r/cumtown the subreddit was much closer to the The_Donald than chapo with its content.

Were you on the subreddit?

Yes, it got significantly edgier after going private.

Yet r/stupidpol has (so far) managed to survive, which was the original Chapo Trap House podcast subreddit.

edit/ There are quite a few actually disgusting subs that have managed to evade this ban, in addition to a few which I kind of expected to see banned that survived. There are also quite a few which are basically worse versions of a subreddit that was in the banwave which leads me to conclude that the Reddit admins simply don't know that they exist.

/r/stupidpol should absolutely be banned if they're banning subreddits. It's everything bad that people thought the Chapo subreddit was, plus a ton of bigotry and genocide apologia.

>In my own opinion this was a long time coming, and Reddit has long since shown that the original hands-off model is woefully inadequate in the face of communities that are willing to expend the effort to argue continuously in bad faith, organize to influence and control opinion in other communities, and attack the platform itself in their campaigns for hateful speech. Just ask /r/BlackLadies if you think these users "stay in their containment areas". Hopefully Reddit is turning the page to better empower its communities to protect their users and keep hate off the platform.

All this will do is push these folks out to different platforms where they will organize brigading and bad faith participation in the dark. There are gobs of matrix/discord/irc rooms where people organize the manipulation of social media, and this move just removed visibility of it from reddit.

IMO it's partially a discoverability issue. Hate groups target young/vulnerable people, and start off with subtle/ironic hate and then groom people into more serious hate. If you read leaked chat transcripts, and even KKK manuals, they discuss this specifically as a tactic. By moving this stuff off of reddit, it makes it harder for those people to find it, because they'd have to go looking for it. It doesn't solve the problem of hate in society, but it helps.

The other thing is that reddit is inherently multi-topic. You can't host hate groups and then quarantine them from non-hate groups. So what you get is a bunch of people who showed up for the hate groups also commenting hateful things in the non-hate groups. This creates problems for people who wish to have a hate-free experience to talk about their gardening projects or video games.

People always say this, but it kind of seems like superstition to me — I haven't seen much evidence to support it. After the last wave of subreddit bans, it was "Well, obviously they'll all just go to Voat." But the corresponding Voat communities were anemic, and most died out, and now Voat itself isn't even around anymore.

Will some people move to an alternative venue? Almost certainly. Will most people do that, and will the alternative venue continue growing like the old one did? I'm pretty skeptical. The reason so many communities are on Reddit is because it's relatively easy to maintain and grow a community there. By denying them that tool, you make it harder for them to do that.

I'm sure most people here who are old enough can think of some old forum they used to love that isn't around anymore. When that one died out, it wasn't simply a matter of everyone going to another one and everything was the same. It works the same way for negative things as it does for positive ones.

>There are gobs of matrix/discord/irc rooms where people organize the manipulation of social media, and this move just removed visibility of it from reddit.

True but then it's not Reddit's problem. Reddit can't solve every ill, but it can cover its own ass.

So if we assume you are right then those users are going to behave like arseholes in either case, better they behave like arseholes off reddit is likely reddit's point of view - not least for PR/legal issues.

I'd probably agree with that, but someone upthread is saying Reddit is anti-censorship, which doesn't quite match with "better they['re] off reddit"?

It is not reddit job to attempt to police whole Internet or whole society. They manage their own site only.

Let’s try the opposite argument then: let’s give these fringe groups more prominent placement in the Reddit ecosystem. Surely it’s better to give them more of a voice so we can know what they have to say, than letting them put in the effort to make their voices heard, right? Maybe we should donate money to these groups to help them congregate in one place so we can easier keep an eye on them too.

You don’t sell walkie talkies to Nazis hoping that they will talk themselves out of being Nazis. You take away their voice until the bad idea dies down. Now, if you want to argue that some of these things are good ideas, I am all ears on how you’d want to justify racism, sexism, and xenophobia as valuable to our society. Unless you can successfully do that, your point isn’t valid.

That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that removing visibility into their motivations, by pushing the bulk of their activity in their insular communities offsite, allows them to more easily blend in and use less extreme language to push their disgusting viewpoints and manipulate conversations onsite.

Essentially it reduces the ability to detect bad actors, is what I'm saying.

No, I understand: it's the idea that keeping them in the spotlight means we can keep tabs on them easier. I can see the appeal of that solution, but here's the problem: some people will legitimately go to /r/The_Donald to figure out what these people are thinking. Researchers, political operatives, etc. might find this very convenient. But the other effect this has is that (a) it gives them legitimacy (look! One of the larger subreddits on Reddit is an alt right haven!), and (b) most people aren't critical thinkers. They will see a political meme that mildly aligns with their beliefs, chuckle, move on. Until they see another, and another. Eventually, they'll notice a pattern: these memes are coming from TD, so they subscribe. Next thing you know, they are only getting their "news" from the TD memes, and suddenly they live in a political thought bubble getting further indoctrinated. That's what will happen with 99.9% of the people who end up on a subreddit like The_Donald, whether you like it or not. So in my estimation, the benefit of keeping TD around (easy visibility into the thought process of these individuals) is greatly outweighed by the drawbacks (providing them with easy means of recruitment and indoctrination).

Also, please keep in mind that for fringe groups like these Reddit is not their primary form of communication. That is, the community leaders don't just PM each other on Reddit or communicate via posts and comments. If there is any kind of organized effort here to effect real world change, it is coordinated by private chat, often times with assistance of anonymizing networks like Tor. Reddit is where people come into this world, but it's only floor 1 of the a vast underground bunker (for the communities where these things exist). Take 4chan as another internet dumpster fire. Anonymous periodically puts on their own campaigns like pridefall which can absolutely create real world problems. But they don't communicate through memes. When stuff starts working on that level, they are coordinating these things via better channels and that's happening today. If 4chan was to disappear, I firmly believe that core group would still be in touch and looking to set up another dumpster fire on another social media site, be it a private Facebook group, a Twitter community, a Discord server, or something else. But I'd rather they spend their time chasing their tail trying to get back to having external visibility than to have them do it in the open.

Also, they already have the opportunity to act more covertly, and they do. I am getting pretty good at spotting bad actors, but I'm sure I miss more. Some are pretty clever in their online interactions. Kicking them off Reddit doesn't give them any better tools to do this. They already can and already are doing this today.

If you want further proof of this, consider why the members of the KKK wear hoods. Could they do what they do in the open? Maybe. But because they are your neighbors, your politicians, your police officers, and your friends, they need a level of anonymity. Take that away and you make it harder for them to do what they do. Reddit provides the means for that open yet semi-anonymous MO. Taking it away doesn't mean they change their beliefs, but it makes it harder for them to do what they do.

I'm not sure why you're getting downvotes, because this is spot-on. Anonymous paper-folding image boards and other places like that are already celebrating the arrival of newcomers. It's like sending a petty offender to prison, and instead of getting reformed, they just get a lot more hardcore.

I get it that Reddit doesn't want extremism on its site, and I don't have an opinion either way on the bans. But I think it's naive to assume that people won't just hop to another, possibly more extreme, platform.

You are missing the point. Organizing, coordinating, recruiting, all these activities have costs associated with them. Costs like time spent on them, time spent finding tools to use for the job, etc. Make a racist subreddit go away and the N people who were a part of it won’t stop being racist. But it will be harder for them to find another platform to recruit and to some degree harder to find ways to coordinate. Now time that could have been spent indoctrinating new recruits can is being spent on less productive tasks, slowing the whole community down. Will it stop racism or even the racist group from doing what they do? Of course not. Will it slow them down, yes absolutely.

If a bunch of assholes showed up to your front lawn and started doing asshole things, do you kick them out knowing that they might go to your neighbor’s lawn? Or do you keep them on yours to protect your neighbor? I guarantee you that you’ll kick them out and then likely help your neighbor kick them out too, not shelter them and help them do the asshole things by providing your lawn as a platform. How is this different?