Right in time for the election.
Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse
221–230 of 970 posts
Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse
#222Worth taking note that in today's climate, you really cannot win when you are in a position to moderate important things that a lot of people use. There is constantly tremendous pressure on you to perform opposing actions, and even making no decision at all will cause you significant mental stress and harassment, regardles of what the issue is. You have to pick who you want to cave to, and to what extent, and no matt…
Would something decentralized help? I don't think people want that. The_Donald involved a lot of spreading their message / fake news sites / spamming across other subs and etc. Do people want to be on a platform where other folks on the same platform are targeting their community with dishonest and often bigoted content? I'm also not sure how much The_Donald was as a community. The sheer volume of users at its height…
IMHO decentralization (via federated protocols) is the most viable option here. Taking Mastodon (https://joinmastodon.org/) as an example, people are able to connect globally with each other, but you also have a moderation framework that allows for true decentralized control over content.
You can join an instance with moderation policies that align with your ideals or even host your own instance.
Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse
#223[flagged]
Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse
#224The internet remains a bastion of free speech. Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, remain privately managed companies with a duty to police their platforms. If /r/The_Donald contributors are upset - they can go almost anywhere else. Vitriol, hate, disinformation, etc... just doesn't need to be on public display.
The problem is that what hate is, is in the eye of the beholder. People can say Trump wanting to enforce rule of law is hate, I don't think so. People can say Trump wanting to enforce our borders is hate, and I don't think so. You have politically motivated people who think that anything that disagrees with their political viewpoints is hate, and justification to be memoryholed from the internet. I don't agree.
Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse
#225The article is incorrect. "racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, glorification of violence and conspiracy theories that flourished there." That can be seen in all political subreddits - even the favored /r/politics. Those forms of hate were not condoned in T_D. But if washpo wants to rewrite history, they can try. T_D was banned because reddit hates the policies Trump was elected to enact.
There's a difference between hate speech occasionally being found in a subreddit and a subreddit existing principally as a platform for hate speech. the_donald was unambiguously the latter.
This is not true at all. I see comments like this and wonder if the person even ventured to TD, interacted in the comments, or just simply contrived such a story. I don't doubt that there were bad actors in TD, as there are in r/politics and every other political community, but having intermittently visited the sub since inception, I almost never saw anything remotely close to "hate speech" (whatever that is). Most of the comments were from regular people that support the President, and rightfully were tired of the hypocrisy coming from the other side. Don't forget that TD was a target from day one, and even exposed the CEO Steve Huffman manipulating comments on it. What message did that send?
Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse
#226Whether you agree with the move or not, it's funny how Reddit's stance has changed over time. Under the old ownership, 2012: "At reddit we care deeply about not imposing ours or anyone elses’ opinions on how people use the reddit platform. We are adamant about not limiting the ability to use the reddit platform even when we do not ourselves agree with or condone a specific use. We have very few rules here on reddit;…
The internet (and Reddit itself) was rather different in 2012.
Yeah, Reddit didn't have Chinese investors in 2012: https://i.redd.it/jp4a0opvf1o41.png
Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would something decentralized help? I don't think people want that. The_Donald involved a lot of spreading their message / fake news sites / spamming across other subs and etc. Do people want to be on a platform where other folks on the same platform are targeting their community with dishonest and often bigoted content? I'm also not sure how much The_Donald was as a community. The sheer volume of users at its height…
> So you'd be in your other community and one day I don't think so? So if TD was a mastodon community, many others would blacklist their content, but unless members of TD go and make accounts elsewhere that'd be the extent of it, no?
No, they send 'envoys' to other social media sites to argue with and harass those who speak up against them anywhere on the Internet. Think "flash mob" crossed with "sealioning^", and look to Gamergate for being first to that particular line. For example, there's a lot of green accounts posting comments here about where to find their new community.
^ Sealioning: https://wondermark.com/1k62/
Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse
#228Chapo was just banned too. No warning AFAIK.
There's already multiple clones of that subreddit, and there will be many more created, and they'll all be allowed to thrive.
Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
Users won't allow for (use) decentralized platforms until there is a good way to censor them. Once that happens, what would be the point of switching. Facebook and Reddit are successful BECAUSE they are censorship machines. Facebook spends far more man hours on "curating" content compared to engineering. Same with Reddit. Add up all the "moderation" time spent removing negative or controversial posts and I bet much m…
Actually, that's not quite true. Reddit's first wave of popularity came from a lack of censorship. There was a decryption code posted on a news story on Digg that allowed one to decrypt a bluray. Digg got a cease and desist, took it down, and people started protesting on Digg posting the code everywhere. During this time was the first wave where people started jumping from Digg to Reddit because of the lack of censor…
> Reddit is still very much anti censorship.
This is just not true. They are very transparently trying to kick off users/communities that they don't "like".
For example basically any subreddit associated with the "alt right", except I believe /r/DebateTheAltRight or whatever it's called.
It's very simple:
(1) Identify community that you don't like, generally due to association with anti-leftist political views
(2) Find an instance of a threat of violence, regardless of context (i.e. the threat coming from someone who isn't a "real" community member)
(3) Use (2) to have a justified reason for "quarantining" the community, which is just the first step in a long, slow death-squeeze. From my understanding, those at /r/The_Donald saw the obvious writing on the wall and thus migrated to the donald.win quite some time ago.
Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse
#230I'm confused by the article. My understanding was that reddit replaced the moderators of /r/The_Donald months ago after initially making in quarantined. The Wikipedia article seems to agree with my understanding: > In February 26, 2020, Reddit administrators removed a number of r/The_Donald moderators "that were approving, stickying, and generally supporting content in this subreddit that breaks [Reddit's] content po…
>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.