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Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

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Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#281

Post by wnevets »

samfriedman wrote: post #159

The title should be updated, as T_D was just one of a large number of subs banned today; even then, it has been largely irrelevant since the admins' earlier decision to quarantine it and impose other restrictions. Other larger banned subs include /r/GenderCritical (anti-Trans) and /r/ConsumeProduct which was ostensibly for criticism of consumerism and product promotion, but hid a large strain of antisemitism below th…

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

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#282

Post by noir_lord »

s_y_n_t_a_x wrote: post #95
teej wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The inactive claim is hilarious, let's remove all the mods so you have to close the community so we can claim you are inactive... The funny thing was they removed mods because of the lack of moderation... which was unfounded as they never said what content went unmoderated. It's annoying to be persecuted based on political ideology, but we all know what Reddit is now, the most extreme liberal echo-chamber on the inte…

> It's annoying to be persecuted based on political ideology.

At this point been pro-Trump isn't really an ideology, it's a cult in all but name.

I've got conservative friends (UK style conservatism), I disagree with them but I can respect their beliefs because I can see how through a different lens I could hold their views, for the pro-Trump folks that lens just gets further and further away.

At this point I'm not sure what Trump could actually do that would surprise me - I mean I'm old enough to remember people mocking Bush for doing/saying the odd dumb thing but Trump went full-idiocracy inside 4 years.

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#284

Post by hinkley »

duxup wrote: post #86
ve55 wrote: post #7

Worth 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…

> Would something decentralized help?

I've been thinking about this a bit lately, and I don't see how. People are going to game the system, and decentralization just means they can play the game for longer, or in all new ways.

How do you establish a pattern of bad behavior by a person if that data is balkanized across a hundred independent nodes? They can feel out the line between ban-worthy and nuisance and if they happen to overstep a little bit a few times, they can still annoy 90% of the userbase. You have to have centralized moderation information and infrastructure.

People who don't want to be moderated, therefore, don't want this kind of decentralized system, and the maintainers would be fools to offer it. What they want is their own system, but someone else to do the work. An open-source Reddit engine, perhaps. When they discover how expensive it is to run, especially with people acting up, then a few of them may become self-aware.

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#285

Post by three_seagrass »

duxup wrote: post #86
ve55 wrote: post #7

Worth 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…

Anything decentralized will create a vacuum of power to be filled by rational actors.

Kind of like how Bitcoin is decentralized but controlled by a handful of miners on China.

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#286

Post by tbabb »

ve55 wrote: post #7

Worth 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…

> You have to pick who you want to cave to

Why does the narrative have to be about "caving" to someone instead of weighing principles against each other and taking the action which protects what's most important?

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#287

Post by Covzire »

ryankemper wrote: post #229
proverbialbunny wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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) Fi…

I think it'll be a good thing, Reddit and most Silicon Valley companies hostile to free speech are going to decline as competition as alternatives that truly appreciate the constitution of the country they operate in are born.

I actually like how Reddit moderates for the most part, they do keep things relatively "clean", but they are also thoroughly corrupt politically, horrendously biased in favor of anything left wing and beyond reform. Outside of a few minor subs, I don't "browse" reddit anymore at all. Everyone fair and honest who visits /r/politics or /r/worldnews knows by now they're being lied to, constantly and without relent, so only one type of reader still goes there willingly.

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#288

Post by marcusverus »

_red wrote: post #129
cactus2093 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole US was definitely different, Mitt Romney to Donald Trump is quite an extreme transition.

Donald Trump was a democrat for most of his life. The basic tenants of secure borders + protecting american jobs was basically the Democrat platform for most of its existence.

The issue of uncontrolled immigration used to be common ground for the left and the right. For a long time even Bernie opposed it on the grounds that large numbers of low-skilled immigrants were driving driving down wages for the poorest Americans[0].

[0]https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/03/16/years-ber...

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#289

Post by duxup »

mantas wrote: post #280
andybak wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> from any subreddit that toes their party line There's plenty of right-leaning subreddits. What set The_Donald apart was how close it sailed to being outright cultishly crazy.

How many left-leaning subreddits were banned? There're several toxic commie subs with a lot of hatred thrown around, but nobody seems to care. r/politics was default for ages and it wasn't exactly a welcoming place.

I don't have numbers for right vs left... I'm not sure those numbers matter unless somehow we measured how many 'should' be banned.

But beyond that I've seen lefty subs banned as well, for the same reasons regarding violence and etc.

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#290

Post by drdeca »

numpad0 wrote: post #177
pjc50 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. The average user, especially women, does not enjoy having their boundaries pushed by an escalation of shocking (but not illegal!) and pornographic (but not illegal!) images, which you will get if you don't have moderation, and even a bit if you do. As proven by Slashdot twenty years ago. Oh, and the plain spam. C1al1s spammers can fill your entire board if you let them.

Having seen countless female gore/porn artists on social networking I’m not so sure how important of a problem it is... especially the porn part

There are many many people. As such, the fact that many people like something does not imply that the typical person doesn’t dislike that thing.
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