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Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse
321–330 of 970 posts
Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse
#322Earlier 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.
r/Chapotraphouse which is mentioned in the title was left leaning. On the ither hand many other right wing subreddits were not deleted. Hard to see how people make this a partisan issue.
Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse
#323Worth 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…
The best solution is not to cave to anyone. It's to come out, say what you think is best, then tell anyone who disagrees to either take it or leave the platform. If enough companies, groups and individuals do that, this sort of pressure will stop, since people will learn it doesn't work. Most people won't stop using a platform over this stuff anyway.
I wish it were that easy, but the things that keep people from shouting extremely distasteful but legal speech on every street corner of busy intersections don't really work for the internet, at least not yet. I suspect the only way to get a truly free and open honest platforms, is by removing anonymity and forcing users to categorize/tag their speech and then use punitive measures if they don't tag correctly.
Say you have a native feature where anonymous users or anyone will not see (by default) certain types of content by tags. The community might vote on which tags to require users to "opt in" to view. The only way to be banned might be, assuming legal speech in the first place, would be if someone posts content that fits within a community agreed upon tag, but the user fails to tag it.
I haven't given this a ton of thought, but I would love to see something like this tried.
Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
That was effectively a challenge: how bad can you be without explicitly violating the rules? (I call this "I'm not touching you Fascism", after the popular children's pastime. The goal is to enrage people without ever crossing anything that might be considered a clear line. Most systems evolve a meta-rule somewhere that "pushing the boundaries of the rules is itself against the rules". At the very least "ban evasion"…
As someone who's moderated a community, this is exactly what things feel like. Especially given that our community has an explicit focus on freedom of expression (and what a thorn in our side that's ended up being) We've adopted pretty vague rules as a result, with a lot of room for interpretation, and rather than changing the rules often we've just updated our interpretations and communicated them with the community…
Biggest difference I have seen is a change from random trolls (often who were easy to identify and proud of who what/they were) to larger, organized campaigns. Even if the campaign isn't running on your forum, people are reading Facebook or whatever and this causes many people to start spouting similar stuff they have seen. And even here, the comments often get close to looking like astro-turfing. I barely read the comments anymore, usually only a quick glance to see if there are more links relevant to the topic.
Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Easy to follow the money on this one. Trump admin has been MUCH less giving than Obama admin / GWB admin / etc when it comes to trade with China. They'll be much better off if Joe Biden wins in November than if Trump gets another 4 years. Investment well spent and paying dividends today.
Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm also not sure how much The_Donald was as a community. It was very clearly a real community, as you can see evidence from the fact that they migrated to thedonald.win when Reddit made it clear that they wouldn't be treated fairly. > So you'd be in your other community and one day they all show up and down votes and the vitriol begins... it was no mystery that this happened, it was spoken of openly in The_Donald…
>And yet Reddit happily ignores vote brigading and other negative externalities from any subreddit that toes their party line, so it seems bizarre to single T_D out Do you have evidence for this, or is it just your gut feeling?
r/AHS staged a massive public brigading campaign in 2018 to get as many right-wing subreddits banned as possible.
Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse
#327Since the 2016 election the left has been consolidating their vast cultural power by exiling opposing views that don't pass their ever-shifting purity tests. It remains to be seen whether or not this will bury conservative thought or cause an underground resurgence.
The largest lefist subreddit was banned today. The T_D ban was purely symbolic, it was already dead. This isn't "the left" this is liberalism.
They banned /r/politics?
Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse
#329The 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…
>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…
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.
Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse
#330Earlier 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.
ChapoTrapHouse, which was the largest left wing sub.
Edit (since I can't reply): r/politics is American liberalism, which is centrist.