Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 970 posts

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

#381

Post by mdoms »

ryankemper wrote: post #207
duxup wrote: post #86

Earlier 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…

> 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…

They didn't single T_D out. It was one of 200 subs banned in today's wave, many of them for similar transgressions. And t_d survived several ban waves before.

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

#382

Post by dlp211 »

1MachineElf wrote: post #326
spaced-out wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

> r/AHS staged a massive public brigading campaign in 2018 to get many HATE subreddits banned.

FTFY.

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

#383

Post by dangus »

koolba wrote: post #167

This final banning of /r/The_Donald is part of a concerted effort to eliminate any sense of normalcy for being pro-Trump. Even with no content for the past few months (after the mod removal), it stood out as a historical reference point to show thousands of people that supported Trump's 2016 campaign and presumably would continue to support him in 2020. They had a choice to leave it up and locked, but instead chose t…

As a counterpoint to that, there is really nothing “normal” about supporting Trump. He really is just as bad as his critics say.

This is the guy that retweeted a video of someone yelling white power in support. This is the guy who called COVID-19 the “Kung flu.” This is the guy that said there were “fine people on both sides” where one side was neo-Nazis. This is the guy that encouraged both police and rally-goers to get violent with the “wrong“ type of people.

Trump is deeply, unacceptably racist, and pro-violence, full stop. Trump is on the side of Christian white nationalism and there are plenty of people who voted for him who don’t even recognize it.

The fact that your typical upper middle class white suburban family with generally moderate views might have voted for this guy isn’t normal. They just can’t hear the dog whistles and have been, amazingly, convinced that that the alternative is worse.

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

#384

Post by dustingetz »

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…

the only reason they are centralized at all is to make a profit, so it’s the profit motive which is causing them to hoover up and own all this content and thereby being vulnerable to the risk

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

#385

Post by Natsu »

bitexploder wrote: post #234
ryankemper wrote: post #207

Earlier 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…

Well, if you had any doubt about the character of TD and what it has become at its new home, just cruise around it. It’s full of conspiracy theories, misogyny, racism, and outright calls to violence. It is a common sentiment there that the only good Democrat is a dead one. These “edgy” takes receive many upvotes.

Eh, I've seen almost all of those things on the front page of Reddit, too.

Just recently, on the front page of reddit, I've seen a headline saying to cut off a cop's dick because he tasered someone (I believe it said 'take his badge and his manhood'), ACAB types have been threatening to kill cops, Reddit has doxxed the wrong people for major crimes, etc.

It's particularly ironic because the original justification for the quarantine (which was then edited) was for threatening violence against cops, specifically due to wanting to protect some lawmakers who fled from a vote on cap & trade from arrest.

Looking back, that really seems inconsistent with the number of front page ACAB posts threatening violence I've seen on the front page this month. I mean, either it's okay to threaten violence or not, pick one.

Then again, maybe they did, because they edited that out of the quarantine reason for r/T_D.

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

#386

Post by jerf »

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?"

Not directly; I'm increasingly thinking centralization is not the problem.

The problem is size.

The intersection of "things that everyone agrees are acceptable" goes to zero as the size of the community increases, and while communities have strong selection effects that prevent them from being anything like "a uniformly random selection of people slammed together", regression to the mean means that you get there as size goes into the tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions.

I don't think there's a solution, because no matter what technical tools you put into place, you can't get around the fact the people don't agree about what's acceptable.

What we need is a diaspora back into a community structure where HN would be just about the largest sort of community out there, instead of still a relatively small one. Decentralized tools could help with that, but if "decentralization" just ends up building "decentralized" communities trying to contain a million people in the "same place" you'll just get the same problems again. It's kinda orthogonal. "Reddit, but once a community hits 10,000 people it becomes progressively harder to join" would quite possibly work fine, for instance. (I envision something like an exponentially-growing waiting list delay, such that getting to even 11,000 users would be difficult.)

Obviously, legislating some sort of limit here is virtually impossible. Somehow the technical structures need to support it and afford communities in the hundreds to low thousands, but somehow make it inconvenient to grow beyond that. Or afford more complicated structures where membership is not a binary status. (A social graph would work, if it wasn't being run by an entity that desires to aggregate people together more to more effectively advertise at them. Or more accurately, a set of graphs.)

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

#387

Post by forgotmypw17 »

I know a little bit about a large apolitical r.

The majority of the time people's arguments get heated enough that a mod has to step in and tell someone to cool it, the topic is politics.

And the majority of the time the argument starts with obvious trolling/baiting, typically racist stuff.

Straight up racism is quickly spotted and flagged down, so the new technique is to go on a roundabout monologue and imply racism.

Reddit admins themselves sometimes step in to remove things as well, but it's rare. Mostly for illegal things they spot first, e.g. trying to buy/sell drugs.

AMA if you want to know anything else.

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

#388

Post by foogazi »

parliament32 wrote: post #9

Whether 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;…

> and no interfering the site's functions

Spamming the r/all homepage due to eliminating downvotes certainly interferes with the sites functions

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

#389

Post by jbob2000 »

linuxftw wrote: post #259
fortran77 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried some of the alternatives. I figured if the people I don't like stay in their subgroups, I'm fine. But they don't. They invade every group. I don't want to see extremely racist posts in my "anti-bicyclist" group (for example). They'll take every post and make it about race.

> They'll take every post and make it about race. It's called trolling. As long as you're feeding the trolls, they keep trolling. Do other language forums have these race problems? Are English speaking sites being targeted by nefarious actors or botnets with racist remarks for some ulterior purpose? It seems to me that posting racist things on the internet may have been weaponized.

English has a context problem, in that you need to know a little bit about the person to truly understand their communications. Mix this with the Anglosphere's culture of humor and sarcasm, and I see how someone communicating anonymously can have their comments read in differing ways.

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

#390

Post by lumberingjack »

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…

>The_Donald involved a lot of spreading their message / fake news sites

Like none one the cnn "news" stories on /world news aren't fake

Post reply on HN