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

491–500 of 970 posts

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

#491

Post by lipstone »

ipnon wrote: post #336
Press2forEN wrote: post #185

Since 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.

Social media companies and "the left" are not the same. Although they surely have some overlap (just as social media companies and "the right" surely have some overlap), conflating them entirely with each other is simply false. We cannot assign political conspiracies to entire industries.

I don't think the claim is that social media is inherently leftist, but rather than leftists have mounted attacks on all social media companies that don't actively censor right-wing opinions (see current ad boycott targeted at Facebook). I think the success of these campaigns are extremely concerning and a reminder that peace and prosperity are not a given.

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

#493

Post by Svperstar »

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…

As the head mod of a subreddit this really resonates with me.

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

#494

Post by caconym_ »

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…

T_D was chock full of calls for violence since its early days. In particular, I remember looking one day and seeing its whole front page covered in posts glorifying Pinochet for the way he treated his domestic enemies. The mods quite clearly had no good faith interest in keeping this kind of content out, only stepping in (except to ban users going against the narrative) when they were threatened from above.

I am mystified by how often I see the opinion that "T_D did nothing wrong". Speaking as someone who also finds the far-left spaces on Reddit frightening and repugnant, there is no question that T_D was among the worst of the lot and had the most mainstream reach, which makes it a fine target for responsible moderation efforts. If you want to question why Reddit doesn't follow their content policies to the letter in perfectly even-handed moderation across all users and subreddits, that's fine, but the claim that T_D didn't have a serious penchant for calling for and glorifying violence kind of makes it difficult to take that question seriously coming from you.

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

#495

Post by [deleted] »

Gunax wrote: post #414
ant6n wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it wierd what some Americans consider to be communist. A communist is not somebody who advocates for * equal rights for all people independent of ethnic origin, skin color, gender or religion * public transit * universal access to health care * affordable higher education * affordable housing * or even wealth redistribution via taxes, for example via welfare or a guaranteed minimum income A Communist is somebo…

And a white supremacist is not someone who advocates for bringing jobs back home, or enforcing immigration law. But people still feel free to call Trump racist because of those policies. The reason is that people view him as having ulteriour motives beyond his stated ones. Everyone is for affordable housing, so being in favour of that has no political bearing. But there are different proposed solutions to that. Putti…

[deleted]

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

#496

Post by Nasrudith »

jerf wrote: post #386
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…

"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…

I would put it as "the problem is society" essentially as opposed to size per se. I personally doubt that what is essentially a forcibly sharded technical approach akin to what MMOs did to deal with larger loads and content saturation would be useful. Content depends upon O(n) users subdividing it would reduce the utility and make it lose out and worse breed a new tribalism. Combine that with side channels and I am skeptical it would get better.

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

#497

Post by pjc50 »

kerkeslager wrote: post #364
pjc50 wrote: post #89

Earlier 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"…

But the current rules Reddit are still an invitation to "I'm not touching you Fascism". Fascists haven't gone away. They still are around and they still think fascist things, they've just metastasized into a subtler form of cancer. The only difference now is that we can't confront fascism with the truth any more. Ironically, by using the tools of the fascist against them we've implicitly admitted that the fascist is…

You can't confront fascism with the truth, because they've no interest in playing that game and will laugh in your face. There is no statement you can present that will trigger a Damascene conversion.

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

#498

Post by chc »

rjbwork wrote: post #213
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…

>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…

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.

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

#499

Post by [deleted] »

Melkor765 wrote: post #456
skrowl wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "everyone I don't like is a racist" debate strategy isn't a good look, but "every conservative is racist" is just pathetic. There was literally zero racist activity on The_Donald. The mods were very transparent and showed EVERY ACTION once they hit quarantine (to show they didn't deserve to be quarantined). The only racist posts came from new accounts / people who had never posted in The_Donald that were immediat…

To anyone reading, this is not true.

[deleted]

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

#500

Post by fzeroracer »

jl2718 wrote: post #173

There’s no winning this game. Soon they will be considered liable for anything they didn’t censor, especially from the extreme left, as they are making the appearance of support. I hope they’re paying Michael a massive amount of money to associate himself with this dumpster fire.

Trump literally signed an executive order which was threatening social media companies to take on liability from anything their users posted. When that happens said companies will simply outright ban the subs that are causing problems, which are usually the far-right subs because they insist on making threats of violence and racism.

The 'extreme left' has little to no political power compared to the president telling companies to either obey him or risk having their site go down in flames.

Post reply on HN