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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

#451

Post by duxup »

alexandercrohde wrote: post #439
usefulcat wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm also not sure how much The_Donald was as a community. The sheer volume of users at its height seemed to involve a huge amount of brand new accounts you never saw again / never posted again (except when they show up as a group again), and etc. Or those without brand new accounts show up and post strange dishonest lead in type posts that sort of try to lead folks down a bigoted path ... that you can blatantly see…

As soon as those metrics are exposed though, people will start hacking them by purchasing older accounts, etc.

A less common, but I'm seeing more frequent tacit are user accounts where they delete their posts after X time so the account looks like it has been around, but you've no idea where / what was posted.

Those users almost always head down the rabbit hole after a few posts....

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

#452

Post by john-shaffer »

Rebles wrote: post #257
filoleg wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fully agreed. I think people get up in arms over "but they have the rights to do it", making it look like those opposing decisions of admins believe that admins don't have those rights. Admins own the platform and they totally have the right to set whatever rules they want. No one is debating that. The thing that people point out is that despite admins having those rights, they might be exercising those rights in a w…

There is waaaaay too much content generated on Reddit for the admins to approve or curate. And the success of Reddit is in user-driven communities and content. Admins do not want to be in the business of content curation. Reddit is updating its content policy.

Admins tell the moderators how to act, and remove mods when they don't comply. Most content is effectively invisible unless it's heavily upvoted, so mods only really need to act on a small subset of posts. Some subreddits are moderated pretty heavily, while others remain mostly user-driven.

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

#453

Post by iamstupidsimple »

ant6n wrote: post #345
mantas wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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…

Part of the communist ideology is they mix up equality of outcome and equality of opportunity. If you optimise for the former, you end up with everyone being just as poor as one another, hence the link.

This is my understanding at least.

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

#454

Post by zpallin »

mdoms wrote: post #381
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…

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.

Technically 2000 subs, 200 established "communities."

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

#455

Post by throwaway894345 »

duxup wrote: post #374
throwaway894345 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? No, but I think people want equal, consistent, and predictable enforcement. Notably, lots of other communities are allowed to exi…

>lots of other communities are allowed to exist despite having much more and more overt bigotry including celebrations of political violence I would argue that was what TD was until very recently.

That's the point. Other communities are worse than TD and go reprimanded. And it's not just communities like TD; people are canceled, terminated, etc for completely not racist offenses such as "making an OK symbol by accident" or "standing next to a woman who wrongly suggested a minority person was vandalizing a store" or "citing a prominent Black academic's research on nonviolent-vs-violent protests" or "publishing an interview wherein a Black man says that he wishes there was more concern for crime problems in predominately Black communities", or "publishing an op ed from a US senator that expresses a viewpoint shared by more than 50% of the US public", or etc. Meanwhile people can go on years-long racist tirades on Twitter and be promoted into the NYT or say things like "literally all members of $RACE are irredeemably evil" in a book and hit the top of the Amazon and NYT best-sellers list and get diversity consulting gigs all over the country. There aren't words to describe how far beyond parody these double standards have become.

EDIT: That's a lot of downvotes. I'd be really interested to hear what specifically people disagree with. Do you contest my assertion that a double standard exists? Or maybe you don't agree with my negative characterization of TD? Or do you contest that the implication that double standards (in general or this one in particular) is morally wrong? Let's talk about it (leave the downvotes by all means, but let's have a productive discussion).

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

#456

Post by Melkor765 »

skrowl wrote: post #341
Rebles wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a strategy imposed against racism and violence. If conservative voices include a lot of racism, then, yes, I guess they should stop being racists.

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.

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

#457

Post by undersuit »

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.

A subreddit that keeps track of banned subreddits: https://www.reddit.com/r/reclassified/

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

#458

Post by zozbot234 »

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 migrated a long time ago, and the sub itself was all but abandoned. Reddit's ban today is the equivalent of them saying "You can't quit, you're fired!". It would be hilarious if it wasn't so damn predictable and depressing.

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

#459

Post by numpad0 »

deegles wrote: post #415
jlkuester7 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Who does the moderation? Some really messed up stuff gets uploaded to basically every social media platform [0] and I sure as hell do not want to deal with that. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebo...

It’s server admins’ responsibility, so if it’s run by individuals the admin bans when he has time, if it’s run by a company then it’s done at company expense, and if moderation standards of two instances conflict then either operator takes it as offense and blacklist the other one.

My understanding of Mastodon federation is that the Europe/American instances generally play along, some alt-rights oriented are cut off, and then there is group of predominantly Japanese instances running incompatible legal ideology on completely incompatible language so European admins generally reject those as horrible dark corners of internet(?)

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