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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

#621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Way back when r/the_donald just started when his campaign began, many people including me thought it was an ironic subreddit and treated it as such. Then suddenly Trump gained momentum and the subreddit turned out to be for real.

Irony has always been a tool of the far right, from the nazis to the Christchurch shooter. How 4chan and t_d use it is not especially different.

I agree on that, but I think this case was a bit different. A lot of the early posts were making fun of Trump pretty thinly veiled.

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

#622

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>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…

I'm not sure why you're getting downvotes, because this is spot-on. Anonymous paper-folding image boards and other places like that are already celebrating the arrival of newcomers. It's like sending a petty offender to prison, and instead of getting reformed, they just get a lot more hardcore. I get it that Reddit doesn't want extremism on its site, and I don't have an opinion either way on the bans. But I think it'…

You are missing the point. Organizing, coordinating, recruiting, all these activities have costs associated with them. Costs like time spent on them, time spent finding tools to use for the job, etc. Make a racist subreddit go away and the N people who were a part of it won’t stop being racist. But it will be harder for them to find another platform to recruit and to some degree harder to find ways to coordinate. Now time that could have been spent indoctrinating new recruits can is being spent on less productive tasks, slowing the whole community down. Will it stop racism or even the racist group from doing what they do? Of course not. Will it slow them down, yes absolutely.

If a bunch of assholes showed up to your front lawn and started doing asshole things, do you kick them out knowing that they might go to your neighbor’s lawn? Or do you keep them on yours to protect your neighbor? I guarantee you that you’ll kick them out and then likely help your neighbor kick them out too, not shelter them and help them do the asshole things by providing your lawn as a platform. How is this different?

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

#623
post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A counterpoint to the post: wasn't r/ShitRedditSays, a subreddit that repeatedly brigaded threads that had racist/bigoted comments, one of the first prominent subreddits to get in trouble for brigading?

What do you mean “get in trouble”? It still exists and doesn’t seem limited in any way...

I think the anti-brigading rules were put in place because of them.

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

#625
post #532

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Don't hold your breath, especially regarding any action taken against /r/politics or an effort to make it actually politically neutral.

How would one make a political discussion group be politically neutral?

By encouraging discussions from both ends of the political spectrum, perhaps? The discussions themselves cannot be neutral, but the environment can be.

That is not currently the case in /r/politics.

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

#626
post #613
post #571

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> The_Donald involved a lot of spreading their message / fake news sites / spamming across other subs and etc. Yea, I gotta say, having to previously deal with r/The_Donald brigades on another large subreddit was incredibly annoying and depressing. Can't speak to spreading fake news, but massive influxes of r/The_Donald users spamming truly vile stuff in an ostensibly non-political sub really sucked (as a moderator,…

Gotta respect the iron fist of /r/askhistorians. Probably the best sub on reddit.

The sound of folks bemoaning getting moderated there is music to my hears.

No people, we want someone who KNOWS, not just saw something on the Discovery Channel this one time ... it's such a refreshing change from the magical internet experts that come and go.

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

#627
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…

I run a video game clan with a fairly active discord channel -- the stance I've taken is: there are no rules beyond: 1. nothing illegal (includes cheating at games) 2. no racism / homophobia / transphobia 3. no harassing other members 4. everyone has different beliefs and come from different parts of the world -- if you are offended, ask the offender to stop, otherwise see a mod so far there are around 50 people in t…

The how is simple - 50 people on a semi-private system is a totally different league than Reddit, with millions of users and public. Similar to your 4-rules stance, Reddit has Reddiquette and Content Policy and for the most part, people obey the policy. It's at the fringes where there are problems. It's not the one Satanist that's the issue, it's when there are large groups of members in the Church of Satan who don't get along with members of the Satanic Temple who don't get along with fringe Scientologists. (Because mainstream Scientology wasn't kooky enough for them.) And then trying to force them to split a pie that's not big enough for everyone to have a slice.

50 people is 48 more members than are in my video game clan, so I can admire the community building. The problem space changes drastically when scaling up though.

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

#628

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IMO the 'heavy censorship' is the only thing keeping hobby communities going well. Without that moderation, you'd be trying to learn about something fun like knitting but you'd see a bunch of hateful content, like racist MAGA stuff instead of knitting for example. Having the moderation get stronger is the only way to save hobby subreddits IMO.

No you wouldn’t, that’s the whole point of upvotes and downvotes. The community gets to decide what’s popular. Not moderators.

I agree that it doesn't necessarily always devolve into hate speech but, anecdotally, every community I've seen without heavy moderation eventually devolves into low effort meme posts, and sometimes hateful content. For example, r/gaming vs r/games. The pattern repeats itself all over reddit.

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

#629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean like https://thedonald.win/p/GIEYMyjj/steven-huffman-the-most-col...

Have you ever been to any of Reddit subs?

It isn’t perfect. Most major subs uphold a reasonable measure of decorum. It’s a big place, I am sure you can find examples of everything you see on TD.win. The point is Reddit is trying to enforce its rules and maintain reasonable standards (IMO)

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

#630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users won't allow for (use) decentralized platforms until there is a good way to censor them. Once that happens, what would be the point of switching. Facebook and Reddit are successful BECAUSE they are censorship machines. Facebook spends far more man hours on "curating" content compared to engineering. Same with Reddit. Add up all the "moderation" time spent removing negative or controversial posts and I bet much m…

> Users won't allow for (use) decentralized platforms until there is a good way to censor them. Once that happens, what would be the point of switching. You could imagine a world where there's multiple apps that access the same decentralized platform, where the censoring happens at the application level. So if your favorite community gets banned in one app, if you want, you could switch to a different app. Not a perf…

Usenet and killfiles.

In the olden days (when NNTP was a more popular protocol), almost anyone could post almost anything to almost any group. There was moderation, but mostly in more focused groups or announcement-centric groups where replies were not expected. To moderate, you, yourself, added people and subjects to your own kill file. This meant that the platform was mostly free of censorship, but the participants could choose to engage or not with trolls or charged topics. If they chose to disengage, they simply wouldn't see it. Like going on /. and setting a filter level of 5 for viewable comments.

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