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Comment by kaixi | Hacker News Reader

Which rules have they broken?

Arguably the same rules any subreddit with over a dozen members has broken at some point. You'll probably be linked to a list of posts with few/no upvotes that make "calls to violence". You can easily compile a list like this for any major subreddit on any subject, but people like to harp on T_D because it represents a bias they don't care for.

https://np.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/7a4bjo/time_f...

>Many of these links are probably in violation of our policy

--spez

> Generally the mods of the_donald have been cooperative when we approach them with systematic abuses. Typically we ban entire communities only when the mods are uncooperative or the entire premise of the community is in violation of our policies. In the past we have removed mods of the_donald that refuse to work with us.

> I don't accept that excuse. These were gathered by searching for phrases that should be included in their AutoModerator config. These calls for violence are mod enabled.

https://www.reddit.com/r/RightAgainstTrump/wiki/violence

Clearly the CEO of reddit feels the mods of r/the_donald have done a reasonable job at policing their sub overall, despite having missed a handful of extremely lowly upvoted comments.

Do you suggest the AutoModerator filter for words like "hang", "kill", "shoot"? Why not implement that site wide? I'm sure that would go over well with the rest of reddit.

What pisses people off is how spez (reddit's CEO) is dancing around the fact that for a reason or another he can't/doesn't just punish a misbehaving subreddit while other borderline subreddits otherwise very cooperative but way smaller get shut down regularily.

It's a bit like how kids in a class get away with sticking gums two or three times on their desks "because they were quick to remove it" when other kids have their parents called the first time they bring a circuit board to school.

Reddit does what it wants, that's their platform. It just looks terrible on the face of it.

Agreed, reddit's ban hammer is often arbitrary and self-serving and r/the_donald drives too much traffic to reddit for them to seriously consider it for them (even more so with Twitter and @realDonaldTrump)

Admins should contemplate banning less, and users on all sides should chill on demanding it for subs they don't like. No one forces you to go to a sub, and you can even filter them from the front page without extensions now.

But live-and-let-live is not particularly in-vogue these days. As in this submission, the top post is (nothing to do with topic) "Why isn't this other sub also banned hmmm???"

> and r/the_donald drives too much traffic to reddit for them to seriously consider it for them

Ehh, it's not that, the sub is not really that active outside of a core group. Their user base isn't that involved either, none of the polls they post get any traction (that's why they stopped posting them) and for the most part frontpage posts get like 60-100 comments (unless it's a 'big' story). So it's not the traffic for sure, no matter how much they want to delude themselves about the 10 million invisible subs or whatever.

It's the press. Because like it or not they would be making a pretty big political statement by banning the sub, the main 'supporters club' for the currently sitting US president. Whatever ban reason will be picked apart and spun by either side of the press and the whole thing will become a big unmanageable mess, which is not something anyone would want to trigger. Better to wait it out until, for whatever reason, he's no longer the president. At that point I'm sure the rules regarding death threats, racism and witch hunting will be enforced a bit less leniently.

The question was "Which rules have they broken?" and they have clearly broken many.

Spez's response "yeah but they took some of them down after they got caught" doesn't change that.

I think his point is that the mods of the sub have done their best to enforce the rules, despite missing a handful of very lowly upvoted comments here and there.

Thus "they" (the people who run the sub) have not broken any rules, just some bad actors which presumably would have been dealt with if their posts got more attention.

If random users making bad posts that almost no one notices in highly active subs constitutes a total subreddit ban, then all subs would end up banned.

T_d and similar regularly sees posts that break the rules, at rates higher than other subs, that are highly upvoted, it's not just a few low-scoring bad apples. Reddit won't ban them because they want the traffic. "Well they took some down after they got caught" is a sorry excuse.

Perhaps so but the post of examples linked by GP has the vast majority of offending posts upvoted <= 5. Only 9 were >= 10 and just 3 >= 20. Really? This is a sub where popular posts and comments get hundreds and thousands of upvotes. Could they not have compiled a better list? It must be easy if the place is as bad as we're all told.

But I agree, reddit just wants the traffic, and r/the_donald does deliver on that for them.

I don’t know about rules but I left reddit because it kind of sucked seeing their posts calling everyone cucks every single day. That was literally like half of the top posts on any given day leading up to the election.

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