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

I think they tend to be fashion critics more than anything else.

Some leftist communities worship Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot and others, whose actions led to murder of tens of millions of people. Why should we allow any of them to exist?

Those platforms don't lack on identitarian division and push of extremist views

There might be a slight point that those platforms end up being more of a right wing echo-chamber more than a left-wing one because of some factors. But the bias is on what's in there, not on the platform

That being said, nothing was lost of value with the shutting down of T_D (ok, maybe it would be a prime source of information on manipulative state actors, but they can work on what they have already)

You aren't seeing that content censored, because that content has been censored, and its posters vilified so completely, for so long, that it has disappeared.

There are virtually zero republicans or conservatives on any social media site -- they know they aren't welcome, so they don't engage very much.

You don't see them being censored because, at this point, they self-censor.

Who wants to be doxxed and have their employer harassed into firing them just for trying to have a calm conversation with people who want to murder them anyway

Reddit removed The_Donald from showing up in All, changed their search algorithm, and changed the number of active users showing up on T_D (they screwed up and you could see the true number on their ad buy portal).

Those were all 100% admin actions to censor, not moderator actions.

Consent is important here.

There are many many people. As such, the fact that many people like something does not imply that the typical person doesn’t dislike that thing.

The sense of persecution and victim-hood I hear from the right seems rather at odds with how damn successful they seem to be at the moment.

It's like when the silent majority was anything but.

I think it'll be a good thing, Reddit and most Silicon Valley companies hostile to free speech are going to decline as competition as alternatives that truly appreciate the constitution of the country they operate in are born.

I actually like how Reddit moderates for the most part, they do keep things relatively "clean", but they are also thoroughly corrupt politically, horrendously biased in favor of anything left wing and beyond reform. Outside of a few minor subs, I don't "browse" reddit anymore at all. Everyone fair and honest who visits /r/politics or /r/worldnews knows by now they're being lied to, constantly and without relent, so only one type of reader still goes there willingly.

> Find an instance of a threat of violence, regardless of context

Doesn't the fact that finding instances of violent rhetoric among alt-right posters, regardless of context, sorta make the case that maybe this is an endemic problem and not a purely political suppression?

There are a lot of really hateful people among that group, in ways that just aren't true for other politically aligned communities.

I mean, the Dirtbag Left folks have their assholes too (note that the Chapo sub was banned too), but they're comparatively rare, notable in isolation, generally have names associated with them, and (really importantly) tend to be shamed and controlled from within their own communities.

The alt right is a bunch of assholes, plus a bunch of people who make a habit of tolerating assholes. That's a toxic combination if you're Reddit.

> They are very transparently trying to kick off users/communities that they don't "like".

They are now. But what we are saying is that reddit didn't used to be like this.

Reddit used to be much less moderated, and much more in favor of free speech, almost to a ridiculous degree.

They used to allow a subreddit called jailbait, for gods sake.

Things are very different now, obviously.

Reddit has banned left leaning subs too, so there is probably something more there than first meets the eyes.

>Something like r/watchpeopledie, they don't have to censor, and it seems contained. I wouldn't want to visit it, not more than once, it may not be healthy in general, but taking it down seems to be "just" censorship?

I can say for me personally after spending some time on that subreddit that I am far more cautious and safe in everything I do. I always look out for falling objects, wear helmets and safety gear when appropriate, drive even more defensively etc. The sub opened my eyes to the dangers of planet Earth, all the ways it tries to kill us, and I don't think I'm alone on this.

Wouldn't each community have their own userbase? So brigaders would need to make new accounts to execute the attack. Maybe a hill/gate could be introduced for new accounts to rate-limit the influx?

The issue right now is that most content is presented over and communication conducted over HTTP interfaces without clear APIs. This makes writing independent applications to access this content or communicate via these channels challenging (though not at all impossible).

What would be really great is to go back to communicating via open protocols (and I don't mean a bespoke protocol over the open protocol that is HTTP). This lets people use whatever tools they want to participate. Like we have with email, Usenet and IRC.

EDIT: I initially wrote about content presentation over HTTP, that wasn't what I meant so I modified it. Specifically I'm talking about forums (like this one, Reddit, or any of the other popular gathering grounds) that are interfaced with via HTTP. They've taken over a large chunk of our person-to-person communication. Simple sites (like this one) are easy to interact with via a custom application. But Reddit, Facebook, and others are harder to use via anything but their primary site or their own application.

Maybe? But we're in a subthread about decentralized solutions, so I feel like it makes sense.

That's honestly one of the Big Questions™ about stuff like Mastodon; is how resilient it is against that sort of behaviour.

On a lot of levels, it seems to be designed to allow multiple groups to share blacklists, so that if a given target is a bad actor anywhere, as long as other groups trust the group they initially burned, word is allowed to get around and close the door in their face before they even say a word somewhere else.

That's really the sign of our times when it comes to internet communities - almost all communities have this "innocent until proven guilty" stance for random strangers. Having been a moderator before on at least one internet community, it's almost like you're a police detective "building a case". You don't just get a whiff of "gee, this person's probably acting in bad faith, let's just ban them" - you have to gradually build up a strong dossier of sorts proving that they're genuinely bad, otherwise (at least in the old-school communities I grew up in) it reflects extremely poorly on you.

But because of this, they're susceptible to all sorts of really rudimentary social hack vectors, some almost feeling as silly as "the same guy coming back five minutes later wearing a Groucho Marx mask and a slightly altered name - and fooling everyone".

-----------

I feel like that's really the novel thing about Mastodon et al - being able to ditch these social norms lets people unload a whole raft of scorched earth tools - like pre-emptive IP bans that follow people around and are in place before they even arrive.

They're dangerous tools - we could easily make ourselves susceptible to attacks where trolls get people kicked out of their own communities by impersonating them elsewhere, but it feels like the pendulum's been swung way to far in the "gentle and understanding" direction for decades, now.

I am a member of several non-conservative political and non-political groups that were banned because of the bad behavior of members of those subreddits.

Users of The_Donald regularly got away with behavior that got other communities wiped off of Reddit entirely.

r/AHS staged a massive public brigading campaign in 2018 to get as many right-wing subreddits banned as possible.

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?

SRS being tolerated.

> It is a common sentiment there that the only good Democrat is a dead one.

A similar sentiment is commonly expressed by far left individuals and groups on Twitter, Facebook and other mediums.

"the only good Tory is a dead Tory" has been the popular refrain for decades.

It's depressing these sentiments are carelessly amplified and approved by so many.

Edit: Apparently this has caused a stir. I encourage others to not read into this comment anything but disdain for the kind of discourse where "the one good BLANK is a dead BLANK" is accepted.

You mean like

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

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.

Just visited the site. Looks like you need to go through capticha/cloudflair wait and then you have to create an account. I never got that far.

But you went through all of that and verified your email. Now you are reporting it is full of [insert trending bad words]. Are you part of that community? A reporter?

Were there any upvotes on comments you approved of?

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.

People that think there is some "party line" at Reddit should look into the founders' political views.

To put it in perspective, spez is a right-wing libertarian who fought to keep r/Jailbait alive because it was the most visited subreddit at the time, despite it being a subreddit for posting suggestive pictures of minors.

Technically 2000 subs, 200 established "communities."

> Reddit's ban today is the equivalent of them saying "You can't quit, you're fired!".

This implies the Reddit ban is directed toward TD specifically, which it’s not. This is Reddit taking a long-term stance on what type of content they want on their platform. To sit here and downplay its importance is a predictable talking point and just as depressing.

Similar to how leftists promoted the "punch a nazi in the face" meme'. They will of course be the ones defining who is a "nazi".

You're imagining some reality and it's very strange. Take a look here and you won't see any of the delusional things you're describing:

https://thedonald.win/

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(?)

> if you don't block Gab, there are a lot of instances that don't want to talk to you.

Modern day witch hunts. (I'm not defending gab, or promoting it) However, these guilt by association hunts are irritating.

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).

Maybe. Those other ones aren't banned though while TD was. Combined with the fact that their new rules explicitly allow for harassment of majority identity groups, I'd say this isn't a good move.

No, only by Google.

e-mail is a communication standard, not a network/system.

It doesn't have to be a "forcible shard". In fact I think that's not terribly effective and there's better ways to do it. Weblogs did it fairly well, way back when.

Also, don't forget that you don't belong to one community; it's not like you log in one day and get assigned to your immutable chunk of the internet. You wander around the read versions of various communities, pick a couple of communities you invest it, pick several more to half-follow, get tired of the abuse in one and switch to another, meet someone in real life who encourages you to join another community, and so on.

Basically, the sort of "tribalism" that you'd encounter is whatever "tribalism" you associate with HN, because the structure I describe already half-exists, scrounging around the remnants from reddit and Facebook in tens of thousands of forums and active blogs and other such things. I don't think it produces any more or less "tribalism" than you get from anything else.

I agree, but I think that size and the speed by which information spreads makes social media what it is.

Social media is like being in a room with thousands, possibly millions, of people. If you have a gathering of this many people in real life it's entirely possible for the crowds to go out of control and for them to turn into a mob. This mob then gets worse through one-upmanship.

Subdividing these groups might breed new tribalism, but it'll make it less likely for a situation to spiral out of control. It takes more time for information to pass the barrier between communities. You also won't get as many people engaging in group-think, because your in-group isn't as large.

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....

..which seems like it would make it more expensive to achieve the same level of credibility via such 'fake' accounts. Seems like an improvement to me.

It should be difficult to get in or at least have some reputation system built-in like StackOverflow. Proof that you behave and have valuable opinions. It is quite bad if thousands of bots can be made easily and post spam, fakenews and manipulations.

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.

Yea wow, I don't moderate r/askhistorians but rather a different sub, and we sometimes pride ourselves on keeping this relatively clean. But then I stumble across r/askhistorians again and remember that no, no we don't have things under control by comparison.

We can barely keep a lid on the vitriol and toxicity, and some of the more blatantly false/scammy advice. r/askhistorians is a whole 'nother level.

Sometimes I honestly wish hackernews was run more like r/askhistorians. Too many people here on hn talk a lot of shit on stuff they don't really know much about beyond a cursory understanding (I'm probably guilty myself).

The iron fist is a double edged sword in some senses.

Although reddit acted as a free speech haven for a long time, it was only overall, and not ever in major specific communities. True free speech is valued because it fosters debate, and allows bad speech to be rebutted by more speech. A marketplace of ideas, and maybe more importantly, the counterspeech doctrine, are incredibly important principals in justifying the existence of free speech. Fiefdoms more often than not were echo chambers, where to see a response to bad speech, a person would have to know where else to venture. By creating filter bubbles, tribes, echo chambers, reddit was not an exemplar of a free speech haven, but instead a collection of lopsided megaphones pointed in opposite directions, strewn across a hard to navigate map.

Strong moderation is what allows communities with strict quality guidelines to function, but also amplifies division.

And on the topic of history, a part of me finds it unfortunate that this banning will make historical, sociological, and psychological analysis of trends, thoughts of the times, past bad behavior etc much harder. It's no what.cd or house of wisdom or library of alexandria loss, but it is still a historical record loss of a huge event that happened. I may not have personally liked The_Donald but it was quite the experience, as a fish out of water, to go look at how other people think, communicate, and reason. The culture that developed there will continue to exist, but the ease with which one could passively observe it, and learn lessons from it is greatly diminished. Another double edged sword.

I respect the iron fist of /r/askhistorians but it has the feel of being impossible to contribute.

This is by design but horribly off putting even if you read all the rules.

It feels way worse than wikipedia or Stack Overflow inner circle.

For example a few years ago there was a question about Hitler underestimating Soviet tank production. I submitted a link to HistoryChannel Youtube audio of the famous Hitler-Mannerheim talk of June 4th of 1942. I included even the exact second where Hitler talks about Soviet tank production.

Well, my comment which was 3rd or 4th level down got [deleted]. Why did I even bother?

I had a lengthy discussion with the askhistorians moderator on what the problem was.

* It was not Hitler since the question was about him. * It was not the fact that this was about as close to primary source as possible. * The problem apparently was that I did not provide enough context. We are talking about providing a primary source in a comment 3 levels down.

This leads to a horrible ratio of questions/accepted answers.

You would think that with only few historians being able to navigate the requirements the answers would be of the highest quality.

When it comes to recent history it certainly does not feel like it.

Another example: There was a question on Soviet black markets in 1980s The sole accepted answer referenced one pitiful official Soviet source and that was it. It was a lazy answer.

Since all I had was a wealth of anecdata I could not contribute which was fine but the feeling of incomplete answer really nagged me.

So you end up feeling like https://xkcd.com/386/ but unable to do anything.

The problem is this, if the official r/askhistorians answer is so obviously(to a biased participant in a recent event) incomplete for recent history how can we trust askhistorians for history where you have no knowledge?

It leads to a form of Gell-Mann effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

>Isn’t /r/politics completely one sided fake news to prop up the democrats???

/r/politics is how I imagine the "Two Minutes Hate" from 1984. A complete circle-jerk that has infested many of the main subreddits. /r/pics, /r/nextfuckinglevel, /r/publicfreakout are rather outposts of /r/politics these days. No wonder, when a small clique of politically aligned mods controls the major subreddits.

Even /r/askhistorians joined the blackout in support of 'Black Lives Matter'. What's neutral about that?

I'm not sure why this is downvoted. As an European I always found r/politics to be on the other side of funny US politics (dem and libtard and whatnot) and I also found it a bit disrespectful that it was just for US news. I get the whole "we were here first" thing but reddit is a bigger platform than that

No. I think there are two separate camps within the Democrats, with very little overlap. Progressives on the far left, and centrists. Think Sanders vs. Biden, for example. And /r/politics is completely dedicated to propping up the progressives.

To be fair, I don't think it's filled with fake news. It's filled completely with progressive-biased, one sided interpretation of actual news events.

They correctly saw that, in the run-up to the election, all the big leftist tech companies would assert themselves and silence conservatives in an effort to "prevent the next Trump situation" as Google's Jen Gennai put it last May when she thought she was talking to a fellow "diversity advocate".

> Who would hate a platform for not removing people for just honestly disagreeing and talking?

A lot of people. And if your goal is quantity, not quality, those people are important, because they are who the investors give you money to build a site for.

The problem is "honest disagreement and talking" isn't. One person's honest disagreement is inciting violence, and with coded signals and dogwhistles, it's not a subject that everyone will agree on. Things that are clearly on one side or there other of the line aren't in question. It's more subtle stuff that can be argued either way, eg "When the looting starts, the shooting starts", where it gets more contentious.

Pretending it's all just honest disagreement is being naive.

On a phone so can't type at length but I actually agree with you on some of this.

I'm sitting here thanking God for people like you because what you've just described sounds IDEAL.

I firmly believe the best way to resolve all this is not censorship but by shining that light as brightly as possible.

I wonder what a workable version of this looks like?

No, I understand: it's the idea that keeping them in the spotlight means we can keep tabs on them easier. I can see the appeal of that solution, but here's the problem: some people will legitimately go to /r/The_Donald to figure out what these people are thinking. Researchers, political operatives, etc. might find this very convenient. But the other effect this has is that (a) it gives them legitimacy (look! One of the larger subreddits on Reddit is an alt right haven!), and (b) most people aren't critical thinkers. They will see a political meme that mildly aligns with their beliefs, chuckle, move on. Until they see another, and another. Eventually, they'll notice a pattern: these memes are coming from TD, so they subscribe. Next thing you know, they are only getting their "news" from the TD memes, and suddenly they live in a political thought bubble getting further indoctrinated. That's what will happen with 99.9% of the people who end up on a subreddit like The_Donald, whether you like it or not. So in my estimation, the benefit of keeping TD around (easy visibility into the thought process of these individuals) is greatly outweighed by the drawbacks (providing them with easy means of recruitment and indoctrination).

Also, please keep in mind that for fringe groups like these Reddit is not their primary form of communication. That is, the community leaders don't just PM each other on Reddit or communicate via posts and comments. If there is any kind of organized effort here to effect real world change, it is coordinated by private chat, often times with assistance of anonymizing networks like Tor. Reddit is where people come into this world, but it's only floor 1 of the a vast underground bunker (for the communities where these things exist). Take 4chan as another internet dumpster fire. Anonymous periodically puts on their own campaigns like pridefall which can absolutely create real world problems. But they don't communicate through memes. When stuff starts working on that level, they are coordinating these things via better channels and that's happening today. If 4chan was to disappear, I firmly believe that core group would still be in touch and looking to set up another dumpster fire on another social media site, be it a private Facebook group, a Twitter community, a Discord server, or something else. But I'd rather they spend their time chasing their tail trying to get back to having external visibility than to have them do it in the open.

Also, they already have the opportunity to act more covertly, and they do. I am getting pretty good at spotting bad actors, but I'm sure I miss more. Some are pretty clever in their online interactions. Kicking them off Reddit doesn't give them any better tools to do this. They already can and already are doing this today.

If you want further proof of this, consider why the members of the KKK wear hoods. Could they do what they do in the open? Maybe. But because they are your neighbors, your politicians, your police officers, and your friends, they need a level of anonymity. Take that away and you make it harder for them to do what they do. Reddit provides the means for that open yet semi-anonymous MO. Taking it away doesn't mean they change their beliefs, but it makes it harder for them to do what they do.

"Ha ha only serious."

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'm still convinced that it was a joke in the beginning, and then the subreddit saw an influx of people who didn't get the joke.

You know, life is pretty good when you never 100% agree with everything random people are saying in any subreddit.

Yes, it got significantly edgier after going private.

> Someone's interpretation of their own sexuality or gender affects no one but themselves.

I don't feel you've really followed the debate. Some trans rights activists are demanding that they be legally defined as the sex they 'identify' with. This equates to biological men being housed in female prisons, biological men competing in women's sporting events, etc etc. It's an attack on women's spaces and the very meaning of what it is to be a woman and what women's experiences entail.

This is just a short summary but the idea that they are affecting 'no one but themselves' is way off base.

> Someone's interpretation of their own sexuality or gender affects no one but themselves.

This section was already covered by another user, but I'd like to provide an example too:

So, you fall in love with someone, and marry them. You have children with them and you have a nice family. Everything is going great until one day ... they confess to you that they have always felt like they were the opposite gender. This was not disclosed to you before you said your vows.

You want to support them because you love them so you encourage them to treat their dysphoria. You think it will be fine.

But then it turns out that when they begin to transition hormonally, you're no longer attracted to them. This is no fault of your own, sexuality is what it is, but you kinda feel like the person you were in love with has died. Your marriage falls apart. You're hurt. You feel vaguely betrayed even though you weren't really.

Whenever you try to talk to someone about what happened, just to vent, they all take your ex-spouse's side.

This is the content that was in a lot of the posts on GenderCritical. People who were hurting who wanted a place to vent about something a SPECIFIC person in their life did without automatically being labeled transphobic for working through their feelings.

Additionally, all the posters there were cis women. Men and trans women were asked to go somewhere else. Occasionally they would make exceptions and allow trans men to post, but for the most part it was cis women.

People who don't know better think of GenderCritical as aligned with the alt-right, but basically they are a despised part of the left. They would vote in the interest of women, being feminists, which meant NOT voting with the alt-right.

One of the main reasons they asked men to go elsewhere was because more often than not, those posters WOULD be aligned with the alt-right, and they would not have the best interests of women in mind when discussing things. Alt-right men would just see a subreddit that seemed to be for bashing trans people and be like "Sweet! This is my new home." and all the radical feminists would be like "nuh uh, out."

Source: I starting doing a deep dive into this community about a year ago to attempt to understand them.

There's no militant SJWs in the highest political office in the country. There's not even any in Congress.

The issue of uncontrolled immigration used to be common ground for the left and the right. For a long time even Bernie opposed it on the grounds that large numbers of low-skilled immigrants were driving driving down wages for the poorest Americans[0].

[0]https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/03/16/years-ber...

Even back in '94 the Usenet could get ugly. The Usenet is where Godwin observed his famous law in practice.

As a community grows the probability that it includes disruptive assholes approaches 1. Unmoderated communities do not scale.

Rather like the serious end of anarchism, recognising that the price of freedom is taking responsibility for yourself. And it breaks down with scaling in the same way.

You can confront fascism with truth, because the goal of that is to inform those reading the conversation, not to persuade the fascist.

You're literally saying that because they're not playing our game, we should let fascists control what game is played.

> How effective has "confronting fascism with the truth" ever been?

When white people were afraid of black violence, Martin Luther King showed them black people peacefully hand in hand with ministers in their Sunday best, walking toward Selma and remaining nonviolent even as they were met with violence.

When straight people saw gay people as dangerous deviants, Harvey Milk showed them gay people in their families, jobs, and neighborhoods, behaving like the normal people they are. I personally grew up in a church that taught homophobia--my own opinions were fundamentally changed by one of my friends coming out in high school.

Ask yourself your own question: when has censorship ever been effective?[1] I'd argue that, among other things the election of Trump is partly a backlash against attempts to control speech by the left. It's no mistake that a big part of the pro-Trump narrative was just that he "spoke his mind".

[1] Whenever I ask this question, people always respond by pointing to one study which showed banning a few hate subreddits decreased hate speech on Reddit, so I'll preemptively respond to that by saying that there's absolutely no evidence that bigots on Reddit didn't simply move to Voat at that time.

There’s a clue in his username...

You know mediamatters wrote that article before Reddit took action right? Reddit used that article as the justification for something they clearly wanted.

It was the Oregon GOP rep that said [If you send the police to get us, send bachelors].

I think it’s a little more complicated than you make it out to be.

It’s a larger discussion of what can mods with a large subreddit be responsible for. Is it reasonable to assume that in a sub that is typically pro police that some users that posted comments get the sub shut down? If that is the standard, can we prove mediamatters didn’t make those posts to point to for effect?

Maybe you are right; but mediamatters is BEYOND extreme bias so let’s not use them as an authority, and there is clearly hypocrisy at Reddit if threats against police “were” a problem.

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.

For posterity’s sake, I believe the commenter is referring to thedonald.win, which I’m purposely leaving un-linkified.

+1 to this. Chapo wasn't bad at all, in terms of breaking actual rules. I saw people on the announcement thread claiming it was full of tankies, and that was reason enough to ban it, but it really wasn't. You wouldn't get very far on Chapo by unironically talking about what a great man Stalin or Mao was -- though, guillotine jokes, including applying them to the necks of landlords, would certainly get you upvotes.

I never saw any actual brigading on the sub itself. Others talk about "organizing brigades through Twitter," and I think it's kind of BS to punish people for that. Reddit doesn't get to police Twitter, and vice versa.

Never saw any actual advocacy of violence against any specific person, either. Sure, there were "kill the landlords" type jokes and memes, but the closest I think I ever saw it get to actual incitement of violence was stuff like "Kissinger needs to fucking die already," or "I would prefer that Trump exit the White House feet first, in a box." You can call that whatever you like, but it's certainly not advocating violence against anyone.

Meanwhile, there's literally a Stalin meme on the front page of r/fullcommunism that says "death to capitalism." Then, there's r/latestagecapitalism, which is a toxic shithole of a sub where you literally can't say "that idea is crazy and will never work because $REASONS," because they have a blacklist of words that are "slurs" of one sort of another that they don't publish, and which will get your post removed if you try and use them.

Just because something is hated by most of the left doesn't make it "not left".

Confusion caused by attempting to sort human beliefs in a one-dimensional space strikes again! To be clear I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with you or the parent poster, just commenting on the ambiguity.

No they weren't. The admins kept the original mods and were trying to work with them.

The admins even said as much when explaining the ban.

No. The lower level mods were forced in by the Reddit admin a while back. There were warnings about these sock mods long ago. The subsequent banning of the top mods effectively put these sock mods in control.

What do you mean, "wouldn't"? This isn't a hypothetical, this is the reality of today. And yes, it is a current problem.

> that’s the whole point of upvotes and downvotes.

No it's not. In fact the reddit rules / guidelines specifically state that is not what upvotes and downvotes are for. It's specifically called out for the moderators to deal with it through user reports, not through votes.

Plus, lots of downvotes does nothing to remove hateful content. The content is still there! Only the moderators can remove hateful content.

>The community gets to decide what’s popular

This is false. The piece of the machine that really decides is reddit's algorithm and how people consume content. It also doesn't take into account how communities can drastically change in an instant if a post gets brigaded. Suddenly it's not "your community" that's voting and deciding.

What happens is the most easily digestible content that appeals to the most people gets upvoted the most. Saying "the community decides" is at best naive.

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.

Isn't it funny how reddit ended up the opposite of what it was seemingly designed as? A system with a community policing vote process turned into a community that is one of, if not the, most top down moderated spaces on the Internet. Where the voting system turned into a supplementary group control system rather than a liberator.

I am not joking, and yes Obama and Biden are very clearly right-wing politicians. I have not seen a single actually left-wing policy out of either of them.

Also, please don't assume the people you're talking to online are 'joking' when they express their serious views. It's against HN guidelines to assume such bad faith in my answers.

> 'left-wing' views are not 'tolerated', they are celebrated.

I don't see that at all on reddit.

There's a disconnect here I feel. If one chooses to refer to biological females as female, and biological males as male (and perhaps approach other situations ad hoc) then it seems you would say "this is trans hate" but the person practicing that behaviour doesn't [necessarily] hate the people they're referring to.

Indeed the person who uses biological identifiers seems often to be the hated person, a person who identified themselves as trans might hate them for not going along with that identity; but the person who is choosing how they personally identify others would in this situation often be labelled as committing hate-speech. IMO it's disagreement, not hate.

Compare the situation to that of the relatively few people who have a body dismorphia such that they believe themselves to be felines (cats) in a human body. They're no less sincere. But I'd still, without hate, refer to them as humans.

Those who disagree are surely entitled to take that position, regardless of whether someone else chooses to consider that hurtful, or do you disagree?

The modern conversation is about tribes not position/ideology. What people are calling left here is an amorphous blob of ever shifting positions. They are neither leftist nor liberal, it is essentially a distributed tribe linked together by shared a language and culture.

Left and liberal are both two very useful words, sadly they do not really describe any of the vocal demographics on social media

To be fair the argument isn't really that TD was where "open and honest" discussion would happen, rather that reddit is politically biased anti-Trump in selectively detecting rule violations.

From the perspective of someone from Europe this is a very valid question, cause Biden is right of the center, so not really what somehow who describes themselves as "leftist" usually votes for. Even Bernie Sanders, often seen as the start of socialism in America, is only a bit left of the center in typical political quadrants.

The problem is that US politics are very skewed to the right, so many there think clear right wing positions are on the left.

(https://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2020)

Theoretically, I can see why that would be distressing as an end-user, but wearing my platform operator hat^, I can't think of any way to implement that doesn't result in either driving traffic to competing platforms, assisting rulebreakers in their inevitable quest to rouse a pitchfork mob against their own platform, and/or is interpreted to be saying that users are bad for having subscribed to banned content.

^ I do not operate any public platforms.

Here’s a partial crowdsourced list https://www.reddit.com/r/reclassified/comments/hi41t2/the_ba...