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.<p>There is constantly <i>tremendous</i> 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.<p>You have to pick who you want to cave to, and to what extent, and no matter how good of a job you try to do, a lot of people will <i>really really hate you</i>.<p>This is even more apparent when you see that Reddit has been taking action against a lot more subreddits recently, some of which are listed in the article, and many of which clearly have little to do with the president. The attitude of some of these communities may be abhorrent, but they are still <i>communities</i>, and people do not react well to their communities being deleted, whether a company had the legal authority to, or was justified in doing so, or not.<p>It's very tough and I wish that we didn't have to go through these things to begin with, and could have more federated and decentralized platforms, or at least more client-side filtering inside of centralization curation. I can always dream.
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.<p>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 the surface in a similar though less-direct fashion to previously banned /r/clownworld (barely-veiled antisemitic and racist cartoons/commentary).
Also banned is /r/chapotraphouse, notably the biggest (only?) left-leaning sub on the list. Its users were known to be relatively cantankerous and tended to kick off a lot of brigading on Twitter and such; though some will say its banning was a "both sides" maneuver from the management.<p>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 "stay in their containment areas". Hopefully Reddit is turning the page to better empower its communities to protect their users and keep hate off the platform.
Whether you agree with the move or not, it's funny how Reddit's stance has changed over time. Under the old ownership, 2012:<p>"At reddit we care deeply about not imposing ours or anyone elses’ opinions on how people use the reddit platform. We are adamant about not limiting the ability to use the reddit platform even when we do not ourselves agree with or condone a specific use. We have very few rules here on reddit; no spamming, no cheating, no personal info, nothing illegal, and no interfering the site's functions."
From Reddit:<p><a href="https://www.reddithelp.com/en/categories/rules-reporting/account-and-community-restrictions/promoting-hate-based-identity-or" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddithelp.com/en/categories/rules-reporting/acc...</a><p>> Marginalized or vulnerable groups include, but are not limited to, groups based on their actual and perceived race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, immigration status, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, pregnancy, or disability. These include victims of a major violent event and their families.<p>> While the rule on hate protects such groups, it does not protect all groups or all forms of identity. For example, the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority or who promote such attacks of hate.<p>The majority based on what? An individual state? The US? The west? The world?
Men are the minority in many countries but the majority world wide. White people are the majority in the west but a minority world wide.<p>Does that mean people can attack white people with impunity, even though they're a global minority? Can I crap on women to my hearts content because they are a majority in the UK? Can people in California shit all over Hispanics because they're the majority in that State?<p>Will they assess a users state/country/continent of origin before deciding whether or not they're being hateful towards a specific group?<p>We are watching Reddit die. Aaron Swartz, the cofounder of Reddit warned about this a decade ago.
I'm confused by the article. My understanding was that reddit replaced the moderators of /r/The_Donald months ago after initially making in quarantined.<p>The Wikipedia article seems to agree with my understanding:<p>> In February 26, 2020, Reddit administrators removed a number of r/The_Donald moderators "that were approving, stickying, and generally supporting content in this subreddit that breaks [Reddit's] content policy" and called the remaining moderators to choose new ones from a list of Reddit-approved individuals.[77] About the same time, Reddit placed r/The_Donald in "Restricted mode", removing the ability to create new posts from most of its users. Since then, the subreddit's community has moved to thedonald.win, an independently hosted site based on Reddit's old user interface.<p>Which all sounds fine to me, but the article's quote "We’re not the ones who shut down the community. The moderators are the ones who shut down that community." seems disingenuous to me.<p>What's wrong with just saying that it's their platform and they have the right to set the rules?
One thing that seems to not be mentioned in Reddit's new policy: They're now auto-removing comments that contain certain phrases or words. Not even moderators can approve them: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/hhtwxi/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_june_29_2020/fwdyvqz/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/hhtwxi/culture_wa...</a><p>It looks like it is no longer possible to make a comment containing "thedonald.win" on Reddit. To be clear: Reddit isn't just censoring links to that site, it's censoring <i>mentioning</i> it.<p>This appears to be a new change as it was retroactively applied to comments from a few days ago.
It was largely empty after the quarantine.<p>I always wondered what the actual population of that sub was, I felt like I saw some strange patterns where whole hordes of users would appear, disappear, mob another sub and so on. It felt like a very non organic community in many ways.<p>The issues surroundings that sub weren't just some folks who had a sub to talk to each other, they were very busy mobbing / taking over other subs and etc.<p>Like most of those subs that leaned right it seemed like a front for sort of a rabbit hole of fear, hate, open bigotry, and blatent calls for violence / division and etc.
They literally greenlit racism against Whites:<p>"Marginalized or vulnerable groups include, but are not limited to, groups based on their actual and perceived race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, immigration status, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, pregnancy, or disability. These include victims of a major violent event and their families.<p>While the rule on hate protects such groups, it does not protect all groups or all forms of identity. For example, the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority or who promote such attacks of hate."
Reddit really had a good run as an interesting site, but it's really angling for a FB style consumer ad experience now. I think the final blow will be when they go after porn like tumblr did, then it will die forever. Too bad the alternatives are pretty extremist. I think Dread is really the best one because people who want to buy drugs on the internet aren't there completely for the politics.
I have no love for the political ideology or behavior of this group but they weren't breaking any laws or even any more rules than other groups on reddit that still operate. They were just politically unviable.<p>Centralized corporate means to communicate (like, say, this one we're using) always go bad eventually. It's the natural lifecycle of online forums. Once money involved it's only a matter of time before the profit and drama-avoidance incentives of the corporation win over the wishes of the users. Reddit hasn't been usable since 2013.
/r/gendercritical was also banned, an active and well-moderated radical feminist sub.<p>I am not a radical feminist, nor was I particularly welcomed there as a man, but I found the sub interesting to expand my perspective.
About time. However, this move was mostly symbolic. r/the_donald has been inactive for months without a single new post on it. AFAIK the community had already moved on to another site off reddit.<p>Much more significant IMO is that the ban also includes r/ChapoTrapHouse, which is a "left"-leaning subreddit accused of much of the same stuff r/the_donald was.
New rule change is essentially no hate subs except if it’s hate against a majority aka white people. As a minority I’m tired of defending white people from other white people and being shouted at by white people for doing so. I’ve tried for 6 years to push for equality for all and had the most insane rebuttals against that.
As horrible or stupid as that subreddit was it at least exposed Steve Huffman stealthily editing posts, so some positive came from it.<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/5frg1n/tifu_by_editing_some_comments_and_creating_an/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/5frg1n/tifu_...</a>
If the rationale for banning is policy violations (doxxing, racism, vulgarity, calls for violence, etc), as long as the standards are consistently enforced I'm okay with it. Although my caveat is that racism is defined differently for different people. I
E., racism has to be directed towards a marginalized group vs derogatory statements based on racial characteristics.<p>This is my main problem with Twitter. The standards aren't consistently enforced. I've seen so many leftist blue checkmarks justifying violence that get a pass.<p>And on the racism front, Sarah Jeong comes to mind.
I don't know what the rest of you are reading, but reddit now explicitly allows hate speech against a majority. Seriously, it's right there on their site: <a href="https://www.reddithelp.com/en/categories/rules-reporting/account-and-community-restrictions/promoting-hate-based-identity-or" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddithelp.com/en/categories/rules-reporting/acc...</a>
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.
To be fair, The_Donald was already shutdown for a while. Between quarantine that makes it not show up in feeds and the moderation team being replaced by Reddit’s, it wasn’t up and running anymore.
I remember how was Reddit 10 years ago... It was a very open and permissive place. Only <i>very</i> bad things were prohibited at that time (pedophilia, rape, murder, etc.).<p>It is now ran by people/corporations with a political agenda.
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.<p>It remains to be seen whether or not this will bury conservative thought or cause an underground resurgence.
Note T_D is only one such sub being banned. CTH and thousands of others as well are being removed.<p><a href="https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/29/21304947/reddit-ban-subreddits-the-donald-chapo-trap-house-new-content-policy-rules" rel="nofollow">https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/29/21304947/reddit-ban-subre...</a>
I don't know how many will see the comment but I was a member of the_donald sub and subsequently migrated to the new thedonald.win<p>There is a significant shift going on that people aren't realizing. The days of the "platform" being a monopoly over users is coming to an end. The cost of running a website, even a bandwidth heavy website is going lower. As major social networks and platforms crack down on controversial content, these communities don't vanish. They simply move to some other place. In the conservative community this idea of "censorship" is increasing to the point where it is becoming a serious movement. Many alternatives to mainstream media are actually gaining a decent userbase. Here is what is going on that I can see:<p>Twitter is replaced by parler<p>Youtube is replaced by bitchute<p>Reddit subs are replaced by thedonald.win (you can get your sub hosted by them now)<p>Twitch is replaced by dlive<p>Just to show you the growth of some of these platforms. Just look at the growth of thedonald.win. Apparently it is ranked at something like 1,250 for the USA by Alexa. That's staggering considering this website is only a few years old.<p>If you are a web entrepreneur, take note because there is a growing market for "conservative" or "censorship-free" social media now.
This is a purely symbolic move at this point. It was effectively shut down and has been completely inactive for something like four months, and by all accounts the competing site has been thriving.
It's high time Reddit and other social networks ban toxic users, and boy are those political zealots toxic. The problem with these people is that they don't realize that almost nobody cares about their fringe opinions.<p>For all that I'm concerned, if Reddit shadowbanned every user with a history of mostly political comments and posts, nothing of value would be lost. Political discussions online do not have any positive effects on anybody, neither on the people doing it nor on the poor bystanders who have to endure all these "campaigns" and the constant attempts to manipulate public opinion.<p>As a European, I'm particularly tired of the constant flow of politically-motivated garbage posts coming from the US. One reason why I'm mostly on HN is that political topics are usually flagged. Kudos to Reddit if they go the same path.
Do you all think Steve is ok? Like on a personal health level? The constant onslaught of "you're a nazi and racist" and being overwhelmingly hated by your user base must take a toll. How do CEOs in positions like this not burn out or avoid major stress-related health problems?
Spez is lying because The_Donald had been inactive for 4 months when the Reddit admins banned their top mods and they all left and built their own website thedonald.win<p>So Spez claiming TD has been continuing to post rule breaking content is literally a lie.
I wonder how they will fight against the other kind of systematic propaganda now but guess nothing will happen. Subs like /r/bestof became absolute shit<p>See the current top post there which is absolutely crazy but hey it fits the agenda.
I'm actually curious how conspiracy subs continually skate through these ban-waves. Even if you discount all of the dog whistles, you can find normal whistles scattered throughout the place: echoes and charts showing who in the media is Jewish are the two most common.<p>Yet they always stay around.
It's about time now to declare the "social media" experiment dead. We're basically learning that there is value in excluding. The all inclusive buffet only brings you down to a neutered lowest common denominator. You're not really going to get any real thought or discussion when you're conversation is monitored by outside moderators. It was doomed to fail anyway.
I feel obligated to once again plug <a href="https://ieddit.com/about/" rel="nofollow">https://ieddit.com/about/</a> -transparent mod/admin logs, anonymous posting, etcetcetc, but I honestly think it's been demonstrated that it's next to impossible to sustain any amount of serious interest in such alternatives (there is certainly no shortage of reddit-like sites).<p>The direction reddit has taken is absolutely abhorrent, but at this point it's hard to avoid adopting a fatalistic outlook on things. What else can be done?<p>Anybody in the upper echelons of reddit who is responsible for the direction the site has taken over the past few years should be absolutely disgusted with themselves. Was the hundreds of millions (billions?) in VC funding not enough? You were given an extremely important position of stewardship over the internet, and have utterly betrayed all of us.
So the rumors about today were right. But this should not be the headline - TD was shut down many many months ago, despite people clinging to technicalities that it was not the case.
Without getting into the weeds, I just don’t see why we accepted that the internet should be one giant message board. We seem to do this over and over with stuff like Reddit and Facebook, but once upon a time communities would be their own site with their own message board.
This played out how many (myself included) speculated it would.<p>1. t_d would not be banned as long as it was moderately active (it's basically been dead for months)<p>2. If it goes, ChapoTrapHouse gets banned as well.<p>The big thing here is that Chapo served as a clearinghouse for the "dirtbag left" and was incredibly active. The expectation that it would be banned was increasing even before the anonymous warning over the weekend. It was common for users to get warnings/3 day bans for "posting violations of content/upvoting violated content" without specifying the specific post or rule that was alleged to have been violated.<p>It's clear that including Chapo was a weak, "both sides" move.
IMO this headline is too selective. They banned a whole group of subs, including /r/trapochaphouse, which is a left-wing subreddit. Only highlighting this one is needlessly simplistic and will mislead anyone reading it.
I know a little bit about a large apolitical r.<p>The majority of the time people's arguments get heated enough that a mod has to step in and tell someone to cool it, the topic is politics.<p>And the majority of the time the argument starts with obvious trolling/baiting, typically racist stuff.<p>Straight up racism is quickly spotted and flagged down, so the new technique is to go on a roundabout monologue and imply racism.<p>Reddit admins themselves sometimes step in to remove things as well, but it's rare. Mostly for illegal things they spot first, e.g. trying to buy/sell drugs.<p>AMA if you want to know anything else.
This final banning of /r/The_Donald is part of a concerted effort to eliminate any sense of normalcy for being pro-Trump. Even with no content for the past few months (after the mod removal), it stood out as a historical reference point to show thousands of people that supported Trump's 2016 campaign and presumably would continue to support him in 2020.<p>They had a choice to leave it up and locked, but instead chose to erase it from the Internet and that's no accident.
Apart from politics, one thing I hope that comes from this is the people learn to own their online identity instead of leasing it from social media companies.<p>For an individual, set up your email on your own domain. Even if you use some other service to host it for you, as long as you own the name, you can move it wherever you want.<p>If you host a community, have it on your own domain. Maybe initially it just redirects to a reddit subreddit, but your users should get in the habit of going to MyCommunity.tld instead of reddit.com/r/my_community<p>If you make videos for a living, have at a minimum a website that has a list of your videos and always tell your users that that is the canonical place to find your videos.<p>Own your online identity. Don’t lease it from a social media company.
Good. I wouldn't want these communities on my website either. And it's not about censorship, it's about not wanting to give shitty hateful trolls a platform and let them run wild on your site ruining it for everyone who chooses to remain civil.
"The rule does not protect people in the majority". Hmm... Aren't women in the majority here in the United States? According to Reddit, women are fair game.
This seems like a win for the trolls. I've cut Reddit out of my diet and I'm sure those communities were deserving of the ban, but targeting specific subreddits rather than properly enforcing whatever rule they were breaking to create a toxic atmosphere seems like the less good answer of the two.
Here's where news about it was leaked over the weekend:<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/WatchRedditDie/comments/hh1pjd/reddits_largest_ever_banwave_is_coming_monday/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/WatchRedditDie/comments/hh1pjd/redd...</a>
Full list of subreddits banned today: <a href="https://www.redditstatic.com/banned-subreddits-june-2020.txt" rel="nofollow">https://www.redditstatic.com/banned-subreddits-june-2020.txt</a> (with "blurring" after top 10)
If you look at the posting history of people who post lots of politics or bigoted, many of them are really weird.<p>One very clear class of weird is people who only post 1-2 sentence posts. If you scroll down, they may post 10-100 posts per day and they are always some short unoriginal emotionally loaded statement of the world situation. If they are not banned the posting history can go on for years, with just endless stream of short sentences.<p>Discussing for them is just saying opinions. They take everything against them personally. If you try to engage them into discussion, they really can't.
I find it odd that there is no mention in parent article or in any comments that Reddit is a subsidiary of the Condé Nast media empire. Their ultimate profit goal doesn't align with users and relies on algos and top-down intervention to generate cash and clicks.<p>Partisanship doesn't contribute to this aim, so, how is their killing a discussion board newsworthy or surprising to anyone?
The internet remains a bastion of free speech. Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, remain privately managed companies with a duty to police their platforms. If /r/The_Donald contributors are upset - they can go almost anywhere else. Vitriol, hate, disinformation, etc... just doesn't need to be on public display.
Perhaps now that reddit is Chinese owned, they're trying to infiltrate to see how much they can get away with by medling around with external affairs in order to model them after their own internal policies.
>“It’s one of the founding principles of Reddit to foster [political] discussion,” Huffman said in the call with reporters.<p>Ironically, /r/The_Donald highlighted a key flaw in reddit's system: moderators.<p>Moderators in reddit's sub vary from being totally absent to all-controlling. /r/The_Donald's mods were at the very far end of the controlling spectrum. For example, back in the early days of the sub, before Trump was even elected, one of their posts showed up on /r/all (Anything highly voted on any subreddit can show up there). Somebody was gushing about "The Art of the Deal". I replied to them that they should check out some of Tony Schwartz's other books and was immediately banned from /r/The_Donald for life. The post in which I said this was removed. People went on gushing about the brilliance of Trump.<p>Moderators on reddit are not selected or paid. They "volunteer". They have absolute control over who posts and what is posted in their sub. There is zero transparency. Users can't see what moderators are doing. The end result is that a sub is as biased as it's moderators. The thing is, reddit subs are like communities. People who post in a sub regularly get upvotes for conforming to the sub's biases, downvotes for struggling against them, and see only what the moderators let them see. Pretty soon their views conform to those of the moderators. /r/The_Donald allowed some pretty crazy people to polarize a lot of other people who were probably a lot more balanced in their political views before Reddit came along.<p>For this reason, I no longer post in or read Reddit's political subs. Most subs <i>seem</i> better than /r/The_Donald, but you simply don't know what the mods are doing to shape your views. Personal experience has led me to believe /r/Canada also has some really bad moderators right now, and you can see the tone of that sub gradually changing over time. It's simply unacceptable to place this much trust in people who are <i>totally anonymous</i>.<p>So, where do I get my political news from? Newspapers. I read several sources distributed from left-centre to right-centre on mediabiasfactcheck.com's ratings. Dead tree media may have corporate biases and a host of other problems but, at least, you can <i>begin</i> to get a handle on who they are and what their biases are. Also, by removing the upvote system from the mix, you don't have meaningless internet points serving as both carrot and stick to make you subconsciously conform.<p>Bottom line, Reddit is for cat gifs and people smacking each other in the nuts. It is not a safe place to get your politics from.
I see reddit as a platform where everyone can shitpost whatever they want, and where every opinion will face criticisms. Banning right or left wing subreddits will make these people to leave to "safe harbour" where their extreme views won't be banned, but such portals will be pwoered by their extreme views and there will be no criticism or "quality control". Basically, extremists fuelling each other to do harm in real life, because there is no one to tell them "hey, this is too edgy" just like small terrorist groups start.
I used to spend a lot of money on Reddit gold until few years ago when Reddit blocked any discussion about the gay club shooting at Pulse nightclub. The_Donald was the only sub which allowed discussion of it and seemed to be the only ones who could sympathize with the gay community on Reddit at that time.<p>Before that, I used to believe right wingers were a bunch of homophobes and what not but if that was the case, why would would they be the only one discussing and sympathizing with the families of the victims?<p>Why was the supposed homophobic and violent sub The_Donald the only ones which were allowing stickies for blood donations towards the shooting victims while the /r/news sub deleting any comment which talked about blood donations to the victims? PEOPLE LITERALLY DIED and for all the virtue signaling Reddit and the front page subs did, they didn't care about the victims?<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20160612232812/http://i.imgur.com/OGaPNij.png" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20160612232812/http://i.imgur.co...</a><p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20160612215205/https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/4nrnyk/fucking_despicablernews_mods_even_censoring/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20160612215205/https://www.reddi...</a><p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20160612215019/http://reddit.com/r/the_Donald" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20160612215019/http://reddit.com...</a><p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20160613172842/http://reddit.com/r/the_Donald" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20160613172842/http://reddit.com...</a><p>Here's people literally pleading mods of /r/news to not delete blood donation comments:<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20160612212229/http://media.breitbart.com/media/2016/06/2016-06-12_18h33_15.png" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20160612212229/http://media.brei...</a><p>When people called out the mods of /r/news to stop censoring, the mod told them to "kill yourself":<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20160616024508/http://imgur.com/XDlWQNd" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20160616024508/http://imgur.com/...</a><p>Here's mods of /r/news deleting a comment about a missing friend:<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20160920213229/https://i.imgur.com/OOiIRAT.png" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20160920213229/https://i.imgur.c...</a><p>This made me re-think about whether my side was the bad guys? Since I am a brown immigrant myself, I was always told right wingers hate me and other minorities. I had never looked deep enough. The Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting which killed 50 gays made me re-think. Why is the side which supposedly hates minorities the only one talking about blood donations to the victims?<p>This also made me question why was "/r/rightwingLGBT" banned? Are gays not allowed to be conservative?<p>Since then, I started browsing The_Donald more often and despite whatever media says, there can sometimes be tongue in cheek memes and comments on there but they are not evil people as media and Reddit makes them out to be. There's a huge community there with gays, hispanics, blacks and every minority group which media claims right wingers hate. When hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico 3 years ago, The_Donald was the only sub where people were sharing how a lot of the FEMA supplies were going missing. Everyone else was calling this a conspiracy theory but there were people literally sharing videos of garbage trucks and warehouses filled with perfectly well and brand new supplies. It was quite sinister. Then the truth finally came out earlier this year that they found 8 warehouses full of FEMA supplies which were rotting away and never given to the Puerto Rico people who were literally starving and dying. These are the types of incidents which have changed my mind since then that there's evil in media and many people who are actively willing to let people suffer and die if it makes right wingers look bad.<p>I might get downvoted for this comment but I hope few people pay attention to what's happening and dig a bit deeper than what media and big tech are telling them. I used to be a liberal - I am still a liberal on most things but I can no longer identify with the current left. It breaks my heart on what people have become.
I was mostly OK with the previous restrictions on Mr. Trump, because they were directed at a person acting irresponsibily.<p>This, however, may cross a line for me. I'm not a Reddit user, but it's my understanding that this is a discussion group about a person. I'm less OK with restricting the discussions of topics.<p>It reminds me of something I heard in a forensics class years ago: Attack the problem, not the person.<p>I need to think about this one for a bit.
3 of some of the biggest right wing YouTube channels, Trump's Twitch account, and 2000 other subreddits including The_Donald all being banned in the span of less than an hour is just a coincidence. More of a criminal conspiracy.
Whatever else you want to want to say about our current president, "The People" did not vote him in.<p>The fact that he's President <i>really is</i> going back to the founding fathers' intention, and why we have an Electoral College in the first place:<p>So that underrepresented voters would have a say in who the President was. And they did, so he is. And now he's pretending that he's the voice of our country, when he so clearly is not. The People spoke, and they requested someone else.<p>A reasonable person would look at his election results and create an agenda from there, but not Trump. I am hopeful that is his downfall. I'm not holding my breath about it, though.
I used to use reddit a lot but it got far too political. even generic subreddits like r/pics or /funny seem to often have a top post bashing trump.<p>it’s really devolved.
I wonder how someone like Hitler would have been treated. I guess free speech advocates would have helped him to spread his sick ideas and rise to power? Free speech needs to have limits somewhere. If others are insulted, smeared, de-humanized, if hate is spreaded, if under the protection of free speech people rise to power who poison the political climate, then the whole system is in danger of falling apart, with all the good elements, even the right for free speech.
If this drives away lots of users of that subreddit, it may well be the case that Reddit becomes less representative (of drastically unpleasant people) and more cohesive. So, good to see it go.
About time!<p>As I commented in a previous discussion of reddit's policies (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23601595" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23601595</a>), the "quarantined subreddits" half measures were clearly too tame as a middle point, where reddit decided to both moderate which communities are wrong and at the same time not ban them (worst of both worlds).<p>I wonder if the discussion there was read by people at reddit, though it's probably not relevant opinions to them.
Chapo was the only interesting subreddit remaining, or at least the only one that still brought me to the site, but I’d gladly take losing it so that reddit can use a “both sides” narrative to deplatform racists.<p>TD was pretty much in zombie mode since they replaced all the mods and the users moved to other conservative subs. I also think many of the more extreme/active users graduated to 8ch. This is probably just reddit getting ahead of the election to be extra sure they can keep it advertiser friendly as it heats up