Posting in ALL CAPS, posting fake news or insults to other members of the community, posting to incite anger, etc. does not make for good discussion, and hurts the sense of community. That, and bringing that to other subreddits via brigading, etc.
If anything, the insane censorship, hivemind of r/politics is more toxic.
But I guess the latter is "quiet" so it's alright. No discussion makes the best discussion.
Use uneddit.com on the_donald if you want to laugh.
If that's not what they want to have (as its clearly making the CEO on edge), why not enforce some strict rules? The people they don't like will simply flock to other communities that will allow it and it becomes their problem.
Reddit is generally best consumed by selecting small subreddits. I really recommend against /r/all unless you enjoy internet drama and subreddit wars.
That particular sub-reddit is a mixture of real people, and trolls who pose as trump supporters to egg the supporters on, as well as scaring and pissing off people against trump. The result being that with little effort and prodding on their side they get to see glorious internet mudfights.
However due to the way they're doing it, it's hard to tell which is which. That puts reddit admins in a bind and they have to balance things. Do they keep distance and let subtle trolls go unscathed? Do they take harsher measures and hit actual trump supporters? How much of this spills over into other reddits? How to handle the /all pollution? Letting it get in there just increases the mudfights, but if they take steps they'll be accused of censorships.
That's what they mean when say they're a "free speech" subreddit: they're protesting against restrictions on free speech, they aren't providing a place for free speech.
I don't know what Steve was thinking, but 10 seconds in that thread makes me start to understand.
Fascists and white nationalists defend it by claiming it's just clownish fun. (which, unamusingly, is EXACTLY the same explanation given by the supporters of fascism in Italy, and Russia, and Germany). Trolls really are having fun, they just don't give a fuck.
It's propaganda. It's gross. All of the donald's loser readers and writers have the right to share their bad ideas; but they have no particular right to say it on Reddit.
Only communities small enough, or moderated enough, to not be interesting to a troll or nefarious person are spared.
The idea of a completely self governed haven of mass free speech is a wondeful one, but no community large enough stays uncorrupted. It has never worked.
It is the ideals and application of those ideals through moderation that make any community bearable, just like in real life.
If I am to be part of a community I would rather it moderated, otherwise the people of the internet ruin all things in time.
I just want to have useful conversations, not circlejerk over freedom of speech while being interrupted by adolescent screaming.
> As much as we try to maintain a good relationship with you all, it does get old getting called a pedophile constantly.
constant fighting and complaining with other subs as well (which normally they would just shut down, but (un)fortunately, the r/the_donald mods are doing all they can do prevent that being needed, so its a constant minor (but active) problem, instead of being a large one-time problem that they can just ban)
Its the whole concept of poisoning the well, you have some people acting bad, and then the other people act bad in return, and then everyone watching just feels bad for watching it, and it makes everyone feel shit
So you think wiping out a subreddit community is reasonable because some members of that community do idiotic things? People from a subreddit as large as The_Donald aren't some homogenous group.
HN for the most part does a good job maintaining comment quality, but it obviously has some advantages that a general community site would not have.
I wish I had better tools to deal with assholes. Savvy leadership can come up with clever solutions sometimes, but it'd be nice to somehow reduce the need to be clever.
It's since turned back into mostly memes and shitposting though.
All I'm asking is to not automatically dismiss it all as propaganda. Regardless of your political affiliation, the podesta files should be looked at very closely. Most of the mainstream media glossed over it and the only place that really dissected the emails was /r/The_Donald. It's concerning that wikileaks was rarely, if ever, mentioned in /r/politics.
I abhor the notion that it's acceptable to hack the private communications of a political opponent, and publish them wholesale. I hate that people have decided it's somehow normal (or worse, noble) to engage in such chicanery because it was politically expedient. It's entirely different than other forms of leaks.
Wholesale surveillance is a terrible idea no matter who is doing it.
It's really effective propaganda, because most folks aren't clever enough to realize that the lack of countervailing scandal is solely because the other party didn't do any hacking... but it's a terrible precedent, and anybody who participated in it should be deeply ashamed of themselves.
Anybody who praises it should borrow a moral compass.
edit: Once the information is out there, it's out there. You should not dismiss illegal or unethical activity because of the way in which that information was obtained.
The contention seems to be where they draw the line, and just how free their version of free is.
thats how r/all looks for me without all the politic subreddits, which I assume is mostly the_donald and enoughTrumpSpam
For real numbers, there are ~300k the_donald subs. If you are not a sub (and use their subreddit style) they have intentionally stopped you from up or down voting their posts or comments, and if you are a sub there is only an upvote button (seriously, something something safe spaces…). Looking at their front page, every single post has between ~3000-6000 "points" (which, taking spam magic out of the mix, means roughly that many upvotes minus downvotes).
Contrasting that, there are 9 million DIY subs, and most of their posts on their front page have <100 points, where a couple of ourliers have ~5k.
Or, there are 11 million r/news subs, and their front page consists of the top 4 posts being in the ~6000 points range, while the rest of that page is more in the hundreds.
They modified it before the election (during implied they did it and then put it back, and unfairly implies it was because they wanted to "suppress the truth" or whatever), and to be clear it was to combat the fact that the_donald readers upvote all their posts with a huge amount of fervour that doesn't align with other subreddits.
The good thing is that the AI can be completely open: how is it trained? what are the parameters? This AI can still have bias, but that bias will be obvious to anyone joining this community.
Reddit of 8 years ago had on the whole much smaller subreddits, so that does suggest that the size of the communities plays a role in their quality.
I mean is reddit going to start deleting every sub that becomes popular because it will have too much stuff on /r/all? What kind of reasoning is that?
The real sensible thing to do would be to recognize reddit as a platform for open and free discussion. saying the wrong things or in the wrong way should be as far away from the admins concerns as possible, so long as the org itself is not threatened. I think reddit is far too obsessed with /r/thedonald, to the point where their obsession is actually becoming tangibly harmful (see: this post)
Maybe it is large? I mean, around 50% of Americans voted for Donald. Why do you want to find some kind of conspiracy... like it not, racist or not, but this is half of your society.
The reason pretty much all posts in the_donald are upvoted by users is due to the fact Clintons Correct the record was downvoting the_donald posts in hordes.
Again if Reddit would not have aligned themselves with one candidate named Clinton they probably wouldn't have this problem now.
And one can argue that the trump subreddit does the same in light of Twitter allegedly not being bought out because of the hate and toxicity. If Reddit can't secure investors and funding because of notoriety, they have to do something.
It's Thanksgiving, and today I give thanks that not everybody wants to shit on freedom and liberty the way you do, just because it makes campaigning simpler.
As for your silly argument about Snowden, he didn't engage in wholesale surveillance; the NSA's wholesale surveillance was public knowledge before his leak; and his leak was meant to change policy, not to attack a political opponent. As such, absolutely none of my criticisms apply to him.
I moderate a small sub. Traffic once something hits r/All is insane.
Recently, here nowe traffic is in the low hundreds on average. The last r/All post resulted in 33,000 sustained for the better part of a day.
The sub basically doubled subscribers and has seen a permanent uptick in here now numbers.
So your idea to counteract people playing psychological games on others is to put something without the common sense of a three year old in charge of moderation. That's just glorious.