The "fat people hate" sub seemed to be banned, not even for its subject matter, but because it's users were spreading their mess into other subreddits as a group. From what I've seen, the same thing is happening with The_Donald
this ideas of "things we like can leak" but "speech that annoys us should be quarantined" is dangerous.
personally I find t_d somewhat useful to peak inside and see what the community is thinking on a given day. i can go read the liberal media for a while, see how Sessions is a racist, then peak into t_d and see the rebuttal. maybe if /r/politics was neutral /r/t_d wouldnt be necessary, but personally I like being able to see what each thought group is up to.
the admins have tried again and again to suppress a pro-inscere type of speaker who speak in mocking hyperbole and not-literally. now they have grouped into one place, with an ideology (of anti pc speak) that took over a country.
you could argue the liberal pc "polite discourse" tolerance (of everything non white) was winning on reddit. but it didnt last.
t_d is now the anti-liberalism counterculture. the majority suppressing a counterculture they dont like never goes well. the ideas spread and last, and breaking up the places they congregate can make them more sympathetic victims. admins are treading on dangerous ground, and have been for a while.
I think they look at it as emergent behavior from popularity vs encouraged behavior from the attitude of users in a sub, but I also they think they aren't above being biased in how they determine what they act on
I'm not going to pretend the threshold for where this "pizza subreddit" would be considered a problem might not end up higher than the one for a sub about a figure Reddit's core demographic appears to dislike, but the core principle is the same
First, I don't think it really makes sense to say a subreddit has opinions as such; it's simply a place for people to post thing. And while the user's do have opinions, nobody is suggesting the user's themselves be banned. Which brings me to...
Second, it's not about opinions. There are much more fringe groups than that sub, and in any case, politically I'm probably significantly closer to the median The_Donald poster than the median Reddit admin. It's not about opinions, it's about tolerance and disruption. Because...
Third, Reddit is a business and a community which thrives on promoting free, open, tolerant discourse. Just looking at the political subs there are communists, fascists, anarchists, libertarians, and everything in between, all happily posting away in their little corners, and occasionally participating in discussions that bring out proponents of different views. And then you have The_Donald. The issue isn't their strange, outrageous views (which aren't so much "outrageous" as "what you get if you cross standard American conservatism with standard European conservatism, put it in a blender, filter through the eyes of a 16 year old, and sprinkle with american flags and memes"). You're talking about a site with actual unironic advocates of actual literal dictatorship on it, come on.
So when you say:
> They picked side
I'm not seeing it. In fact I think they're trying so hard to avoid even the appearance of having picked a side, that they're erring on the side of taking The_Donald's side, and in so doing they're harming the site.
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.
I see very little there that is objectionable, certainly nothing that seems worthy of shutting it down.
Certainly there is a lot of 'things to piss off people against trump', but how is that different from any other political site/sub?
If it managed to stay entirely within the subreddit then the admins would never need to be concerned with it and none of this would've happened.
/r/t_d cannot brigade because they are anti-pc obscenity.
it has turned into speech policing. and trying to squash it, with half assed attempts, is making things worse.
Absolute free speech can have real consequences, here's a sad example from the Rwandan Genocide (copied from Wikipedia):
> The Power groups also believed that the national radio station, Radio Rwanda, had become too liberal and supportive of the opposition; they founded a new radio station, Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLMC), which broadcast racist propaganda, obscene jokes and music, becoming very popular throughout the country.[89] One study finds that approximately 10% of the overall violence during the Rwandan genocide can be attributed to this new radio station.
There are much more active subreddits that side with SRS if you want to go there, like circlebroke. There are also much more extreme subreddits than the_donald, like TheNewRight. Nobody is talking about banning those subreddits. This isn't a partisan argument. The_Donald is (purposely) interrupting how reddit works. I'm not an American and I have no dog in this fight, but the_donald is ruining reddit for a lot of us.
This has been happening for years, and the admins are complicit in it. As far as 'ruining reddit' goes, SRS/SRD are among the worst offenders for sure.
The admins aren't even on their side (their political leanings are assuredly different); SRS were just never as bad as people claim, and so the admins never had a reason to ban it.
A small extract from r/The_Donald:
> There are already loud voices saying Paris isn't Paris anymore, with more african/middle eastern faces than french ones, it's not surprising. (+124 points)
> So much cultural enrichment, how would our nation ever survive with out such multiculturalism and diversity? (+44 points)
> No mention of race or religion? Guess that only means one thing.
on another one:
> Arabic? Don't you mean Swedish?
I just took a random thread, there's probably 100s of others.
Even if you think whining about how liberals are treating Blacks laxly with affirmative action isn't racist, there's someone saying he favors people creating racially homogenous communities in the US.
look at them cheer for a samoan hindi woman, and openly mock the idea they are racist and sexist - https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/search?q=tulsi&sort=top&...
(if you are looking at this post months in the future, you will probably need to remove the 'month' search restriction.)
/r/AynRandIsGod would also be wrong, but it would be legitimately wrong. Same for r/PracticalCommunism.
I'll start worrying if server hosts were doing this, but if Reddit doesn't want a reputation of "slightly better than 4chan", it should try cleaning up a bit.
I actually think legislation has to be brought up to date here. We seem to favor communicating on privately owned websites, but people still seem to have an expectation of freedom of speech. Law should definitely reflect this common expectation.
Edit: and routinely
"How far have I strolled from the herd?"
There's just too many forces that want to make sure China doesn't become a superpower that spreading fake news would be a huge weapon against the government.
Even "real" news would be spun in a way that could hurt the rising stability of the Chinese people so I can see why the government would rather just ban the foreign instigators.
Could go one step further and just ban the entire subreddit and move on with his life.
Since when did terrible jokes and politically incorrect opinion become reason to ban something?
Places like Something Awful r Digg will ban people for being shitty and bad for the community. The community being, circularly, the set of people willing to use the website with such rules.
What's so special about Reddit that it doesn't need to cultivate the community?
If a group of friends get together all the time and then one of them is being a jerk all the time, that person stops getting invited. It's not censorship, it's unfriending.
reddit was founded as a platform that promoted free speech, not a limited subset of liberal speech.
Pick 2:
- little moderation
- low amount of drama (for lack of a better word)
- high diversity of topics
Reddit wants to be all 3 (just like Twitter), but there are reasons even 4chan has a huge amount of "janitors". It's pretty impossible to not have to deal with crap when you've decided white nationalists need a place to talk, and it should be on your site.
reddit should take every opportunity to work on the algorithm and make it so the front pages surfaces the best content possible. they can make sure posts they dont like never reach the front. but once they inject editorial control of all, their ideals are compromised.
the drama is caused by mods who want all the other mods to have the same beliefs, so they dont have as much crap to clean up. if you dont want to be a janitor, dont volunteer. alternatively reddit could pay for janitors? reddit could drastically reduce drama if it had better moderation tools, and better community tools. they could take their metareddits so much further. if you read the chat logs, the default mods dont like other people on 'their' site, who think different, and act differently.
You either need to ban /r/TheDonald, or just accept it for what it is, hold your nose, and walk away. I believe that I'd choose the former, but if I had the power to do so I might feel differently.
But this is the worst possible thing. It makes Spez look horrible, it undermines trust in the site and the admins, it confirms all the nutty things the alt-right believes about Reddit, etc. It makes actually dealing with any of the underlying issues much harder; anything that the admins do which is or might look anti-The_Donald can now be spun as "another example of their bias". And since we've already got such a glaring example of that bias, the claim is now plausible in a way it wasn't before.
Should have just quietly banned the sub and moved on. Or not banned it and ignored it. Anything but this.