> Reddit is a net-negative to society in my opinion.

I did not agree with this before, but after /r/the_donald, I am re-considering my position.

Just because there exists a thing you do not agree with does not mean it should not exist. It seems like many people on HN are for free speech as long as it's speech they agree with. There will always be people who do not think like you and do not believe in same things as you, but you are not helping any situation by no platforming them. Join the debate and use your words, like adult human beings, don't use force (even if it's virtual and not physical)

What would you call it?

The reason the posts hit front page is because people keep voting them up. You can disagree by downvoting. While they could very well be banning people who express opposite opinions so are plenty of other ideologically driven subreddits. You can join one of the dozen opposing subreddits for discussion about the topic(s) in hand. I still see no reason to take away their platform.

I do not subscribe to their opinions completely, but I can also see merit in some of the opinions from that camp just as I can see the flaws. Same goes for more left leaning opinions. Bad thing is that everyone gets so emotional and rallied over their own opinions they completely refuse to listen to the other side and budge even an inch. This just creates bunch of echo chambers on either side where no real discussion can be had.

Not anymore. Since reddit made numerous changes, I don't think I've ever seen one of theirs make the front page. Pretty funny that the site had to change the core of their operation to target them.

Sounds exactly like Reddit

Can you clarify why the actions of shill accounts are inherently anti-democratic? I don't really see the connection between the concept of Democracy and paid posters on a social media website.

I still enjoy the smaller subreddits. Unfortunately anything political becomes brigaded, but things like /r/gamingsuggestions and local city subreddits still make the site worthwhile to me.

Local city subreddits are one of the best things about reddit. National politics sometimes leak in, which is when they're at their worst, but, overall, it's probably my favorite thing there.

I believe that some kind of accessible and open platform will eventually take the place of place in the local discovery field.

For me, the crucial change of how I curate my subs happened when 2x became a default. I hated the sudden influx of bad posts, mansplaining, and terrible/abusive comments.

Good and bad people everywhere. It sucks.

This is a pretty broad claim.

While I don't disagree that toxicity can spread to different subreddits, that doesn't automatically mean it will spread to all of them, especially if the subreddits have solid rules and moderators to enforce them.

Take /r/baseball, for instance, it's a great, topical subreddit and I've pretty much never seen serious political commentary anywhere on it, even during the worst of the recent election.

So yes, places like /r/programming and /r/netsec is still pretty insular. But it's like asking me to visit a bad neighborhood, because there is a good restaurant there. At some point it's just not worth the risk.

Perhaps we thought our little islands of posh culture would stay on their own when reality is taking a dive ?

/r/the_donald specifically exists to spread false information, and to dox and harass people.

/r/politics is opinionated because of it's user base. It's not intentionally a propaganda machine.

One could argue that /r/the_donald uses the banhammer to maintain order (the narrative), and /r/politics uses shill comments+downvoting to do the same.

That is, excepting the "shill" name-calling -- it leads me to believe that you are in fact speaking on behalf of r/the_donald. If that's true, then I know why the term was used. If not, what leads you to believe that anybody involved in discussion in r/politics are "shills".

Because Hillary had hired people to do exactly that:

http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-clinton-digital-trolli...

http://www.thedailybeast.com/hillary-pac-spends-dollar1-mill...

Remember someone leaked a private Slack chat of Reddit admins where one was boasting of receiving their CTR check.

If that is true, supported by the articles you referenced:

-- r/politics has over 3 million subscribers, with an average of 30 - 40 active users during the daytime. -- if every one of those users was a "shill" commenter then every single one would have earned $0.30 for their efforts. That's not counting other forms of social media.

I have to admit some skepticism toward the assertion that the entire subreddit is a controlled narrative. Instead, it seems that there will be those who adamantly support the people they're paid to support, and that those users are in the minimum. Instead I think it's just a general consensus what the popular ideals are in there vs. r/t_d. Besides, not sure if you've been around there much but I certainly don't see much love lost for HC.

so many people don't realize this. if you can tell it's propaganda on the face, it's shitty propaganda.

Point being liberal application of the banhammer should not be interpreted as proof of the mod's intent to run a "propaganda machine" as much as a necessity of holding a discussion within parameters that presume certain reddit-unfriendly positions.

Can you substantiate that? I went there a few times after election and didn't see any doxing or harassing. There were gays, trans, immigrants people of all walks of life all seemingly having fun with their frog image or whatever they call it, and don't remember seeing a lot of harassment. I didn't follow but maybe you're saying it is hidden somewhere or they are subversive and just pretend to be nice?

It follows the "safe-space" "you're not allowed to dissent" model pioneered by some "leftist" subs, and will ban people for having perfectly legitimate dissent.

It managed to exploit some loopholes in how reddit works to take-over the front page. The most interesting one was "stickying" new posts so they were shown on their front page. They did this to a new post pretty frequently. This let them

* Coordinate which posts got to the front page of reddit

and

* Exploited the reddit algorithm for determining "hotness"

For a while, 8 out of every 10 posts on the front page were from /r/the_donald.

It marks the first major incidence of the community engineering tools (that I believe were pioneered by subs like /r/shitRedditSays) being used by the right.

Exactly -- and why I lasted only a week on Reddit. It's nothing but a collection of echo chambers. No matter how sincere and thorough I would try and make arguments, if they're weren't in line with the herd I'd get downvoted to oblivion (no counter argument except insults) if not outright banned (never had been banned before). It's no fun participating when the only accepted input is "me, too!"

It used to be the front page while logged out was /r/all, but that was replaced with /r/popular a while back (which has a completely non-transparent filter applied to it)

Warning: once you see it, you can't un-see it.

Even though they are generally heavily downvoted, I worry that their one-liner soundbites and gotchas will reach more people with weaker critical thinking skills.

No "these people are evil" is not an acceptable answer.

The people who voted for trump may be wrong, but they are still perfectly understandable humans, doing what they think is right. Or at least what they think they have to do.

It's understandable that people who post in the_donald are heavily biased and even think they are doing the right thing.

This American Life had a podcast where they interviewed these people at the DeploraBall, and one of them even said that he "Memed Donald Trump into the presidency". For some it seems this is part of their identity.

Similar to another one in this thread saying "it's just the same as /r/politics", it's important to normalise the_donald in the eyes of potential subscribers and to imply that what goes on in there is no different than in any other political subreddit. The difference, of course, could not be starker.

They also game the reddit voting system so their stories and comments are constantly being featured in /r/all -- so much so reddit had to take action.

Their purpose is to troll, and they are damn good at it.

So, even though a massive amount of their userbase pushes for genocide against "Mdslimes" or "Kbabs", Reddit admins let them exist.

Of course I read the comments. Two comments, here:

1) We don't have a lot of conversations about race or Islam or intersectional feminism (or whatever) over on the credit card churning sub (for example). Not everything is political.

2) Of course, we do have a lot of these conversations on /r/stlouis, some of which, I'm sure, include comments the Hacker News contingent would find obnoxious. But, you know what? They're fine. We get through it. It doesn't dominate every thread. People are downvoted when they're particularly vitriolic. And it's mostly names I recognize from other threads (not outsiders brigading). It's really not a big deal, like, at all.

The problem with having something r/the_donald on reddit is that its posters don't stay in r/the_donald. They go out to other reddits, and post hateful shit.

It's like having a shared space for clubs, that also includes a local chapter of the KKK.

It'd be fine if they just played dungeon and wizard dressup and complained about black people in the confines of their club room every Tuesday.

The problem is that they spill out, and start burning crosses and handing out beatings to the other users of the shared space. Pretty soon, the entire community turns into a dumpster fire, and people who don't want to deal with that bullshit leave.

The owners of the space can then pat eachother on the back, and congratulate themselves for encouraging freedom of expression.

Someone wrote a script that would res tag the_donald posters in other subs, and it's very noticeable how they're the ones derailing discussions that just involve a keyword like immigration, Islam, Europe, race, healthcare, or other hot button issues for them.

Like it or not, Trump won, so there is obviously a large quantity of people who subscribe to the positions you've labeled "hateful". Why should your interpretation of their opinion override their ability to share their thoughts on the topic? Subreddit mods have the ability to constrain the discussion within their own parameters. What else is needed?

I particularly dislike the attitude of "Let's tag people who post in this sub". How are you supposed to know if you have common ground if you can't even post in that sub without getting labeled or banned?

Some notable ways they derail discussions are:

- Oppression Olympics: Saying the U.S. meddles with other countries' elections so it's not so bad that Russia meddled in the 2016 election. "Happens to everybody."

- Whataboutism: Deflecting or changing the subject to be about Hillary Clinton or President Obama.

- Oversensitivity: "They're just memes, lighten up snowflake." "Nobody takes this seriously haha."

As for res tagging, it's extremely apparent that their patterns of behavior they exhibit are fairly uniform. This is probably a side effect of the strict way with which mods of the subreddit ban anyone who doesn't conform to a certain mindset. It creates a strong signal about users who aren't interested in genuine discussion, but are incredibly biased and self serving.

There are subreddits about everything. Most of them don't include conversations about police shootings or Islam.

(And the only reason it seems that they aren't a problem is because moderators of more specialized reddits have to delete their posts, and ban the posters.)

Some customers aren't worth keeping.

Off the top of my head:

* /whiterights * /uncensorednews * /justiceserved * /conspiracy * /hillaryforprison * /physicalremoval

Most of the time when you notice overt bigotry on reddit, the user frequents t_d or one of those subs, or the similar clones that are now all over reddit.

I would highlight https://reddit.com/r/europeannationalism/ as the very worst of it.

They've also taken over the mod teams of extremely large and supposedly politically neutral subs like https://reddit.com/r/uncensorednews/ (every single mod there is also a mod of /r/europeannationalism).

Check https://reddit.com/r/againsthatesubreddits/ for a running log of much, much more.

And for every one open nazi, there's a dozen more concern-trolling, brigading, vote-manipulating, and quietly recruiting more people towards the fucking genocidal far-right.

It's getting so bad that at it will soon be hard to defend Reddit's admins from charges of complicity.

(And I say astroturfing, not as a throwaway attack, but because the voting and usage patterns on those subreddits are very anomalous and smell of manipulation)

Meanwhile, the_donald is the one and only pro-Trump page on the site that has any kind of popularity.

I am not sure how the existence of these anti trump subs leads you to believe that views that r/the_donald is racist and hate filled are misinformed.

Also, I disagree with your last point since there are many altright subs, and r/conspiracy has become extremely pro Trump for some reason.

I'll ask the same thing I ask every time this topic comes up: Where's the hate? Link some. I see posts praising LGBTs, I see plenty of criticism of Islam (usually in relation to Islamists' poor treatment of LGBTs or worse),

but "hate"? Racism? No. That is hyperbole at best. Anytime I see overt racism, it's downvoted into the negatives. Given that my observation conflicts with the narrative, and that verifying it is trivial to check, I have to assume most people repeating it are just going on what they were told by friends or media, rather than their own observations.

is +73 positive enough? I wanted to give at least one example but its a bit hard since the work comp doesn't load reddit and my cell has terrible reception here.

However, this is mostly about me wondering if you're being honest about this. I have seen this rhetoric before (show me a link!) and it usually isn't long before someone does actually link something. Usually, excuses are made why they don't count.

I find it very doubtful someone never showed you the racism/hate straight from the source when demanded.

No, because that indicates the post didn't resonate with the user base there. Front page the_donald posts usually start at 5000 points and up. That tells me that the sentiment isn't really shared all that much. On much smaller communities with much lower average scores, this would be more significant.

On top of that, unless you install a third party addon or disable CSS (most users will not), you can't downvote posts there. That means the average user can't react to posts they dislike beyond reporting it if it breaks the rules.

On top of that, many the_donald users will chain-upvote everything on /new/ without even looking at it in an attempt to counter botting. I can't give you a link here, as this came up in a discord conversation.

I certainly hope you don't think these concrete problems are "an excuse". The score of a post is the only signal you have to determine what the community at large thinks about it.

Judging a community of 460K (with 13K online during off peak hours like right now) using a nine-day old post with a minuscule score isn't terribly honest. Your example post, if anything, is a counter example to the point you were trying to make.

So instead, How about +4614?

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/6o7qas/reminder_12_of_th...

While cousin marriages are a problem, they definitely aren't half in the middle east. 50% is only reached in Pakistan and one African country that I'm not sure why its included in the first place

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin_marriage_in_the_Middle_...

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/6o7qas/reminder...

Deeper in the thread there's a link to https://fellowshipoftheminds.com/2015/07/17/half-of-worlds-m... with some statistics as well as spitballing at a cause (Koran is okay with cousin marriage would seem to be a big one) - and if you're having babies with your cousin, that is objectively inbreeding.

At best, this is arguably a statement of fact, and not "bigoted" or "hateful". Neither is a general sentiment that Islam is negative or hateful.

Which is basically where your argument falls apart for BOTH links I posted. Because that's how The_Donald gets away with bigotry: it posts vague "factoids" that overblow a situation to let users make the desired conclusion but create plausible deniability once the users start posting them. You know it wasn't that long after before someone posted something like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/6p7do4/hard_fac...

Turns out, when your sub is constantly suggesting a whole demographic of people are retarded without literally saying it, the users eventually make the connection and start believing it. Ironically that may be breaking down soon when such a ridiculous post like that managed +710, probably due to recent events causing desperation. (Also before you say "buts that's only Somalis!" OP was kind enough to elaborate in the comments that he's talking about Arabian immigrants too).

Either way last post, feel free to have last comment. This thread is probably dead now and now I can definitely tell you're not honest. This conversation is basically pointless.