A lot of people have the opposite view though (reddit has gone too far down that path, and twitter is a lost cause). There are plenty of bad actors on both sides of this issue.

You’re going to get in trouble for using the words “on both sides”

I don’t think hacker news would say this but many would: “one side is literally Nazis”.. not a very thoughtful complaint

> Reddit is doing far far worse than even Twitter at combatting these issues

Do you have a source for this claim? Genuine question. Searching Google Scholar for "flame wars" or "Twitter Reddit sentiment" failed to produce anything useful.

Interesting paper (if a little tangential): https://conferences.sigcomm.org/imc/2017/papers/imc17-final1...

/r/HailCorporate has plenty examples where corporations can be shown manipulating Reddit on a daily basis. I have to use a word search and replace plugin just to restore some amount of sanity to content and even then it's iffy.

/r/HailCorporate is an echo chamber that insists any time a brand is so much as mentioned without negativity, it must necessarily be an attempt at viral marketing.

Meanwhile in the real world, people talk about brands in everyday conversation all the time without the sanction of the corporation behind it. Not that paid shilling isn't a thing, but they take the confirmation bias, way too far, to the point where calling shenanigans will get you attacked.

As much as I don’t want to bring that particular debate here, this comment reads like anyone with conservative politics is a troll to be silenced. As someone who doesn’t agree, please understand how offensive and unconstructive this statement is.

All of those communities mentioned are not simply providing conservative viewpoints. The ones mentioned have coordinated harassment towards people and organizations that they disagree with.

What you call coordinated harassment may also be called political activism. A democracy requires participation and expression to advance. Of course it can be taken too far, but organizations should be able to handle political expression.

I don't think harassing a woman over a story made-up by a bitter ex-boyfriend counts as political expression by any measure.

Which the_donald never did. It sounds like you're mixing up communities you hate.

Because those subs have absolutely nothign to do with conservative politics and everything to do with alt-right echo chamber trolling.

There are plenty of places you can find polite political discourse on Reddit, like these:

/r/PoliticalDiscussion/ <-- the only one I sub. /r/PoliticalOpinions /r/Ask_Politics /r/NeutralPolitics /r/ChangeMyView /r/GeoPolitics /r/WorldEvents /r/PoliticalScience /r/Economics /r/Politics

And for logical, not emotional political debates:

/r/AskAConservative /r/AskALiberal /r/DebateCommunism /r/DebateFascism /r/LibertarianDebates /r/DebateAnarchism

You include /r/politics on that list, which as we speak, has 100% of the front page dedicated to how horrible our president is. That is the absolute opposite of “thoughtful”, certainly not polite once you get into the comments and say anything that doesn't agree with that stance.

I’d give you echo chamber, but also point out that applies to most subreddits in your list, but especially to the ask_$ideology types. People celebrating their political wins isn’t trolling, neither is celebrating the losses of the other side. It might be many things, but posting to get a rise isn’t it.

It doesn't even make sense - people posting in their own communities about their own ideologies doesn't meet the definition either. Who would they be trolling, themselves? Oncomers who don't agree? If the latter, that applies to every political community everywhere.

/r/politics is a bit of an echo chamber (tho really that’s due to being sick of the Donald brigades) but Trump is objectively horrible so that isn’t a good yardstick.

You make three statements here. The first is a verifiable fact, the second is an unsubstantiated falsehood, the last is an unfalsifiable opinion.

That opinion, and the constant shouting of it from every rooftop and constant silencing and badgering those who think otherwise, is the reason for the existence of the_donald.

This very thread has someone in it who called me a liar because I posted an image that proves botted content on the front page of /r/politics, and then I had to spend half an hour screwing around with google to debunk it. That is the online reality for anyone who doesn't viscerally hate the president, and it's become very tiresome.

I like talking with conservatives. I may not be one but I think it is an important political viewpoint that can have valid perspectives.

But unless you’re going to say racism, bigotry, and all the rest that The Donald/alt-right bring to the table are conservative ideals I don’t see ANY way you could take what I said as espousing that.

See, the difference here is that as someone who regularly skims the top posts there (if nothing else to get away from the never-ending "trump is a baby eating puppy murderer" stories that exist literally everywhere else), I don't see the "racism and bigotry" that you're talking about.

/r/the_donald was promoting the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville with a sticky at the top of their sub.

The one that wasn't advertised as a white nationalist rally, you mean?

From the article:

> Reddit was in stronger shape, he said, claiming that it boosted revenue fivefold during the last three-plus years since he had re-engaged with the company. Reddit, which has been ranked as the fourth most popular U.S. internet site, raised $200 million last year and was in good hands with co-founder Steve Huffman as CEO, he said.

I'm not sure "failing" is the right term to use here. Just because you don't agree with the politics of many of the users doesn't mean that their communities aren’t successful and thriving. TheDonald's candidate was elected president after all...

We've already asked you to post civilly and substantively (as the guidelines ask) or not at all. We ban accounts that won't, so could you please improve this?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Instead of presenting unsubstantiated claims as fact, please cite your sources so we know where you're coming from.

From your source:

- The DNC was not paying Correct The Record. Like all super PACs, Correct The Record made independent expenditures on behalf of supportive donors around the country, and you can find their names here: https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/pacgave2.php?cycle=2016&cmt...

- Correct The Record had about a dozen full-time content producers writing favorable posts about the Democratic candidate online.

I'm not seeing any references to improper payments made by the DNC, nor do I see the Reddit connection. While we're on the topic of independent expenditures, would you like to talk about the 328 million Russian Twitter accounts that were used in the general election to produce paid pro-Trump content?

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/07/us/politics/russia-facebo...

> The DNC was not paying Correct The Record as you claim; they were independently funded by donors around the country, all of whom are listed here:

Super PACs have NEVER taken advice or worked directly with national campaigns. (they verifiably do)

> Correct The Record had about a dozen full-time content producers writing favorable posts about the Democratic candidate online.

> If this was supposed to be your evidence of a vast DNC conspiracy to ruin Reddit, I'm incredibly disappointed.

I would say reddit going from a place that once supported open and free ideas, to one that only pretends to, is a very dangerous thing. Shilling is real, people are paid to do it. On both sides. Clearly the left wing has the advantage on reddit.

> And given the 328 million Russian Twitter accounts used in the general election to produce paid pro-Trump content, do you really want to have this conversation?

NYtimes writing slam pieces about our president? More fake russian collusion stories? Color me shocked. I don't trust the media, and neither should you. The whole Russia story is hogwash.

Thank You for Correcting The Record!

Zing!

Why the whataboutism here? No, I would not like to address these accounts and the questionable methodology that was used to get that "328 million" number, because it's irrelevant to the question.

As to the question, the answer unfortunately requires some familiarity with Reddit and having been a regular user there for a while. /r/politics is the big one since it was a "default" community up until that concept was eliminated a while ago (basically it was automatically on the front page if you browsed the site while logged out, and if you made an account, you were automatically subscribed to it).

I bring them up, because they're the largest political community on the site, and had a level of privilege that comes with that.

CTR is used as shorthand for the pro-Hillary tonal shift in /r/politics that happened fairly rapidly[1], combined with fairly obvious botting[2]. While there's no proof that any particular organization was responsible for those posts, or that Reddit's owners tacitly permitted their behavior, CTR is to my knowledge the only organization who had social network promotion (beyond the usual writing their own obvious posts or buying ads) of Hillary Clinton as its goal, going to the point of addressing actual individuals. AFAIK, this is new.

[1]: https://www.thedailybeast.com/hillary-pac-spends-dollar1-mil...

[2]: https://i.imgur.com/uYZuRBc.jpg

I did some digging, and your evidence of "obvious pro-Hillary botting" (your [2] above) is an alt-right photoshop. They couldn't find any real evidence of this happening, so they fabricated their own. Here's how.

The William_Trevino post is a real post on Reddit that was used as a template:

https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/search?q=author%3AWilliam_...

But all the other "FirstName_LastName" entries were edited in by the creator of the image. Unlike William_Trevino's entry, they have no associated Reddit post. You can try to find users by those names or posts with those entries' title, but they don't exist.

- https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/search?q=author%3AHoward_L...

- https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/search?q=author%3ATerry_Mo... etc.

I've gone ahead and flagged you for posting a completely deceptive photoshop of the truth. Please make an effort to fact-check yourself next time.

Is it possible that those users were deleted after this was revealed?

That appears to be what has happened. Contrary to etjossem's post, Google still has the history of their posts.

howard_lowery: https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/4vm8e2/paul_ryan_...

john_valtierra: https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/4vm7zz/could_sput...

frank_calder: https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/4vm88x/donald_tru...

terry_moore: https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/4vm79m/khizr_khan...

carlos_liu: https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/4vm8xn/donald_tru...

All appear to be single-purpose accounts that only posted in /r/politics, all are currently banned or deleted.

Okay - you're right. I'm surprised none of those show up in a title search. Reddit's search feature must be broken, because title queries are supposed to show even if the author is deleted.

So it looks like someone did make super obvious sockpuppets that posted some pro-Democrat content once. I still don't think you can generalize that to a trend - certainly nothing on the order of the Russian bots. If anything, /r/politics had a reputation at the time of being extremely favorable to conservatives.

Nope. The fake entries added by the photoshopper don't even produce any associated posts in title search results [1]. If they were real posts from a deleted user, they'd still appear in title queries with [deleted] as their author. [2]

It's a photoshop and you've been lied to. I hope this teaches you to think more critically about things, especially when they're what you want to believe. Thanks for playing.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/search?q=title%3APaul+Ryan+Sides+with...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/18ejnd/are_old_posts_...

Your methodology is flawed. I just searched my own Reddit account which I deleted early 2015, which was around for five years and had thousands of comments and 100ish posts, and it identically returns no results of any kind.

https://www.reddit.com/search?q=author%3A+Karunamon&sort=rel...

Now, if we take the same search to Google, you see [deleted] posts by me, and posts that reference my name:

https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&ei=cnF7WqfTHI7ctQXJt...

If we grab a random account from that image, say frank_calder, we get results:

https://www.google.com/search?ei=n3F7WqD7E8W2sAXu1ZzIBg&q=si...

Including one that calls out the botted nature of that account by name:

https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/4vsk1e/a_tour_of_ac...

And with some more digging, we can turn up their actual posts:

howard_lowery: https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/4vm8e2/paul_ryan_...

john_valtierra: https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/4vm7zz/could_sput...

frank_calder: https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/4vm88x/donald_tru...

terry_moore: https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/4vm79m/khizr_khan...

carlos_liu: https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/4vm8xn/donald_tru...

Reddit's search is and always has been awful.

This accounts for every user called out on that image. I'd thank you not to call me a liar in the future.

I've gone ahead and not flagged you because I don't abuse the flag feature against people who make mistakes, given your utterly baseless and easily disproved assertion that those accounts were photoshopped onto this image.

Reddit is not even pretending to be fair and balanced. They lean far to the left (or pander to them) and the front page is often filled with anti-Trump, pro-Democrat propaganda.

Free and fair discussion is a lost cause on that platform, 45 has made anyone with conservative values an enemy.

Just like the banned subreddit /r/The_Donald, right?

Reddit would not allow Pro Trump posts.

Except - they explicitly state something along the lines of being a "24/7 pepe rally". /r/politics was a default sub that all new users saw when they signed up for reddit, or browsed without logging in.

They actively remove posts from that sub when they hit the front page.