I always hoped r/the_Donald had a lot of Russian trolls. The racsism and misogyny there can be crazy and it would make me feel better if it was trolls instead of sincere people

A lot of trolls are sincere though, or at least are indistinguishable from them. I mean I've used nazi symbolism and whatnot ironically / "for teh lulz" in the past, but if you looked at that shit if you didn't know it you'd be sure I was serious.

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."

― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

Yeah, I mean I hope most of the people aren't serious. My worry is that you can't really get a subreddit that large of joking racists without it being explicit that it's a joke. The subreddit almost assuredly has actual racists hiding among the kids who just want it be part of a counterculture.

>if you looked at that shit if you didn't know it you'd be sure I was serious

And if you kept posting it long enough, and participating in that community long enough, it's very likely there would stop being a meaningful difference between what you posted ironically and sincerely.

Do you have example data supporting your POV?

In the past they've made fun of Pakistanis for being inbred and implied that the only way that some actresses could have gotten famous was through sexual favors (this was during the start of the #metoo thing). Most of the subreddit is memes and random political nonsense but when certain topics come up there is a lot of hate. I don't have any specific data as it would be weird to just keep evidence on hand for these sorts of claims but I could get some examples later when I have time if it's really necessary.

Here is a link I had found in my comment history from the last time someone asked for an example https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/7djxqv/three_as...

Why take out ads when you can just infiltrate /r/the_donald and influence them directly and personally? Like you said, way better ROI.

I would say that ROI on influencing /r/the_donald subscribers with any amount of propaganda is precisely zero. They are Trump voters, period.

It's like trying to influence NRA members trying to make them think that guns are cool.

If your goal is more than just to convince them to vote trump but to radicalize and spread ideas r/the_Donald is the perfect place to do it. If you look at how a lot of conspiracy theories spread from there I can see it being very enticing

It reaches different groups of people. /r/the_donald is a self-selected group of extremists and there aren’t enough of them to win an election alone.

Throughout the election they gamed reddit to get their stories to the front page. It went far beyond /r/the_donald.

No doubt: my point was simply that they were doing the same thing people do with things like A/B testing ads – try a bunch of things and measure the results.

It's a good laboratory to test out memes and narrative framings for distribution more broadly. It basically winds up working like a big genetic algorithm for developing viral content.

Also, while the extremists might not be able to vote in numbers to turn an election, they can definitely make the internet a sufficiently unpleasant place for discussion that they have a chilling effect on support for everyone else.

Many Clinton enthusiasts were hounded into "secret" or private subreddits and Facebook groups because of the intensity of abuse they received. Most of the more leftist and Bernie Sanders supporting spaces were, likewise, spammed with so much FUD content that it was impossible to have a productive conversation about anything else. They were a seriously disruptive influence on the capacity for anyone else to organize.

I'm not sure what you're arguing. Nobody is claiming that he didn't win the election. My point was just that /r/the_donald has substantially less than 62MB members so his message had to reach other groups of people.

Similarly, arguing about rally sizes may be a fun political argument but ultimately it comes down to 62M votes for Trump and 65M for Clinton, so it's hard to say there was a huge difference in the number of people who supported each candidate.

It is even worse: He will get reelected. :-)

I'm sure it was - so much so that Reddit had to change policies and their algorithms significantly because they were getting flooded by it. r/the_donald's activity and prominence died very sharply right after the elections, and I can't believe that Reddit rolled out their changes right after said elections; I prefer to believe the trolls and bots just stopped or slowed down a lot because mission achieved.

However, I'm still waiting for Russia to massively benefit from the Trump administration.