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. :-)