> Besides, it was effectively shut down, and all that did was lead to the creation of thedonald.win

You don't end up on thedonald.win by chance, you go there purposefully. For a long time /r/t_d wasn't quarantined at all meaning anyone browsing /r/all would see their posts all day long (since they were pretty good at mass upvoting their own posts for that purpose).

I don't think anyone advocates for entirely banning this community from the internet, freedom of speech is still important, but just not have it in a place where it might get surfaced and advertised to people that weren't looking for it. So to me, thedonald.win and /r/t_d are very different.

> anyone browsing /r/all would see their posts all day long

I feel like that's only right and correct; in a sufficiently-large community (i.e. a society), anyone intentionally exposing themselves to "everything" should be prepared to view the worst of the worst (of the worst) of "everything." That's what "everything" means!

Honestly, I don't get why /r/all even exists, if it's not there for the people who want to voluntarily immerse themselves in a soul-destroying experience. It's a Total Perspective Vortex. (It thus perplexes me why Reddit—a corporation with PR concerns—would keep it around. It's not something a corporation would want to provide, even if it's something some strange people would like to consume.)

Imagine for a moment what the /r/all equivalent for Usenet would be like. Or the /r/all equivalent for "phpBB forums." Or /r/all for Wordpress blogs. Kind of ridiculous to even want that, no? It'd have no purpose other than instilling existential terror.

>Honestly, I don't get why /r/all even exists,

I'd venture to guess /r/all exists for the same reason the Facebook News Feed exists: to increase engagement with the site. It's a curation mechanism that amplifies the already popular items within the sub communities, and exposes them to the community at large in a virtuous (vicious?) cycle.

> anyone intentionally exposing themselves to "everything" should be prepared to view the worst of the worst (of the worst) of "everything." That's what "everything" means!

That would be ok if you saw that in propotion. The issue is when you have a group of people intentionally gaming the upvote system, making /r/all inundated with alt-right content (tbf, /r/t_d weren't the only one doing that), completly skewing what you see.

It's basically the same issue with all social platform, yes everyone should have the right to express their views, but mass amplification via the platform's algorithm shouldn't be a right.

“In proportion” to what, though? We get the same problem here that one gets with many voting systems: if voting is voluntary, then some groups are more politically active (i.e. vote more) than others, and so some voting blocs (here, subreddits) are over- or under-represented compared to their user-base size.

That’s not a problem with the way the algorithm counts votes. That’s just a mathematical voting-theory problem with comparing votes between disparate populations that are each motivated-to-vote for different reasons, and thus using “one vote” to mean something different within each community.

Or, to put that more simply: “karma” is non-fungible. It works fine to rank posts within a subreddit, but it’s entirely meaningless for ranking posts between different subreddits.

———

But that still ignores the greater issue. Things wouldn’t be “fine” even if some ideal inter-subreddit karma exchange-rate was reached. Keep in mind that some subreddits are “quarantined”, which essentially means that their weighting for appearing in /r/all is forced to 0.

In other words, /r/all isn’t just sorting badly; it also requires a bunch of manual overrides to its computed weights, in order to function.

IMHO, that’s not really a satisfactory algorithm. Maybe it’s practical for serving some purpose (e.g. making money), but that kludge-factor means that it isn’t actually doing what it claims to do: telling you about the activity happening across “all of Reddit.”

A “real” /r/all wouldn’t take quarantines into account. It’d just be the view that any third party would compute by scraping every subreddit, throwing all the posts into a table, and ordering by score descending. And that view is the one I mean when I say “soul-destroying.”

Let me restate my premise: a proper /r/all—one that truly delivers on the use-case it claims to deliver on—is just... not something anyone wants.

> but mass amplification via the platform's algorithm shouldn't be a right.

Right. No amplification is the solution. /r/all and the homepage need to be removed. Left wing subs and right wing subs should exist in peaceful isolation and subs like AHS which try to police what other subs are doing should be shut down.

I'm sure that would negatively impact Reddit's income, however.

It's not freedom of speech if reddit starts suppressing speech.

There are various other arguments to make, such as the rpevelance of posts encouraging violence that aren't covered under freedom of speech, or that reddit does not have to follow free speech rules in the first place.

I might be late to the threat but you have a very insidious assumption left unstated. You seem to think certain ideas are to dangerous to be shared. That they could infect people and corrupt them. If we silence all the wrong think people will act better.

This is dangerous for many reasons but particularly, what happens if something is deemed wrong think when it is objectively more true than the "right think"?

>freedom of speech is still important

> just not have it in a place where it might get surfaced and advertised to people that weren't looking for it.

You're going to have to pick one of these two statements. If freedom of speech is important then let the audience determine what makes it to the front page. If freedom of speech isn't important than hide content you don't like and continue building your own bubble.

> You're going to have to pick one of these two statements.

Absolutly not. Repeating myself from a bit further down:

It's basically the same issue with all social platform, yes everyone should have the right to express their views, but mass amplification via the platform's algorithm shouldn't be a right.

Also,

> let the audience determine what makes it to the front page

/r/t_d was gaming the upvote system to have way more posts on /r/all that they would have had 'naturally', making this whole point moot. It wasn't determined by what the audience wanted to see, it was determined by a small brigade of motivated people.

The issue is indeed the same with all social platforms but also media and broadcast. The singular question is this: What entity can really artfully determine who ought to speak to the masses in the interest of society? Is there someone with superiority of wisdom that can determine who should speak to many, and if so, is the answer the same ones that hold that power today. In the not-so-long ago it was the priest who spoke to the many and the king with the divine wisdom. Today we know better and thus we have given that power to... the ones we elect? No. It is the one whose platform has the highest stickyness.

Mass amplification via a platform's algorithm is not a big step above the old ways, and the platform owner does not seem to have much better divine wisdom than past kings.

Do you think the alt right is gaming the first amendment by holding rallies that get mass coverage?

No because it's part of your rights as an individual.

Gaming Reddit's upvote system is however directly prohibited by the ToS:

> [...] the following behaviors are prohibited on Reddit:

* Asking for votes or engaging in vote manipulation [...]

You can’t hide behind the terms of service. That is just something reddit made up. There is no fundamental difference between these two scenarios except whatever you’ve invented in your mind.

That sounds like you’re saying that it’s a waste of time to ever try to change anything because, well, “history.”

Feel free to disabuse me of my misconception if I misunderstand. But it sounds an awful lot like what some people say when you try to call out racist cops: “We’re just scapegoating someone for saying aloud what all the police are thinking. It’s a waste of time.”

Agreed. Pretty bad take. "We shouldn't try to make improvement because it's always been that way and there are more causes than just this one!"

It sounds to me like what he's saying it that its a waste of time (and often counterproductive) to try to silence voices that you disagree with. They aren't simply going to vanish because you've silenced them on your platform.

Because nothing ever changes anything or has any influence on anything it's just all.

Is a very reductive position to take and blatently antiscientific about what we know how racist ideologies spread.

most people weren't advocating violence in there, most of these claims came from people that wanted to tear it down and provide justification for it. I've seen documented evidence that the same kind of content exists on other subreddits that have not been banned.

censorship does not help you win the debate.

why won't reddit police left-wing content and calls for violence? all I want is transparency.