This is silly. I follow a number of subreddits on topics ranging from baseball, local news (city subreddits), credit card churning, maps, history, and many others. None of them have been affected by /r/the_donald.
I take it you don't browse many comment threads, then. Anything vaguely related to black people or Islam and they are virtually guaranteed to show up, spreading their soundbites and gotcha's.
For anyone who doubts this: next time you see a vaguely or directly racist comment on Reddit, go check where that persons posts.. 75% of the time they're directly from /r/the_donald.
"I take it you don't browse many comment threads, then. Anything vaguely related to black people or Islamd and they are virtually guaranteed to show up"
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.
I agree with you and think the hubbub around r/the_donald is amusing. In my opinion, r/the_donald is a "beautiful" example of mob trolling. If a subreddit doesn't interest you, just unfollow it. If you are browsing /r/all, you're probably procrastinating anyways!
> I agree with you and think the hubbub around r/the_donald is amusing. In my opinion, r/the_donald is a "beautiful" example of mob trolling. If a subreddit doesn't interest you, just unfollow it.
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.
Yep, I agree. The users that infiltrate other subs don't announce they're from the_donald, but their rhetoric is still the same.
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.
Are they derailing the discussion, or simply offering a different perspective?
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?
Derailing a discussion is the same anti-patterns as using fallacious arguments when it comes to "offering a different perspective."
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.
Which subreddits are you talking about? I frequent r/boardgames, r/javascript, r/webdev, etc. and I can't remember every seeing overflow from r/the_donald or the like. Maybe you are going to the wrong subreddits?
You're subbed to the wrong subreddits. You could be getting a lot more out of reddit than you are. The comments here make it sound like 95% of all conversations are about race and politics, but if that's what you're seeing, then that's really just a reflection of what you're reading.
There are subreddits about everything. Most of them don't include conversations about police shootings or Islam.
Yes, the guys wearing white hoods will probably not collectively crap all over the knitting club. That doesn't make the overall situation any better, nor is it a good idea to have them make up a large part of the site's userbase.
(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.)
You seem to concede my point, but then proceed with your argument that it's still a problem, anyway. I don't know how to respond to that except to say that I hope nobody actually listens to you. Reddit has some great communities and people shouldn't be scared to participate in them.
ironically, the_donald is just one subreddit while there are literally dozens of specifically anti-the_donald subreddits that people complain about having to unfollow
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.
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).
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.
This is what leads me to believe most of these complaints about the_donald are misinformed or worse. It is impossible to browse the site not logged in without seeing some kind of anti-Trump astroturfing on the front page.
(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 know they're misinformed, because I look through there every now and then.
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.
There is a third exception: being on mobile reddit. Admittedly, while the average user in general is more likely on a phone than a desktop nowadays, I don't know if the average The_Donald user is. I very much would doubt it, but I'll let it stand and stand by my admission I wasn't in the greatest position to post a link.
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
The claim in the headline there is "half of the Muslim world", not "half of the middle east" as you commented.
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.
That's not true at all, the thread title very much says Arab not muslim. That is specifically a term for the middle-east. Also, that article seems to pull the numbers out of its ass without any proof. I'll stick with the actual numbers I posted, which means it is not a statement of fact. It is an exaggeration at the expense of Arabs.
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.
I admittedly waste quite a bit of time on Reddit and am no fan of the_donald but I totally agree. Unfortunately that doesn't suit the narrative being pushed here.
