One thing to note from /u/spez's announcement of the changes[1], which suggests the impact might not actually be that large:
>Interestingly enough, r/the_donald was already getting downvoted out of r/all yesterday morning before we made any changes. It seems the rest of the Reddit community had had enough. Ironically, r/EnoughTrumpSpam was hit harder than any other community when we rolled out the changes. That’s Reddit for you. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
As someone who visits Reddit purely for entertainment, I welcome the changes.
I can't stand Trump. But even if I was a supporter (or the subreddit in question was for a more amiable candidate), /r/all has been useless for the last couple of months. It's been swamped with hate speech and spam. I've stayed away from it altogether, which is a shame because it's a great way to find trending posts in subreddits I don't subscribe to.
An alternative would have been to allow users to block certain subreddits from their /r/all (making it /r/almost all, I guess). But this would have been difficult and confusing for new users and wouldn't help anonymous users at all.
I wonder if they lost a lot of traffic because of that subreddit.
Yes. I find it funny how Americans support free speech (at least here; given general comments and in this thread) when it means the ability to harass certain groups. If the so called "social justice warriors" were doing this, there would be outrage by now as to how we were destroying their favourite online community.
I feel like this article may be a bit unfair. It sounds like organically a community wields a large number of votes, and they aren't getting the same treatment as other communities on Reddit?
Well, the purpose of Reddit's r/all algorithm isn't to implement some nebulous sense of "fairness" or "content-blind consistent treatment", it's to provide a "good" mix of content from all of Reddit for the enjoyment of users. If one subreddit is swamping the r/all algorithm, it makes sense to tweak it to lower their impact.
Especially if it's polarizing content that might drive a significant volume of traffic that didn't sign up for that content away.
Did you even read the article? They are being targeted because they are engaging in vote manipulation.
Members of other subreddit don't collude to upvote everything and try to get into /r/all. They also don't go and attack other subs.
Also, the racist and sexist nature of the posts makes it inappropriate. Reddit has already taken a stance against this sort of content when it banned a bunch of subreddits a few months ago.
/r/all is an algorithmically balanced sample of everything going on on reddit. it is in everyones best interest to keep one subcommunity from shouting over everyone else. letting them speak, but peppering in more of the other posts is not censorship.
/r/the_donald is harassing moderators from other subreddits, the moderators take part in vote manipulation (for which their most active mod was recently banned).
I actually wonder why the subreddit isn't shut down yet.
i'm pretty sure reddit couldnt shut down a subreddit dedicated to a presidential nominee without causing the shitstorm of the century, especially trump
I don't understand how r/sandersforpresident didn't also have the same effect on r/all during Bernie's rise...if there ever was a subreddit that had enthusiastically upvoting users, it was that one.
As an idiot that fell for the Trump secret political savant narrative I upvoted every single article without even reading the title on the first 3 pages of the rising section (very quickly because of keyboard shortcuts) because I believed I was helping the cause. Many others did this.
Don't tell me how much of an idiot I am, I've already judged myself. Luckily I can say I voted against Trump when I had the chance. Now I'm praying Romney runs third party.
> As an idiot that fell for the Trump secret political savant narrative
At the risk of veering off topic, would you mind explaining what this meant for you? I've heard people say sort of similar things before ("he's just pretending, he'll be different in office"), but never fully grasped the thought process behind them.
>At the risk of veering off topic, would you mind explaining what this meant for you?
Well first of all you need to understand I will never vote for Hillary Clinton so I needed to rationalize voting for the Republican candidate.
Secondly it seemed Trump was addressing concerns people actually cared about. Money, security, and the bullshit fed to them by politicians in that order. Up until the Curiel scandal you could have argued the statements made by Trump were not racist. This actually mattered to me since one of the things I love about America is that anybody of any ethnicity could emigrate here and call themselves American. Also some of his positions seemed somewhat rational when you make them somewhat less extreme. For example, some sort of barrier or technology that assisted border patrol in their mandate could significantly curb the problem of illegal immigrants coming into the country and also curb the amount of drugs coming into the country. I also think there are certain countries in the middle east that terrorists almost always originate from, so while I think a complete Muslim ban is unnecessary and unenforceable I don't think we should be accepting anybody from war torn nations with signs of extremism.
Him being against the Trans Pacific Partnership and H1B visas and also being for lowering the corporate tax rate (three things which would affect my family and I significantly). He got my vote over Hillary.
(also Hillary's anti gun stances are another negative for her)
His "almost reasonable" positions led me to take him as my candidate of choice after everybody else I wanted was eliminated. I also believed his "almost reasonable" positions could resonate with voters if he did not make them more extreme. After Curiel he has been doubling down on his extremist rhetoric rather than toning it down which has removed any possibility of me voting for him.
Also it's interesting to note that until Curiel, Trump hadn't made any significant gaffs. Since then he has only made gaffs such as patting himself on the back like a buffoon after the Orlando massacre and he only doubles down. It just serves to make him seem unhinged and not capable of managing a mcdonalds let alone a country.
> It was a problem. A smaller problem, but still a problem. As I mentioned in my post, r/all has gone through waves of being overwhelmed by a specific community many, many times over the years. Sometimes it's healthy, sometimes it's funny, most of the time it's annoying, particularly during election years.
As a regular visitor of /r/all The_Donald is spoiling the experience. Racism and bigotry aside, if all posts are coming from the same sub there is a point to change the rules of /r/all.
I understood that. Let me clarify: what are examples of racism and bigotry that have gained traction? Let's define "gained traction" as 1000 upvotes. Although, I'm open to a better definition.
>Interestingly enough, r/the_donald was already getting downvoted out of r/all yesterday morning before we made any changes. It seems the rest of the Reddit community had had enough. Ironically, r/EnoughTrumpSpam was hit harder than any other community when we rolled out the changes. That’s Reddit for you. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/4oedco/lets_...