from Hacker News

Trump’s brigade took over Reddit. Now Reddit is changing its rules to stop them

by credo on 6/19/16, 2:49 AM with 33 comments

• by jml7c5 on 6/19/16, 6:41 AM

  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)_/¯

  [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/4oedco/lets_...

• by davb on 6/19/16, 6:53 AM

  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.

• by thescribe on 6/19/16, 4:19 AM

  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?

• by danso on 6/19/16, 6:50 AM

  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.

• by ddacunha on 6/19/16, 7:09 AM

  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.

  EDIT: for typos

• by vinhboy on 6/19/16, 6:33 AM

  On a related note, now there is an anti-trump subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughTrumpSpam/

  It's really interesting to watch the power struggle. It's one group of troll taking on another. Must be a headache for the admins.

• by researcher7 on 6/25/16, 10:00 AM

  So censorship is OK as long as it is done to the side you disagree with. (Not a Trump supporter, but I won't support any censorship.)

• by IndianAstronaut on 6/19/16, 6:54 AM

  The front page of reddit now is actually quite pleasant and interesting. Definitely a huge improvement.

• by SixSigma on 6/19/16, 6:18 AM

  When s4p took over reddit, no-one batted an eye