“I’m confident that Reddit could sway elections,” he told me. “We wouldn’t do it, of course. And I don’t know how many times we could get away with it. But, if we really wanted to, I’m sure Reddit could have swayed at least this election, this once.”
- Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit
The_Donald has been quarantined for some time (about 8 months), which makes it unsearchable on Reddit and only viewable if you have an account with a verified email. All attempts by the mod team to try to appease Reddit admins by cracking down on offending posts were deemed not good enough, and their appeals to have the quarantine lifted were denied. In the last few days, admins began sending warnings to users who had upvoted comments or posts that had been removed by them for being offensive, and they promised to ban people who continued to upvote those kinds of posts. Then they started purging tons of The_Donald's mods (over half of them) and promised to replace them with mods vetted by them. Once this happened, most understood this to mean that The_Donald will now be moderated by the very people who hate it, and they decided to flee to https://thedonald.win/. The_Donald still exists, but it is, for all intents and purposes, dead.
Comments
(Old Spike)
The first post on thedonald.win is the moderators saying they put r/The_Donald into restricted mode https://thedonald.win/p/469S7LG/weve-put-the-subreddit-in-restri/
(Old Spike)
Yes, I believe they are calling it quits and trying to herd people towards the new site. Now, that moderation will be overwhelmingly handled by mods that were hand-picked by the admins, it's pretty much guaranteed to be compromised. It's a tried and true tactic of theirs to infiltrate the mod teams of subs they don't like, so they can neutralize them without having to commit to banning them outright. Then they can say "See, The_Donald still exists. We're still for open political discussion. No election meddling here." In truth, it will only be a containment sub that is a husk of what it once was.
(Old Spike)
Thanks, saves me from listening to Tim Pool.
It's a good example of how complaining about censorship is kind of a waste of time. It's way better to create alternatives. Reddit leaving r/The_Donald up so they can promote their new site is a bonus.
(Old Spike)
Did they really think the commies at Reddit would let them kick ass again in 2020 without massive censorship? They should have seen this BS coming from miles away. I was pleased to see they have been working on an alternative not under the boot heel of Reddit at https://thedonald.win/ that looks just like the reddit page. Good for them. 800,000 members is plenty to start their own website and fling a big middle finger to Reddit.
(Old Spike)
and any other website thinking that maybe fascist thought-policing is ok, i hope.
do you think we could get extreme left-wing subreddits banned by making policy-breaking posts to them? i wouldn't be surprised if those posts that caused the trouble on the donald were made by trump haters trying to get it blocked.
(Old Spike)
Why did they chose reddit in the first place. breitbart is way more suited for that crap.
(Old Spike)
Because Breitbart is a news site and doesn't serve the same function as Reddit.
(Old Spike)
A "news site" hihihihihihihihihihihi.
(Old Spike)
Simple. It takes zero effort to open a sub on Reddit and when they were small and the left assumed Trump would lose in a landslide to Hillary, Reddit gave zero fucks. Oh but how shit changed once Trump won the election.
Now just a little personal background for context; I ditched the rest of Reddit upon realizing how far left the management was. And I ditched the Trump sub when, after Trump stupidly gave the gun grabbers what they wanted and unconstitutionally reclassify bump-stocks as machine-guns, I voiced my disagreement and was temp banned for it. Seeing people there not even question his decision to throw gun-owners to the left was all I need to see to GTFO.
Back to my point, the sub is huge and very active. So large in fact that Reddit concealed its actual stats to the public because it embarrassed them. However they were still giving the stats to advertisers, which eventually leaked, and it showed just under a million members. Of course it was "wrong-think" and the Reddit admins were constantly under pressure from lesser leftist subs to censor the_donald and/or outright ban the sub. Of course Reddit would never do that for the same reason Twitter would never ban Trump, it's gigantic active user base was allowing them to sell ads.
The leftist subs so despised the_donald that they had bots that would auto-ban you from their sub if it detected that you were subscribed to, or posted in, the_donald.
I knew this was coming. It's been obvious that big tech has been planning to massively crack down on anyone advocating for anything remotely conservative or anti-left. They "quarantined" the sub a few months back, in preparation for what they are doing now. Like a boss making a case to fire an employee, they began making a bullshit list of "offensives" in order to justify replacing the leadership of the sub with their own people. With anti-Trump mods in place they can effectively censor what made the the_Donald popular while pretending they are not the ones doing it directly. They think they can keep the user base and control it with an iron first. Which is retarded when you think about it. It's so transparent what they're doing.
Reddit did them a favor if you ask me. They should have broken away months ago. The new site has been up for a couple of months but it was just insurance. Now that insurance is paying off as all the users have a place to go now that the sub is effectively dead.