<story><title>Reddit has quarantined /r/The_Donald</title><url>https://old.reddit.com/r/the_donald</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nilkn</author><text>I suspect this isn&amp;#x27;t going to accomplish much of anything and may even backfire. According to published statistics by Reddit as of this writing, this subreddit has 755k subscribers and over 45,000 members online right now. For comparison, the official politics subreddit has 5.2 million subscribers but fewer online members (42,000). r&amp;#x2F;the_donald has an extraordinarily high level of activity and engagement. So long as r&amp;#x2F;the_donald exists and is maintained, it can act as a sort of black hole so that official subreddits can be heavily moderated to support certain platforms, politicians, and advertisers. If it were actually shut down, though, the users there are so numerous and active that it probably wouldn&amp;#x27;t be possible to maintain r&amp;#x2F;politics or other official subreddits in their current moderated state.&lt;p&gt;Perhaps worse, this quarantined state -- which really doesn&amp;#x27;t accomplish or do anything of substance -- just creates a sense of martyrdom in the already extremely active userbase there. I suspect this will energize them 10-fold.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Chardok</author><text>I thought that would have happened too when other subreddits were quarantined or banned (and it briefly did when fatpeoplehate was banned) but honestly the banned discourse does not show up on the front page or &amp;#x2F;r&amp;#x2F;all, as they intended.&lt;p&gt;However, because of this, Reddit is becoming increasingly sterile, single-minded, and most importantly ad-friendly to the point where its fairly difficult to have an honest discussion about anything remotely controversial.&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately their selective banning of communities that I would associate with the &amp;quot;far-right&amp;quot; has seriously hurt any attempt to migrate away from Reddit (specifically Voat.co is unbearable for me trying to participate).&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know if there will ever be a straw to break the camels back, but I have been actively searching for reddit alternatives for years and have not found a truly viable replacement.</text></comment>
<story><title>Reddit has quarantined /r/The_Donald</title><url>https://old.reddit.com/r/the_donald</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nilkn</author><text>I suspect this isn&amp;#x27;t going to accomplish much of anything and may even backfire. According to published statistics by Reddit as of this writing, this subreddit has 755k subscribers and over 45,000 members online right now. For comparison, the official politics subreddit has 5.2 million subscribers but fewer online members (42,000). r&amp;#x2F;the_donald has an extraordinarily high level of activity and engagement. So long as r&amp;#x2F;the_donald exists and is maintained, it can act as a sort of black hole so that official subreddits can be heavily moderated to support certain platforms, politicians, and advertisers. If it were actually shut down, though, the users there are so numerous and active that it probably wouldn&amp;#x27;t be possible to maintain r&amp;#x2F;politics or other official subreddits in their current moderated state.&lt;p&gt;Perhaps worse, this quarantined state -- which really doesn&amp;#x27;t accomplish or do anything of substance -- just creates a sense of martyrdom in the already extremely active userbase there. I suspect this will energize them 10-fold.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>altcognito</author><text>The_donald is notoriously bot driven, the online user count is garbage.&lt;p&gt;It’s not the only subreddit with large bot populations, I’m just saying it’s one of the more toxic influential ones.</text></comment>