The posts rise up the ranks of r/all because the subreddit’s subscribers enthusiastically “upvote” pretty much everything posted there. Sometimes, the moderators will “sticky” a post of particular interest to the subreddit to the top of its feed, which has the effect of drawing even more votes. Redditors suspect that the subreddit is engaging in “vote manipulation,” against Reddit’s rules, though r/The_Donald’s moderators deny that accusation.

Reddit chief executive Steve Huffman told Redditors that the change was not entirely attributable to r/The_Donald and that Reddit had been “working on this change for a while.” But “I cannot deny their behavior hastened its deployment,” he added in a town hall post on Reddit on Thursday afternoon.

“We have seen many communities like r/the_donald over the years — ones that attempt to dominate the conversation on Reddit at the expense of everyone else,” his post said. “This undermines Reddit, and we are not going to allow it.”

The Trump subreddit has no official affiliation with the Trump campaign. It’s simply one point in a nexus of the right-leaning Internet literate who have thrown their memes behind Trump’s presidential run.

The subreddit r/The_Donald is generally more sincere in its support for Trump than, say, 4chan’s /pol/boards, where the alt right’s racist meme lords go for anti-Semitic jokes and smear campaigns. While there’s cross-pollination between r/The_Donald and /pol/’s membership, the Reddit community has a set of periodically changing rules that bans activity that might make their chosen candidate look bad — for instance, doxxing or anti-Semitism, one moderator said. On 4chan, Trump’s appeal is more conditional. When Trump talks and acts like a 4channer, he is celebrated.

...

The change to r/all comes days after Reddit’s news-gathering subreddit, r/news, devolved into chaos during the developing story of the Orlando shooting on Sunday. Redditors looking to the popular subreddit for the latest information on the massacre at a Florida gay club were instead dragged into a storm of accusations and infighting.

Things really kicked off when r/The_Donald accused the moderators of the news community of deliberately censoring their contributions, particularly posts linking to reports that the Orlando shooter was a Muslim. That report was of interest to r/The_Donald, where discussions of Islam and immigration roughly align with Trump’s positions.

To get the rest of Reddit on board with their outrage at r/news, subscribers to r/The_Donald did what they’ve been doing for a few months now: upvoting en masse posts accusing r/news moderators of conspiring in the name of political correctness to hide the religious identity of the shooter until it was unavoidable.

Subscribers to r/The_Donald eventually mass upvoted a post declaring the subreddit the “last bastion of free speech,” after the r/news fiasco, a statement that is funny if you know that the moderators’ draconian rules have also banned all “dissenters.”

While Reddit agreed that something went very wrong with r/news’s moderation on Sunday, the site’s admins and r/news’s moderators denied that the problem was the sort of deliberate, politically motivated censorship r/The_Donald was talking about. Instead, they said, the issue was understaffing, a lack of support from Reddit and a rogue automated moderation system that removed a bunch of posts that it flagged as duplicates.
...

But the battle was more or less won: Instead of coverage of the Orlando shootings, r/The_Donald managed to get a whole bunch of Redditors to talk about them.

“Does that sound like someone familiar?” asked a moderator of r/EnoughTrumpSpam in an email to The Intersect. The moderator asked to remain anonymous and has a username that is unprintable in The Washington Post. They graciously agreed to be referred to as B. Smack.

The subreddit r/EnoughTrumpSpam has been trying to draw attention to Trump’s dominance of Reddit’s top posts, an effort that caught on with a vengeance after the Orlando incident. “It is really frustrating for redditors to watch Donald Trump supporters vote manipulate Trump‘s racist demagoguery to the front page,” the group said.

Among other things, B. Smack was frustrated with the “extremely low-quality” sourcing of the news articles that have ascended through Reddit’s ranks, thanks to r/The_Donald. Those include “Kremlin propaganda pieces from Sputnik and RT, and unsubstantiated stories from hard, hard right sources like Glenn Beck, Alex Jones, Brietbart, the Washington Times, or the Daily Caller.”

“r/the_donald is not letting through any other content,” the moderator added, “People can’t find anything interesting that is trending in the Hot queue because it is just Trump Spam.”

The Redditors trying to stop r/The_Donald might be delighted by the apocalyptic fury about Reddit’s decision that dominated the board this week. But one longtime moderator, dylan_w (formerly CisWhiteMaelstrom), said that while he knows Reddit is trying to directly hurt his subreddit, he isn’t too worried that they’ll actually succeed.

“I’m going to make changes,” the 20-something law student said in a phone interview Thursday, “but that’s not going to be for the worse. It’s for the different.”

While the changes to r/all might make it harder for r/The_Donald to upvote its way into the hearts of the new algorithm as much as it has in the past, dylan_w, characteristically of the subreddit’s namesake, argued that the change is actually great for Trump, great for Reddit and great for the Internet.

The moderator said he’s happy to have his subreddit take the fall for a change that he thinks was a “long time coming,” one for which Reddit was simply searching for the right excuse to implement — i.e., them. And, fresh off the original success of the subreddit, he believes that its moderation team is prepared to adapt to it.

Basically, his plan involves using r/The_Donald’s popularity and enthusiastic base to help others who want to make right-leaning subreddits to get their communities off the ground and into r/all’s top posts.

So, with the new algorithmic change in effect, it might be true that r/The_Donald can’t have it all. But maybe 15 conservative subreddits, all endorsing one another, could.

>>51864
Wow that redditor‘s ego is through the fucking roof. Also

>law student

Future parasite of america

Hasn't this been a problem since literally day 1 of reddit? (after it stopped being pure astroturf) Yeah congrats to trump spammers for being the straw that broke the camel's back but the media should quit pretending they invented mass voting overwhelming actual conversation on that site

>>51868
Every 12 year old already knows that the default subs (including /r/news and /r/politics) are worthless and full of contrarians and trolls. 95% of all the rest of the subreddits are full off hobbyists or shitty mememasters who don't give a shit about politics in the first place.

>>51868
Nah, the Trump threads of that day were upvoted because tons of Reddit posts about Orlando were being deleted by mods while r/The_Donald had them still up. So people flocked to it and upvoted them. It gained 12,000 subscribers that day.

>>51863
>Trump‘s racist demagoguery
When will they learn that he hasn't said anything racist.

>>51899
when /r/donald gets deleted for being racist.

Who wants to bet they "changed their algorithm" by just curating what content they'll allow to trend from certain subreddits?

Where was this change when Occupy was dominating? Or when S4P spammed their "MATCH ME" bullshit?

This is so blatantly a way to silence subs they don't like it's almost surprising. Mods and admins at Reddit are getting shitter and shitter. Absolute fascist garbage.

>>51948
This. Also 4chan isn't safe from sjw cancer as well. I remember when the Internet didn't have cultural marxism cancer. Everything always at some point goes to hell. It's a sad world we live in.

>ITT entitled millennials who think they have a right to free speech on corporate websites.
Make your own reddit if you have a problem with the real one. I thought most of the overly-outraged rightwing kneejerk reactionaries already left reddit for voat anyway. Guess not.

>>51931
people on reddit who support Trump being racist =/= Trump being racist

>>51952
4chan is significantly safer than any other website out there.

>>51971
people on reddit = voters

>>51974
What does that have to do with Trump being racist?

>>51980
If the majority of voters decide his statements are subjectively racist then history is written by the victors.

These stupid assholes realize that the "right-wing" subreddits (/r/The_Donald, /r/TumblrinAction, etc) are a lot more populated then the leftwing ones right? Its all in the numbers.

Its both stupid for /r/EnoughTrumpSpam to think they can't hide the subreddit, but equally as stupid for /r/The_Donald to think that Reddit would "censor" a key subreddit

>>51931
You know one of the rules on /r/The_Donald is NOT to be fucking racist?

>>51953
>implying the entitled millennials aren't the ones on /r/EnoughTrumpSpam
Spot the libby

>>52054
>You know one of the rules on /r/The_Donald is NOT to be fucking racist?
That subreddit wouldn't know what was racist even if Zombie Martin Luther King came and hosted an AMA./r/thedonald is a poor judge of what's racist or not. That's why reddit is changing its algorithm to get rid of /r/thedonald's racist posts shitting up /r/all.

>>52055
>implying there is only one
"libby" here

Wake up and smell the RCP poll average, Trumpposter. You know, if only you neofacist reactionaries took all your bottled """""muh freeze peach""""" copypasta and spent 5 minutes attacking all the tens of thousands of right wing christian SJWs who want to ban every nude scene in every movie on TV instead of spending all your time with hastag brigades and giving a platform to pandering twitterwhores like Milo then maybe reddit wouldn't call you hypocrites so much.

>>52056
I haven't heard any posts advising to kill the blacks or the mexicans, gas the kikes, ect ect.

You explain to me how /r/The_Donald is racist.

>>52059
>and spent 5 minutes attacking all the tens of thousands of right wing christian SJWs who want to ban every nude scene in every movie on TV
Except tons of /r/The_Donald users support KotakuinAction and TumblrinAction

But, uh, take a wild guess what website doesn't like those...

>>51856
Kill reddonconce

>>52063
KotakuInAction still thinks gamergate is a thing and its a joke. The only thing it's good for is getting updates on Notch's twitter shitposting and learning which journalist fucked up today.

>>52056
All you guys...
>r/The_Donald is racist
>r/The_Donald is homophobic
>r/The_Donald is full of Nazis
r/The_Donald's patron saint is Milo Yiannopoulos, a gay Jew with a black fetish that they once held on one of those lifted throne things at a Trump rally. Trump himself knows who he is and has recognized him when he goes to sign shit during rallies. Their current hero is a little black kid that stumped an old man that told him Donald was gonna send him to Africa.

How is r/The_Donald racist/homophobic/anti-Semitic again?

>>52067
>complains about Donald Trump supporters not attacking SJWs
>give example of Trump supporters attacking SJWs
>its not relevant
I don't know what all you want faggot

>>52071
Y-You just don't get it anon!
Racism is Prejudice + Power - 18/2*(the square root of macaroni and cheese)/(whatever gender I feel like on a Tuesday)

Multiply by two and this LITERALLY CONFIRMS Donald Trump is Hitler

>>49025
It's sad when Trump is the only one with an ounce of professionalism.

Sanders and Clinton would be barred from the race here due to their conduct.

>>51859
It really pisses me off at how casually /pol/ is mentioned in the news these days.
Thanks for bringing in a never-ending wave of newfags that have no intention of assimilating into these boards.
I can only hope they stay on on /pol/ but that's a false hope.

>>52059
No one is interested in your retarded liberal opinions.

>>52078
Wrong thread?

>>52133
>>>/pol/

>>52135
Mad libtard confirmed.

>>52139
>>>/pol/

>>52142
jesus, you really belong on reddit bud

>>52146
>>52142

Neither of you belong on this board. Neither one of you have anything interesting to say. Just hurr durr conservative durr hurr liberal. Maybe at one point you can grow up and realize political parties aren't fucking basketball teams that shouldn't be blindly supported or hated.

>>52146
>>>/twitter/
>>52148
>>>/pol/

>>52177
>>>/reddit/
>>>/facebook/
>>>/twitter/
>>>/tumblr/

Wow, I can do that too!

>>52181
>>>/pol/

>so butthurt hes spamming >/pol/
lmao enjoy your ban

>>52183
>>52177
>>52142
>>52135
all me

>>52189
It isn't banworthy to tell off topic people to get out. Discuss the article or gb2/>>>/pol/

>>52181
Mad lol

>>52189
The reddit shitposters are always anal anguished.

>>52243
/r/thedonald is that way ⇨⇨

>>52059

>You know, if only you neofacist reactionaries took all your bottled """""muh freeze peach""""" copypasta and spent 5 minutes attacking all the tens of thousands of right wing christian SJWs who want to ban every nude scene in every movie on TV instead of spending all your time with hastag brigades and giving a platform to pandering twitterwhores like Milo then maybe reddit wouldn't call you hypocrites so much.

I'd agree with you if you weren't being ridiculous and ignoring the fact that that progressivist SJWs and "hashtag brigades" hold infinitely more sway than the Christian right in this day and age. I'd even posit the left is worse because they take advantage of the generally left-leaning views (and good intentions) held by most westerners to push this radical ideology of social justice.

Tell me: if some white Christian male made a public stink about, say, the new all-female Ghostbusters film and a female POC SJW did the same thing but in regards to an all-male cast of whatever...who would be taken more seriously by the general public? Who would get more favourable press?

Face it, the left ARE the establishment. You can't represent the Christian right and SJWs as equals because they are not (aside from both being radical ideologies).

>>52258
>Christian right
>radical
Pick one

>>52258
>progressivist SJWs and "hashtag brigades" hold infinitely more sway than the Christian right in this day and age.
HAHAahahAHAHah holy shit my sides are traveling at warp 8 past Zeta Reticuli right now.
Allow me a second to compose myself, ahh that's better.

In the meantime, please for the love of a christian god learn what the Parent Television Council is and how they have about 10000x the membership of every SJW group on the Wall Street boondoggle microbloggging and marketing platform you know as "twitter" combined with Yahoo's "tumblr".

Do you even have any idea how many letters the christian right writes to networks every time some faggots kiss on TV? God forbid they air a Victoria's Secret Fashion Show during primetime hours.

It's amazing to me how twitter users seem to have been tricked into thinking that what happens on twitter matters to vast majority of people who don't use twitter.

The biggest problem with this is every time something makes a bunch of redit fags ass blasted a bunch come here and try to make it more like their vision of redit and less like 4chan.

>>52264
When you stop blaming reddit and start blaming twitter then you will be getting somewhere. What's happening on Reddit AND 4chan are the effect of someone else's twitter cause.

>>51866
Cis is a ultra-giga-mega attention whoring faggot. Imagine what a /b/ browser sounds like. That's him speaking to a T.

>>51856

It's already been said, but the algorithm only came after Trump posts dominated r/all following the Orlando shooting.

A lot of the popularity the_donald got that day was a reaction against mods banning everything critical of Islam.

It was done to silence the sub and nobody's buying their excuse of "we were planning to fix this problem for a while now".

They didn't care when Sandersposting was all over the sub, but a single day of r/the_donald dominating and suddenly we need to promote more diversity of threads.

>>51856
>censorship
Fuck that shitty website

>>52059
>Moral/Christian right
>Not dead
Pick one

Why do self identified liberals always have such a simplistic view of everything? (I know this statement is ironic and walking into a minefield with it, but my point still stands).

You guys realize that the right in the US is made up of all sorts of groups of people who adhere to various ideas, right?

>>52348
I never self identified as a liberal, that's just your adhoms talking. Also, you're an idiot and 5 minutes searching google proves you wrong.

http://w2.parentstv.org/main/About/Default.aspx

>>52067
https://heatst.com/tech/gaming-press-quick-to-link-video-games-with-orlando-shootings/

it is still a thing. not because if kotakuinaction, but because of the SJWs themselves

>>52388
/r/kotakuinaction is full of SJWs just like /r/politics is, the only difference is what side of the GG issue they are on.

>>52059
>spent 5 minutes attacking all the tens of thousands of right wing christian SJWs
are you retarded? it's a country of hundreds of millions of people. drop the tunnelvision and get the fuck away from the tv and internet.

>>52348
they believed what they saw on tv and apply it to everyone. media created stereotypes for them to be herded against. so misled and exploited but they won't let go

>>52353
you couldn't go to a football game and find anyone who knows who the fuck that is
this shit is not relevant you worthless muppet.

>>52620
>drop the tunnelvision and get the fuck away from the tv and internet.
Do you not understand that I'm talking about interest groups with millions of members that think television and the internet are tools of Satan and want to shut it all down?

>this shit is not relevant
According to whom? If you don't like the PTC then have the FRC. There are hundreds of such groups, each of them dwarfs all your little SJW boogeymen on twitter and tumblr

>>52621
forgot link
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Research_Council

>>51856
These are the same people /pol/ attracts who then venture onto other boards and spam them. /tv/ and /pol/ will be the death of this site. Every popular board will be /b/ tier two years from now.

>>51952
4chan has its ways of dealing with it, take all of old timers from our chan, we can always employ gore spamming for a day or two until they run out with their eyes and ears covered crying like little babies they are as they say the ends justify the means. many ways to handle the problems that can occur.

>>52388
Nice article, thanks.

>>52680
People don't care about gore pictures anymore, Grandpa. Rotten.com lost its allure 15 years ago.

>>51878
/r/the_donald actually had a shitload of front page posts before that. But when the orlando shit went down, they had 75% of the front page posts
They've pretty much disappeared because some new algorithm the admins put in pretty much neutered them