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Plus heaps of users browse /r/all and the the_donald community is so large, and the upvotes come so quickly (some insist it's upvoting bots since it's so fast)

Plus heaps of users browse /r/all and the the_donald community is so large, and the upvotes come so quickly (some insist it's upvoting bots since it's so fast) that the top of /r/all is often the_donald. Right now the nr. 1 post and another one on all are from the_donald.

jrockway 10y ago
We're making some headway with /r/EnoughTrumpSpam though, which is often at the top of /r/all too. Personally I enjoy the /r/all war between The_Donald and EnoughTrumpSpam. Everyone has a "safe place" to retreat to now, so it's all more funny than harmful. (I read The_Donald, and EnoughTrumpSpam lets me post similarly-styled comments and get massive upvotes, so I generally enjoy it. Kind of an Internet performance art.) Reddit is generally best consumed by selecting small subreddits. I really recommend against /r/all unless you enjoy internet drama and subreddit wars.
- city41 10y ago
  Claiming that EnoughTrumpSpam is making headway just supports that the Reddit of today is a cesspool. I greatly miss the Reddit of 5 to 10 years ago. I'd love to see a new community site spring that figures out how to maintain quality and grow. And no, small subreddits aren't the answer. Seriously, Reddit about oh 8 years ago was just fantastic. HN for the most part does a good job maintaining comment quality, but it obviously has some advantages that a general community site would not have.
  - y_u_no_rust 10y ago
    Reddit hit it's eternal September a while ago now it's just a frequently updating youtube comments section (minus a few gems that honestly could be their own forums somewhere else)
  - cr1895 10y ago
    > And no, small subreddits aren't the answer. Seriously, Reddit about oh 8 years ago was just fantastic. Reddit of 8 years ago had on the whole much smaller subreddits, so that does suggest that the size of the communities plays a role in their quality.
  - mememachine 10y ago
    reddit (and you) are at war with scale
- elpocko 10y ago
  /r/all is fine if you use RES and filter all the shit. My filter list is hundreds of entries long and I for one enjoy browsing /r/all now.
551199 10y ago
During election they modified their algo to avoid the_donald posts getting to front page.
- Melk 10y ago
  They modified the algorithm to avoid the front page getting flooded by the_donald. Their posts still make it to the front page.
- bcherny 10y ago
  Interesting, do you have a source for that?
- ajacksified 10y ago
  (ex-reddit employee, employed during the changes) - we'd been designing changes to the algorithm to not be just a few top subreddits, and to instead show more variety well before r/the_donald even started; in fact, it was one of the first things Steve took on when he came back. There's no anti-r/the_donald conspiracy; there's much less discussion about them internally than they'd like to believe.
  - megamann 10y ago
    Except this thread and subsequent news articles being published on this event contradict that statement. If no one cared then why did the ceo care enough to slight of hand users posts?
    - ajacksified 10y ago
      I'm specifically referring to the algorithm, not Steve's database admin rights. If you're talking about my "there's no big conspiracy" - all I know is that Steve claims to be a lone agent, and I believe him. But, hey, I'm not there, dunno.
  - vxNsr 10y ago
    I believe there were two edits from the time /r/the_donald became popular, the first was a more general edit as you say, but the second if I recall correctly was all about keeping the /r/the_donald from the top. Though it seemed to have backfired because after the second edit I saw more of them on /r/all not less.
artursapek 10y ago
I remember spez or another admin actually saying that /r/all gets relatively little traffic. Something like less than 10% of users ever open it.
- Melk 10y ago
  As I recall it was more like 2% or 3%.
  - ddingus 10y ago
    But that concentration is huge! I moderate a small sub. Traffic once something hits r/All is insane. Recently, here nowe traffic is in the low hundreds on average. The last r/All post resulted in 33,000 sustained for the better part of a day. The sub basically doubled subscribers and has seen a permanent uptick in here now numbers.
city41 10y ago
Grab the reddit enhancement suite, you can easily filter out any subreddits from r/all you don't like.
- thecatspaw 10y ago
  "20 of 25 posts on this page have been filtered" thats how r/all looks for me without all the politic subreddits, which I assume is mostly the_donald and enoughTrumpSpam
ManlyBread 10y ago
Didn't they alter the frontpage so this subreddit wouldn't appear anymore?
- SCdF 10y ago
  Not that it wouldn't appear, but that it would be weighted more harshly against. Specifically because their community upvotes in higher proportions than others (either due to upvote bots or just an over-enthusiastic / fervent community), to such an extend that breaks algorithms, and so the relative worth of their posts is set to be lower than other subreddits. For real numbers, there are ~300k the_donald subs. If you are not a sub (and use their subreddit style) they have intentionally stopped you from up or down voting their posts or comments, and if you are a sub there is only an upvote button (seriously, something something safe spaces…). Looking at their front page, every single post has between ~3000-6000 "points" (which, taking spam magic out of the mix, means roughly that many upvotes minus downvotes). Contrasting that, there are 9 million DIY subs, and most of their posts on their front page have <100 points, where a couple of ourliers have ~5k. Or, there are 11 million r/news subs, and their front page consists of the top 4 posts being in the ~6000 points range, while the rest of that page is more in the hundreds.
- basch 10y ago
  /r/all isnt the front page. /r/t_d is not represented on the front page.
justin_vanw 10y ago
It seems like the sensible thing would be to change the /r/all algorithm to prevent a single sub from dominating? I mean is reddit going to start deleting every sub that becomes popular because it will have too much stuff on /r/all? What kind of reasoning is that?
- mememachine 10y ago
  They have already tried to change the algorithm. The real sensible thing to do would be to recognize reddit as a platform for open and free discussion. saying the wrong things or in the wrong way should be as far away from the admins concerns as possible, so long as the org itself is not threatened. I think reddit is far too obsessed with /r/thedonald, to the point where their obsession is actually becoming tangibly harmful (see: this post)
  - justin_vanw 10y ago
    So just to be clear, I think they are fundamentally motivated by a dislike of the users in that sub and they want to quash their views.
  - CmdrSprinkles 10y ago
    Well, the whackjob subreddit was a threat to the org because they were organizing harassment and slander/libel from there and it is a matter of time until there is a lawsuit for damages And one can argue that the trump subreddit does the same in light of Twitter allegedly not being bought out because of the hate and toxicity. If Reddit can't secure investors and funding because of notoriety, they have to do something.
    - justin_vanw 10y ago
      If reddit is trying to find investors and funding after 10 years of being one of the top traffic sites on the internet, well, that might be a pretty big red flag right there.
sumedh 10y ago
So what, if more people want to read about Trump and upvoting the_donald, isnt that how the Reddit is supposed to work?
angry-hacker 10y ago
> community is so large Maybe it is large? I mean, around 50% of Americans voted for Donald. Why do you want to find some kind of conspiracy... like it not, racist or not, but this is half of your society.
- Sean1708 10y ago
  I don't think anyone's saying it's a conspiracy.
frumiousirc 10y ago
This fact is what got me to learn about RES's feature to hide select subreddits from r/all. It's helped Make Reddit Great Again(TM) (or at least suck less). Now, when reddit's scroll jumps with many 10s of missing posts, I know T_D has been blasting and I smile in willful ignorance of their contents.

jrockway 10y ago

We're making some headway with /r/EnoughTrumpSpam though, which is often at the top of /r/all too. Personally I enjoy the /r/all war between The_Donald and EnoughTrumpSpam. Everyone has a "safe place" to retreat to now, so it's all more funny than harmful. (I read The_Donald, and EnoughTrumpSpam lets me post similarly-styled comments and get massive upvotes, so I generally enjoy it. Kind of an Internet performance art.) Reddit is generally best consumed by selecting small subreddits. I really recommend against /r/all unless you enjoy internet drama and subreddit wars.

city41 10y ago
Claiming that EnoughTrumpSpam is making headway just supports that the Reddit of today is a cesspool. I greatly miss the Reddit of 5 to 10 years ago. I'd love to see a new community site spring that figures out how to maintain quality and grow. And no, small subreddits aren't the answer. Seriously, Reddit about oh 8 years ago was just fantastic. HN for the most part does a good job maintaining comment quality, but it obviously has some advantages that a general community site would not have.
- y_u_no_rust 10y ago
  Reddit hit it's eternal September a while ago now it's just a frequently updating youtube comments section (minus a few gems that honestly could be their own forums somewhere else)
- cr1895 10y ago
  > And no, small subreddits aren't the answer. Seriously, Reddit about oh 8 years ago was just fantastic. Reddit of 8 years ago had on the whole much smaller subreddits, so that does suggest that the size of the communities plays a role in their quality.
- mememachine 10y ago
  reddit (and you) are at war with scale
elpocko 10y ago
/r/all is fine if you use RES and filter all the shit. My filter list is hundreds of entries long and I for one enjoy browsing /r/all now.

551199 10y ago

During election they modified their algo to avoid the_donald posts getting to front page.

Melk 10y ago
They modified the algorithm to avoid the front page getting flooded by the_donald. Their posts still make it to the front page.
bcherny 10y ago
Interesting, do you have a source for that?
ajacksified 10y ago
(ex-reddit employee, employed during the changes) - we'd been designing changes to the algorithm to not be just a few top subreddits, and to instead show more variety well before r/the_donald even started; in fact, it was one of the first things Steve took on when he came back. There's no anti-r/the_donald conspiracy; there's much less discussion about them internally than they'd like to believe.
- megamann 10y ago
  Except this thread and subsequent news articles being published on this event contradict that statement. If no one cared then why did the ceo care enough to slight of hand users posts?
  - ajacksified 10y ago
    I'm specifically referring to the algorithm, not Steve's database admin rights. If you're talking about my "there's no big conspiracy" - all I know is that Steve claims to be a lone agent, and I believe him. But, hey, I'm not there, dunno.
- vxNsr 10y ago
  I believe there were two edits from the time /r/the_donald became popular, the first was a more general edit as you say, but the second if I recall correctly was all about keeping the /r/the_donald from the top. Though it seemed to have backfired because after the second edit I saw more of them on /r/all not less.

artursapek 10y ago

I remember spez or another admin actually saying that /r/all gets relatively little traffic. Something like less than 10% of users ever open it.

Melk 10y ago
As I recall it was more like 2% or 3%.
- ddingus 10y ago
  But that concentration is huge! I moderate a small sub. Traffic once something hits r/All is insane. Recently, here nowe traffic is in the low hundreds on average. The last r/All post resulted in 33,000 sustained for the better part of a day. The sub basically doubled subscribers and has seen a permanent uptick in here now numbers.

city41 10y ago

Grab the reddit enhancement suite, you can easily filter out any subreddits from r/all you don't like.

thecatspaw 10y ago
"20 of 25 posts on this page have been filtered" thats how r/all looks for me without all the politic subreddits, which I assume is mostly the_donald and enoughTrumpSpam

ManlyBread 10y ago

Didn't they alter the frontpage so this subreddit wouldn't appear anymore?

SCdF 10y ago
Not that it wouldn't appear, but that it would be weighted more harshly against. Specifically because their community upvotes in higher proportions than others (either due to upvote bots or just an over-enthusiastic / fervent community), to such an extend that breaks algorithms, and so the relative worth of their posts is set to be lower than other subreddits. For real numbers, there are ~300k the_donald subs. If you are not a sub (and use their subreddit style) they have intentionally stopped you from up or down voting their posts or comments, and if you are a sub there is only an upvote button (seriously, something something safe spaces…). Looking at their front page, every single post has between ~3000-6000 "points" (which, taking spam magic out of the mix, means roughly that many upvotes minus downvotes). Contrasting that, there are 9 million DIY subs, and most of their posts on their front page have <100 points, where a couple of ourliers have ~5k. Or, there are 11 million r/news subs, and their front page consists of the top 4 posts being in the ~6000 points range, while the rest of that page is more in the hundreds.
basch 10y ago
/r/all isnt the front page. /r/t_d is not represented on the front page.

justin_vanw 10y ago

It seems like the sensible thing would be to change the /r/all algorithm to prevent a single sub from dominating? I mean is reddit going to start deleting every sub that becomes popular because it will have too much stuff on /r/all? What kind of reasoning is that?

mememachine 10y ago
They have already tried to change the algorithm. The real sensible thing to do would be to recognize reddit as a platform for open and free discussion. saying the wrong things or in the wrong way should be as far away from the admins concerns as possible, so long as the org itself is not threatened. I think reddit is far too obsessed with /r/thedonald, to the point where their obsession is actually becoming tangibly harmful (see: this post)
- justin_vanw 10y ago
  So just to be clear, I think they are fundamentally motivated by a dislike of the users in that sub and they want to quash their views.
- CmdrSprinkles 10y ago
  Well, the whackjob subreddit was a threat to the org because they were organizing harassment and slander/libel from there and it is a matter of time until there is a lawsuit for damages And one can argue that the trump subreddit does the same in light of Twitter allegedly not being bought out because of the hate and toxicity. If Reddit can't secure investors and funding because of notoriety, they have to do something.
  - justin_vanw 10y ago
    If reddit is trying to find investors and funding after 10 years of being one of the top traffic sites on the internet, well, that might be a pretty big red flag right there.

sumedh 10y ago

So what, if more people want to read about Trump and upvoting the_donald, isnt that how the Reddit is supposed to work?

angry-hacker 10y ago

> community is so large Maybe it is large? I mean, around 50% of Americans voted for Donald. Why do you want to find some kind of conspiracy... like it not, racist or not, but this is half of your society.

Sean1708 10y ago
I don't think anyone's saying it's a conspiracy.

frumiousirc 10y ago

This fact is what got me to learn about RES's feature to hide select subreddits from r/all. It's helped Make Reddit Great Again(TM) (or at least suck less). Now, when reddit's scroll jumps with many 10s of missing posts, I know T_D has been blasting and I smile in willful ignorance of their contents.