10 ms·

Yeah, TD alone was huge in 2016-2017 and was a huge contributor to the dynamic we have in the world today. Ellen is 100% right here and Alex did absolutely noth

Yeah, TD alone was huge in 2016-2017 and was a huge contributor to the dynamic we have in the world today. Ellen is 100% right here and Alex did absolutely nothing to address it. Good on her for publicly calling it out.

dstaley 6y ago
Steve Huffman has been the CEO since July 2015. Ellen was calling out Steve, not Alexis.
- frakkingcylons 6y ago
  Alexis was on the board and still had an active role at the company despite not being CEO, for example, firing a popular moderator and and letting the blame fall on Ellen Pao: https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/13/details-emerge-about-victoria-taylors-dismissal-at-reddit/ https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/13/details-emerge-abo...
say_it_as_it_is 6y ago
You're giving a message forum way too much credit for Trumpism in the United States. Do you actually think that social media is representative of a majority?
- JoeSmithson 6y ago
  Steve Bannon has spoken about specifically targeting Gamergate for political recruitment, I think the role of Reddit in radicalizing young men is quite important, actually. I don't think you could write a reasonable history of the last 10 years of US politics without reference to Reddit, Twitter, Facebook and 4Chan.
  - FeepingCreature 6y ago
    To be fair: that doesn't mean social media has any relevance, just that some people on both sides think it does.
    - mst 6y ago
      Right. Dig into campaign actions and - as an example - it looks a lot like the trump campaign won wisconsin with robocalls more than with social media. Hard to tell for sure, of course, but the recent blanketing of facebook with political advertising doesn't seem to have achieved that much except for buying Brad Parscale a ferrari. Social media does presumably have some effect but I'm not sure how you'd tell how much/how little compared to other approaches for reaching people.
- boardwaalk 6y ago
  They didn’t say it was? Ideas don’t reach a single person — someone that follows these forums — and then stop. They continue spreading and they might moderate when they do but they still have some center.
- kube-system 6y ago
  Social media is wildly influential. At this point, it is likely more influential than any other form of media. Reddit is the #2 social media platform by traffic in the US, after Facebook.
  - xnx 6y ago
    My feeling is that the world at large underestimates the impact of social media and Hacker news overestimates it. Not sure how to rate the infulential-ness of different media, but Fox News was HUGELY influential to the voters that decided the last presidential election: https://www.vox.com/2019/3/4/18249847/fox-news-effect-swing-elections https://www.vox.com/2019/3/4/18249847/fox-news-effect-swing-...
    - ethbro 6y ago
      I think "worldview media" is a more appropriate term for the phenomenon. What form it takes isn't as important as the fact that it supplies enough content / entertainment / methods of consumption that one can subscribe to it and have 100% of their bandwidth filled, to the exclusion of competing narratives. Talk radio was an imperfect expression of this, because radio isn't portable in the same way that app-based social media + mobile devices / Fox News are. But it's entirely possible to prevent someone from ever being exposed to a contrary narrative, simply by filling all their available time.
    - dredmorbius 6y ago
      Media, generally, catalyzes and facilitates social change, often in bad ways. That's the central premise of Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1980) https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/printing-press-as-an-agent-of-change/7DC19878AB937940DE13075FE839BDBA https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/printing-press-as-an-ag... I've compiled a related bibliography that gets at other aspects, including social and online media. https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7k7l4m/media_advertising_sustainability_externalities/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7k7l4m/media_a...
  - artificial 6y ago
    Is there a breakdown by subreddit? I'm curious how popular the adult reddits are.
- geofft 6y ago
  Reddit's advertising tool once said that /r/The_Donald had six million daily unique visitors. Sixty-two million people voted for Trump and sixty-five million for Clinton. Six million isn't a majority, but it's absolutely influential. Brad Parscale, the Trump campaign digital director, and Dan Scavino, Trump's social media manager, regularly visited the site.
WorkingDead 6y ago
Right, the healthy discussions over r/politics is what they should encourage. /s
- staycoolboy 6y ago
  Yes, /r/politics is an echo chamber. But there is an enormous difference between that and T_D. I don't ever recall seeing posts on /r/politics being stickied that called for violence, whereas that happened routinely on T_D. Your comment is not sarcastic, it is misleading, misiniformed and ultimately destructive.
  - WorkingDead 6y ago
    BS. The only difference between the two discussion groups is that TD dropped all the pretense. I have seen the same kinds of things that are loosely defined as 'calls to violence' in both places.
    - vvG94KbDUtRa 6y ago
      I don't agree with you, but even if I did, the "pretense" being referred to is "we don't actually want violence inflicted on the other party". I'd say that's a pretty important pretense to keep
    - jacobolus 6y ago
      The “only difference” between a group of fascist white supremacists who fantasize about violently exterminating their perceived enemies and a bunch of ordinary people in a community organized around discussing newspaper/news magazine articles who are scared about the growing threat of fascist white supremacists and want them voted out of office and removed from positions of power is that the former have “dropped the pretense”? I guess that’s one way of looking at it...
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - 6y ago
MuffinFlavored 6y ago
> Yeah, TD alone was huge in 2016-2017 and was a huge contributor to the dynamic we have in the world today Can you elaborate as to why? I'm not really sure how a subreddit is responsible for hate + violence + racism. How does freedom of speech/thought only work one way?
- sfkdjf9j3j 6y ago
  It was by far the largest online conservative community, and it funneled people into even more extreme communities. I don't really get bringing up the freedom of speech angle here - r/the_donald has always aggressively deleted posts and banned users for expressing anything but complete loyalty to Donald Trump.
  - metalchianti 6y ago
    This opinion bothers me. TD was always an explicitly pro-Trump subreddit. You expect anti-Trump content to be modded or removed. The modus operandi of /r/politics is much more nefarious. It is branded as a general politics-related subreddit but content that doesn't fit the left-leaning narrative is removed for ambiguous reasons.
    - _emacsomancer_ 6y ago
      > content that doesn't fit the left-leaning narrative is removed for ambiguous reasons it's much narrower than that: whatever doesn't fit centrist Dem narratives is removed
    - lksaar 6y ago
      You'd expect mods of t_d to not partake in smear campaigns against survivors of a school shooting, actually remove calls for death of various politicans, not telling people to harass journalist and maybe remove blatant fake news.
      - metalchianti 6y ago
        Straw-man. I never said TD was moral--just consistent with their ruleset.
at-fates-hands 6y ago
You're saying Reddit has that big of an influence on how people see and interact with the world as opposed to say Identity Politics which by its very nature puts different groups into direct conflict with each other and where "cancel culture" came from??
meowface 6y ago
I think if TD were banned in 2016, there's a decent chance the world would look even worse and more polarized today, due to the backlash and chain reactions that would have occurred. Picture "TOP SOCIAL MEDIA COMPANY BANS SUPPORT OF THE PRESIDENT" headlines running for months. Picture Trump bringing it up in hundreds of speeches and tweets, demanding regulation and saying how unfair it is that he and his supporters are being censored and silenced and attacked by Silicon Valley and the left. (He's already doing that, but this would give him way more ammo.) Picture he and his supporters pointing to it as evidence that The Elites and the liberals and the tech industry are out to get him and out to get half of the country, and that only he can defend their liberties and bring our country and corrupt establishment back from the brink. Also, all of those users would just flock to alternative off-site communities that make TD look like a bastion of reason and civility by comparison. Huffman's not in an easy position, here.
- vegannet 6y ago
  I don’t think this alarmist view makes much sense because all of that has happened, and more. The Right (the group of angry young white men inhabiting r/the_donald not conservative voters) spend every moment outraged about censorship and supposed sleights against them — real or not. Everything you describe is happening every single day and has been since before Donald Trump and will continue after him. If the_donald had been shut down it would have been a positive, without question.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - meowface 6y ago
    > Everything you describe is happening every single day and has been since before Donald Trump and will continue after him. Yes, it has been and it is and it will, but everything is relative. No matter how bad a bad situation is, it can always get worse. You may not like the US now, but for all we know you could be begging to return to June 2020 when June 2021 comes around. Every little thing like this increases his odds of re-election and the odds that people will think he's right or at least has a point. If reddit bans the subreddit for him and his supporters and doesn't ban any others, that could actually turn some non-Trump voters into Trump voters, and definitely increases the odds that his people will get out and vote. >spend every moment outraged about censorship and supposed sleights against them — real or not Sure, but then here they would have a real sleight, a real example of censorship, and a concrete and empirical thing to be outraged about, as well as a coherent and persuasive argument about the larger implications of the censorship and potential future risks they may face. It's the perfect way to empower them and bolster their intensity and their numbers. He is very good at taking inflammatory stories, running with them, and getting other people fired up about them, too. He is extremely persuasive not only to his base, but also can be to some people who are closer to the middle. Reddit banning the subreddit and not allowing another one be created for him would be an escalation and a turning point. It's a major line in the sand, and would be a major talking point for him. It may sound alarmist, but I'm saying this because I am genuinely alarmed at what could have happened and what might happen in the future. His supporters exist in the tens of millions, and they're going to talk with each other one way or another. If they're unable to talk with each other or about him without being banned on popular websites, they're left with no choice but to instead do it on insane cult-like conspiracy theory websites (trust me, if you think TD is bad, just try looking at some of those sites), where they'll be increasingly polarized and will increasingly believe even more dangerous and extravagantly false things. The more large organizations try to restrict a particular group, the angrier they get and the more they feel like powerful forces are out to get them and that there's an organized conspiracy behind it. It's like trying to push an air bubble out of some material - you just end up displacing it, and if you apply too much pressure, the thing's going to pop. Also, as other commenters have pointed out, there are lots of very polarized and even extremist people on the opposite side, and if reddit removes one side and does nothing to the other, then all of the above gets amplified even more. I honestly agree with how Zuckerberg and Huffman are handling this. They both clearly personally dislike Trump, but they understand the big picture. It's kind of like geopolitics.
tossout99 6y ago
r/conservative seems to be taking on the role of T_D now, unfortunately.
- jdhn 6y ago
  /r/conservative isn't taking on the role of T_D, but it is taking on the role of unironic right wing boomerposting. I don't even go there anymore because the titles always seem to be variations of "EPIC ownage of LIBTARDS" and circlejerks in the comments, and very little discussion about actual conservative principles.
devnull3456 6y ago
Is TD responsible for the cities currently being burned down and looted?
luckylion 6y ago
> Yeah, TD alone was huge in 2016-2017 and was a huge contributor to the dynamic we have in the world today. Surely you mean "the dynamic we have in the world of reddit today", right? Otherwise, that sounds Bill-Gates-Is-Transmitting-Corona-Over-5G-Towers level insane. It's not the smoldering powder keg in the middle east, the long looming conflict between the US as the sole imperial super power and the up and coming China contesting their role in SE Asia etc, no. It's really TD, a subreddit where Trump fanatics post memes.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

dstaley 6y ago

Steve Huffman has been the CEO since July 2015. Ellen was calling out Steve, not Alexis.

frakkingcylons 6y ago
Alexis was on the board and still had an active role at the company despite not being CEO, for example, firing a popular moderator and and letting the blame fall on Ellen Pao: https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/13/details-emerge-about-victoria-taylors-dismissal-at-reddit/ https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/13/details-emerge-abo...

say_it_as_it_is 6y ago

You're giving a message forum way too much credit for Trumpism in the United States. Do you actually think that social media is representative of a majority?

JoeSmithson 6y ago
Steve Bannon has spoken about specifically targeting Gamergate for political recruitment, I think the role of Reddit in radicalizing young men is quite important, actually. I don't think you could write a reasonable history of the last 10 years of US politics without reference to Reddit, Twitter, Facebook and 4Chan.
- FeepingCreature 6y ago
  To be fair: that doesn't mean social media has any relevance, just that some people on both sides think it does.
  - mst 6y ago
    Right. Dig into campaign actions and - as an example - it looks a lot like the trump campaign won wisconsin with robocalls more than with social media. Hard to tell for sure, of course, but the recent blanketing of facebook with political advertising doesn't seem to have achieved that much except for buying Brad Parscale a ferrari. Social media does presumably have some effect but I'm not sure how you'd tell how much/how little compared to other approaches for reaching people.
boardwaalk 6y ago
They didn’t say it was? Ideas don’t reach a single person — someone that follows these forums — and then stop. They continue spreading and they might moderate when they do but they still have some center.
kube-system 6y ago
Social media is wildly influential. At this point, it is likely more influential than any other form of media. Reddit is the #2 social media platform by traffic in the US, after Facebook.
- xnx 6y ago
  My feeling is that the world at large underestimates the impact of social media and Hacker news overestimates it. Not sure how to rate the infulential-ness of different media, but Fox News was HUGELY influential to the voters that decided the last presidential election: https://www.vox.com/2019/3/4/18249847/fox-news-effect-swing-elections https://www.vox.com/2019/3/4/18249847/fox-news-effect-swing-...
  - ethbro 6y ago
    I think "worldview media" is a more appropriate term for the phenomenon. What form it takes isn't as important as the fact that it supplies enough content / entertainment / methods of consumption that one can subscribe to it and have 100% of their bandwidth filled, to the exclusion of competing narratives. Talk radio was an imperfect expression of this, because radio isn't portable in the same way that app-based social media + mobile devices / Fox News are. But it's entirely possible to prevent someone from ever being exposed to a contrary narrative, simply by filling all their available time.
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    Media, generally, catalyzes and facilitates social change, often in bad ways. That's the central premise of Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1980) https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/printing-press-as-an-agent-of-change/7DC19878AB937940DE13075FE839BDBA https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/printing-press-as-an-ag... I've compiled a related bibliography that gets at other aspects, including social and online media. https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7k7l4m/media_advertising_sustainability_externalities/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7k7l4m/media_a...
- artificial 6y ago
  Is there a breakdown by subreddit? I'm curious how popular the adult reddits are.
geofft 6y ago
Reddit's advertising tool once said that /r/The_Donald had six million daily unique visitors. Sixty-two million people voted for Trump and sixty-five million for Clinton. Six million isn't a majority, but it's absolutely influential. Brad Parscale, the Trump campaign digital director, and Dan Scavino, Trump's social media manager, regularly visited the site.

WorkingDead 6y ago

Right, the healthy discussions over r/politics is what they should encourage. /s

staycoolboy 6y ago
Yes, /r/politics is an echo chamber. But there is an enormous difference between that and T_D. I don't ever recall seeing posts on /r/politics being stickied that called for violence, whereas that happened routinely on T_D. Your comment is not sarcastic, it is misleading, misiniformed and ultimately destructive.
- WorkingDead 6y ago
  BS. The only difference between the two discussion groups is that TD dropped all the pretense. I have seen the same kinds of things that are loosely defined as 'calls to violence' in both places.
  - vvG94KbDUtRa 6y ago
    I don't agree with you, but even if I did, the "pretense" being referred to is "we don't actually want violence inflicted on the other party". I'd say that's a pretty important pretense to keep
  - jacobolus 6y ago
    The “only difference” between a group of fascist white supremacists who fantasize about violently exterminating their perceived enemies and a bunch of ordinary people in a community organized around discussing newspaper/news magazine articles who are scared about the growing threat of fascist white supremacists and want them voted out of office and removed from positions of power is that the former have “dropped the pretense”? I guess that’s one way of looking at it...
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - 6y ago

MuffinFlavored 6y ago

> Yeah, TD alone was huge in 2016-2017 and was a huge contributor to the dynamic we have in the world today Can you elaborate as to why? I'm not really sure how a subreddit is responsible for hate + violence + racism. How does freedom of speech/thought only work one way?

sfkdjf9j3j 6y ago
It was by far the largest online conservative community, and it funneled people into even more extreme communities. I don't really get bringing up the freedom of speech angle here - r/the_donald has always aggressively deleted posts and banned users for expressing anything but complete loyalty to Donald Trump.
- metalchianti 6y ago
  This opinion bothers me. TD was always an explicitly pro-Trump subreddit. You expect anti-Trump content to be modded or removed. The modus operandi of /r/politics is much more nefarious. It is branded as a general politics-related subreddit but content that doesn't fit the left-leaning narrative is removed for ambiguous reasons.
  - _emacsomancer_ 6y ago
    > content that doesn't fit the left-leaning narrative is removed for ambiguous reasons it's much narrower than that: whatever doesn't fit centrist Dem narratives is removed
  - lksaar 6y ago
    You'd expect mods of t_d to not partake in smear campaigns against survivors of a school shooting, actually remove calls for death of various politicans, not telling people to harass journalist and maybe remove blatant fake news.
    - metalchianti 6y ago
      Straw-man. I never said TD was moral--just consistent with their ruleset.

at-fates-hands 6y ago

You're saying Reddit has that big of an influence on how people see and interact with the world as opposed to say Identity Politics which by its very nature puts different groups into direct conflict with each other and where "cancel culture" came from??

meowface 6y ago

I think if TD were banned in 2016, there's a decent chance the world would look even worse and more polarized today, due to the backlash and chain reactions that would have occurred. Picture "TOP SOCIAL MEDIA COMPANY BANS SUPPORT OF THE PRESIDENT" headlines running for months. Picture Trump bringing it up in hundreds of speeches and tweets, demanding regulation and saying how unfair it is that he and his supporters are being censored and silenced and attacked by Silicon Valley and the left. (He's already doing that, but this would give him way more ammo.) Picture he and his supporters pointing to it as evidence that The Elites and the liberals and the tech industry are out to get him and out to get half of the country, and that only he can defend their liberties and bring our country and corrupt establishment back from the brink. Also, all of those users would just flock to alternative off-site communities that make TD look like a bastion of reason and civility by comparison. Huffman's not in an easy position, here.

vegannet 6y ago
I don’t think this alarmist view makes much sense because all of that has happened, and more. The Right (the group of angry young white men inhabiting r/the_donald not conservative voters) spend every moment outraged about censorship and supposed sleights against them — real or not. Everything you describe is happening every single day and has been since before Donald Trump and will continue after him. If the_donald had been shut down it would have been a positive, without question.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- meowface 6y ago
  > Everything you describe is happening every single day and has been since before Donald Trump and will continue after him. Yes, it has been and it is and it will, but everything is relative. No matter how bad a bad situation is, it can always get worse. You may not like the US now, but for all we know you could be begging to return to June 2020 when June 2021 comes around. Every little thing like this increases his odds of re-election and the odds that people will think he's right or at least has a point. If reddit bans the subreddit for him and his supporters and doesn't ban any others, that could actually turn some non-Trump voters into Trump voters, and definitely increases the odds that his people will get out and vote. >spend every moment outraged about censorship and supposed sleights against them — real or not Sure, but then here they would have a real sleight, a real example of censorship, and a concrete and empirical thing to be outraged about, as well as a coherent and persuasive argument about the larger implications of the censorship and potential future risks they may face. It's the perfect way to empower them and bolster their intensity and their numbers. He is very good at taking inflammatory stories, running with them, and getting other people fired up about them, too. He is extremely persuasive not only to his base, but also can be to some people who are closer to the middle. Reddit banning the subreddit and not allowing another one be created for him would be an escalation and a turning point. It's a major line in the sand, and would be a major talking point for him. It may sound alarmist, but I'm saying this because I am genuinely alarmed at what could have happened and what might happen in the future. His supporters exist in the tens of millions, and they're going to talk with each other one way or another. If they're unable to talk with each other or about him without being banned on popular websites, they're left with no choice but to instead do it on insane cult-like conspiracy theory websites (trust me, if you think TD is bad, just try looking at some of those sites), where they'll be increasingly polarized and will increasingly believe even more dangerous and extravagantly false things. The more large organizations try to restrict a particular group, the angrier they get and the more they feel like powerful forces are out to get them and that there's an organized conspiracy behind it. It's like trying to push an air bubble out of some material - you just end up displacing it, and if you apply too much pressure, the thing's going to pop. Also, as other commenters have pointed out, there are lots of very polarized and even extremist people on the opposite side, and if reddit removes one side and does nothing to the other, then all of the above gets amplified even more. I honestly agree with how Zuckerberg and Huffman are handling this. They both clearly personally dislike Trump, but they understand the big picture. It's kind of like geopolitics.

tossout99 6y ago

r/conservative seems to be taking on the role of T_D now, unfortunately.

jdhn 6y ago
/r/conservative isn't taking on the role of T_D, but it is taking on the role of unironic right wing boomerposting. I don't even go there anymore because the titles always seem to be variations of "EPIC ownage of LIBTARDS" and circlejerks in the comments, and very little discussion about actual conservative principles.

devnull3456 6y ago

Is TD responsible for the cities currently being burned down and looted?

luckylion 6y ago

> Yeah, TD alone was huge in 2016-2017 and was a huge contributor to the dynamic we have in the world today. Surely you mean "the dynamic we have in the world of reddit today", right? Otherwise, that sounds Bill-Gates-Is-Transmitting-Corona-Over-5G-Towers level insane. It's not the smoldering powder keg in the middle east, the long looming conflict between the US as the sole imperial super power and the up and coming China contesting their role in SE Asia etc, no. It's really TD, a subreddit where Trump fanatics post memes.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]