Interesting. As an outsider (didn't vote for Trump or Clinton), Reddit seems decidedly organized against the Trump supporters on that site. From what I can tell, even the admins have made core changes to Reddit that any reasonable person would see as an effort to reduce the visibility of the Trump subreddit.

I think the Trump subreddit is very childish (seems to be intentional). But I hate the thought of websites like Reddit, FB, and Twitter engaging in practices that clearly and systematically try to reduce the visibility and legitimacy of one political viewpoint. What if the table was turned against the liberal viewpoint? I would be just as worried.

This is fairly easily disproved by looking at non-US subreddits. I frequent /r/france, /r/unitedkingdom and /r/sweden and non-liberal viewpoints, although less popular, are certainly not silenced. They're just that: less popular (thus more downvotes).

Things are different for the trump subreddit because it's a subreddit that has actively engaged in hostility against other subreddits and particular reddit users. Calls for brigading, slurs and harrassment of other users and admins, I've seen it all by now. It's reprehensible.

The main Trump subreddit would have long been banned and nuked out of existence if it weren't as popular as it is today. Right now, Reddit would face too much backlash if it outright banned the subreddit for continuing not to comply with the site rules. So it's understandable that the admins are trying to handle the situation somehow -- that's not "an effort to reduce [its] visibility", it's a compromise that doesn't involve removing the sub outright.

There's plenty of pro-trump subreddits which aren't involved in this nonsense because they're not spamming, harrassing, using bots etc. You don't hear about them because they get lost in the noise.

> to handle the situation somehow -- that's not "an effort to reduce [its] visibility", it's a compromise that doesn't involve removing the sub outright.

I'm certain what will happen is that the admins will keep adjusting the anti-voting ring algorithms until they effectively nerf all of the accounts that frequent the_donald and vote there.

Then they have a cover for any backlash because they didn't do anything specifically targeting the_donald, it just happens to be the case that the_donald "unfortunately got impacted" by the new algorithm due to the community's behavior.

I think that's the wrong way to approach /r/all (a subreddit that aggregates top posts from across Reddit). It's aim is to give people a look at top posts from across the site. If it gets dominated by any one subreddit - even if that were an innocuous subreddit full of of cute animals (like /r/aww) - it's an issue that would need to be fixed by changing the scoring algorithms. /r/all is not a prize for people to win, it's for readers to get a sense of major posts across the site.

On top of this, the Trump subreddit wasn't even legitimately getting most of it's posts to /r/all. They were actively trying to manipulate things in order to flood /r/all - making a sticky of new posts to get rapid upvotes, saying they would upvote any post on the subreddit, etc. The result was that the usefulness of /r/all went down, because a lot of it was just posts from one subreddit. The posts in the Trump subreddit also aren't innocuous. After the U.K. parliament attack, for instance, they made a post with the title "But hey, it wasn't all bad. In the end a Muslim was shot." that got ten thousand upvotes.

The_Donald's strategy was one of depth: focus on one subreddit aND it's content and work the algorithm to get to the front page.

The resist subreddits strategy is one of width: lots of subreddits where they focus on one or 2 posts in their subreddits network to get visibility on the front page.

The resist strategy is more annoying because there are too many different subreddits that they control to effectively filter them out

Reddit seems to have done a good job at clearing /r/all of the Trump wars. Right now I can't see a single pro- or anti-Trump post there.

As I saw it, that subreddit was mostly artificially increasing their visibility, and the measures introduced by the admins countered that. So I don't think they're actively trying to reduce the visibility of one political viewpoint, but rather to give it the visibility that is actually somewhat proportional to how much visibility users desire it to have.

But it's a difficult problem.

They created r popular specifically to censor the_donald and promote the dozens of resist subreddits.

It's pretty crazy: I started on reddit about 10 years ago and it has noticeably changed in their attitude towards allowing political opunions that they do not agree with

Think about it this way: your communication platform serving several hundred million users is being trolled by a very vocal minority which happens to be politically aligned and it cannot be excluded that the trolling is in some cases inspired and sponsored by a foreign nation state. Do you really keep your hands off the wheel because free speech?

Yes, Absolutely. I'm a firm believer that once social media platforms reach a certain size that they should be managed much the same as any public space: free speech is of the utmost importance.

There were/are 100m+ user, who wanted none of that political shitstorm. it's not a witch hunt.

> CIA Agents are really foreign people reporting back

Definitely: "one was shot in front of his colleagues in the courtyard of a government building"

If you're running a US-agent embedded spy ring, your ring's members don't hang out together. They probably don't even know of each others' existences.