Not to mention, its pretty widely known that /r/the_donald uses bots to up the votes and push their stuff higher on /r/all. Not that Im thrilled that Spez did what he did, but /r/the_donald has been pushing the line ever since it was created.
This exactly. I am more suprised and disappointed that subreddit survived long enough to let this "scandal" happen, than about the thing itself.
A subreddit with a fraction of the userbase and activity than other subs would constantly have multiple posts on the frontpage at any given time, and noone cared to look into it or do something against it. I wouldn't be surprised if that sub beat out some default subs during that time, which is just straight up ridiculous.
This shouldn't have happened, true, but the reason for that is not as much /u/spez screwing up than it is all of reddit screwing up.
There have been exactly ZERO r/The_Donald posts on the frontpage, ever. It is not and never was a default subreddit.
You are talking about r/all, which almost no one browses according to the Reddit admins themselves. And as of a few months ago, at most 3-4 posts from any one subreddit are on each page of r/all.
Why exactly should they be banned? I can't help but suspect that the real reason is that you want to silence their politics.
I browse /r/all almost every day. I don't subscribe to everything I'm interested in, so I check /r/all to see if I'm missing everything. Before they changed the algorithm, page one was nearly 100% /r/the_donald spam. I don't care about their politics, that's their own business, but it's pretty obvious they're gaming the system. Again, that's fine. That's their own business. So reddit changed the way the posts are displayed to make /r/all usable to a wider audience again, problem is now it's mostly porn after you get past page one.
To remove politics from the argument, I don't watch basketball. So if /r/nba decided they wanted to have all their posts on the front page and told their readers to up vote everything they see no matter what, I'd have the same reaction. It's not what the system was designed for. I want to see a healthy mix of what reddit users actually think are the most interesting posts of the day. One subreddit, especially one that's not even that popular, taking over /r/all is not what I want to see. Doesn't matter which subreddit. I want to see a good mix.
The main issue is that Reddit does not have a built-in way to filter out subreddits. There is a ton of uninteresting and offensive content on Reddit, and the only way I can use the site is to filter subreddits using Reddit Enhancement Suite. I like /r/all because it lets me discover new content outside of my subscriptions, but I can't read it on mobile or on other computers--without RES there is too much crap to wade through.
Their votes to comments ratio is much, much higher than other subreddits, which is very suspect.
Another suspect thing is that time when the Reddit algorthm broke and the first 50 pages of r/all were turned into /r/the_donald post. Apparently what happened is that the sorting broke and they were ordering posts by activity, revealing that /r/the_donald posts were being upvoted at a rate that dwarfed other subreddits.
Trump supporters turned out to be 47% of voters and it's been said many times he had a strong base of energized young people. It's entirely possible it's fully legitimate in my mind at least.
From what I've read, Trump didn't actually get any more votes than republicans in the past few presidential races, it's just the democratic turnout was a lot lower than expected, i.e. fewer people overall voted (or more voted for the third-parties).
Early on mods encouraged users to upvote everything to counter brigading. Then they noticed that it got them on /r/all. So now they just randomly post notices of brigading.
Just wanted to also throw out there that the mods' technique was to sticky a post for everyone to see and upvote. The Admins told them that abusing stickies in such a fashion (frequently, and without good reason) was considered a form of (up)voter manipulation.
Disregard the title as it's not a "botnet." It's a user script that adds functionality to RES: automatically upvote everything in The_Donald, automatically downvote everything in other subreddits, and allows importing lists of specific users to up/downvote.
In fairness, bots have been influencing many subs for quite some time. An analysis of how one sided /r/politics was and how many seemingly bot accounts (very new accounts with abnormal activity, heavy publishing/etc) posted nothing but pro Hillary / anti Trump articles with an immediate push of votes.
Reddit is gamed all over the place, in all subs. Between that, and fake amazon reviews, it's really feeling like this is a problem we need to start spending some time to try and push against.
I'm far from stating that t_d used bots to push submissions up, because there is no definite proof, but what I know for sure is that the US election ruined browsing /r/all for me. While it was mostly porn and memes before, every now and then I would bump into something interesting from a subreddit I didn't know. But during the election it was 90% of either t_d or sandersforpresident.
EDIT: Apparently reddit has changed the /r/all algorithm so this is no longer true. Thanks everyone for informing me!
It only looks like a political move because a political subreddit is the one that forced the change. If it was any other subreddit, no one would have cared. I'm sure if /r/hillaryclinton did the same thing, they would have reacted the same. It's not good user experience for one subreddit to take over the site like that.
It's a long running joke on the sub after being constantly accused of being bots (and probably bots created by Russian hackers closely working with Trump.)
It's really, really not. Accusations of Russian influence on Trump's campaign are common to the point of almost being a meme. So /r/the_donald turned it into one. Not much different than the "steel beams" meme.
This coming from a person who filters out /r/the_donald so I don't have to see it.
