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.

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.

> 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.

reddit (and you) are at war with scale

/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.

> 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.

I don't think anyone's saying it's a conspiracy.

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.

As I recall it was more like 2% or 3%.

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.

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

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

"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

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?

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)

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.

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.

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.

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

(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.

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.

Yes, the second edit backfired massively.

The reason pretty much all posts in the_donald are upvoted by users is due to the fact Clintons Correct the record was downvoting the_donald posts in hordes.

Again if Reddit would not have aligned themselves with one candidate named Clinton they probably wouldn't have this problem now.

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?

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.

See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13029201

They modified it before the election (during implied they did it and then put it back, and unfairly implies it was because they wanted to "suppress the truth" or whatever), and to be clear it was to combat the fact that the_donald readers upvote all their posts with a huge amount of fervour that doesn't align with other subreddits.

Interesting, do you have a source for that?

They modified the algorithm to avoid the front page getting flooded by the_donald. Their posts still make it to the front page.

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.

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

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.

/r/all isnt the front page. /r/t_d is not represented on the front page.