Reddit has quarantined /r/The_Donald
Just happened minutes ago, so not much information yet.
I think it's likely that this article from Monday might have finally pushed it over the edge (since it's usually media attention that does it): You can’t offer to murder cops on Reddit unless you’re on r/TheDonald
The quarantine message says:
It is restricted due to significant issues with reporting and addressing violations of the Reddit Content Policy. Most recently the violations have included threats of violence against police and public officials.
As a visitor or member, you can help moderators maintain the community by reporting and downvoting rule-breaking content.
Here's the message the admins sent them:
Dear Mods,We want to let you know that your community has been quarantined, as outlined in Reddit’s Content Policy.
The reason for the quarantine is that over the last few months we have observed repeated rule-breaking behavior in your community and an over-reliance on Reddit admins to manage users and remove posts that violate our content policy, including content that encourages or incites violence. Most recently, we have observed this behavior in the form of encouragement of violence towards police officers and public officials in Oregon. This is not only in violation of our site-wide policies, but also your own community rules (rule #9). You can find violating content that we removed in your mod logs.
As we have discussed in the past, and as detailed in our content policy and moderator guidelines, we expect you to enforce against rule-breaking content. You’ve made progress over the last year, but we continue to observe and take action on a disproportionate amount of rule-breaking behavior in this community. We recognize that you do remove posts that are reported, but we are troubled that violent content more often goes unreported, and worse, is upvoted.
User reports and downvotes are an essential way that Reddit functions to moderate content. Limiting or prohibiting them prevents you from moderating your community effectively. Because of this, we are disabling your custom styling in order to restore these essential functions.
As stated in our Moderator Guidelines, our goal is to keep the platform alive and vibrant, as well as to ensure your community can reach people interested in it. Accordingly, here are the specific terms of the quarantine and the next steps we are asking from you as a mod team to resolve this situation.
Quarantine terms:
Visitors to this community will see a warning that requires users to explicitly opt-in to viewing it. This messaging reminds users of the importance of reporting rule-breaking content.
Custom styling has been disabled to restore the report and downvote buttons.
We hope both these changes will help improve the signal around rule-breaking content and improve your ability to effectively address it.
Next steps:
You unambiguously communicate to your subscribers that violent content is unacceptable.
You communicate to your users that reporting is a core function of Reddit and is essential to maintaining the health and viability of the community.
Following that, we will continue to monitor your community, specifically looking at report rate and for patterns of rule-violating content.
Undertake any other actions you determine to reduce the amount of rule-violating content.
Following these changes, we will consider an appeal to lift the quarantine, in line with the process outlined here.
We hope that this process provides a viable way forward to restore the health of the community. However, if this situation continues to escalate, we will explore further actions, including the possible banning of your community.
Please confirm that you have received and understand this message.
i do find it relatively funny that T_D threatening violence against public officials only leads to a quarantine (which might kill external traffic to a sub but in practice will likely just create another space of radicalization while ensuring reddit can still profit off of the traffic of the people in it), and yet reddit also threatened to outright ban (not just quarantine) /r/ChapoTrapHouse specifically over "kill slaveowners" jokes not that long ago, which seems quite a step below what T_D is accused of here. reddit's standards for what gets your subreddit collectively punished are so, so fucking muddled and arcane that it's stupid and it's obvious they're always flying by the seat of their pants when they do it, because there is zero consistency to how they apply anything.
Steve Huffman (spez) is a libertarian, and likely sides more with the right than he does the left.
He has already talked about how he stows guns, owns a bunker, and is a prepper for the end of the world wherein he thinks he will be a "leader" and not a "slave" (...apparently those are the only two options? so he's going to be a leader of slaves? instead of a manager of workers in an accommodating work environment?)
It would not surprise me if he identifies very much with the right, or at the very least the protecting of corporate interests, much like how Netflix says out loud that they are against the abortion ban, but bankrolls all of the politicians who support it more than they do the dems, because their CEO supports privatization of schools.
oh, i'm well aware of spez's idiotic sympathies. he's also on record as saying that ”the_donald is a small part of a large problem we face in this country — that a large part of the population feels unheard, and the last thing we're going to do is take their voice away.” and acting as if that somehow justifies not blowing T_D up and justifies giving them slightly preferential treatment in regards to moderation as has generally been the case prior to now.
I was super happy when Steve Huffman left, and not happy at all when he came back.
Give me Yishan and Ellen any day.
Ellen only please. Yishan wanted to be even more hands off.
I was a little blindly internet "liberal" at the time. Was Ellen Pao run out for trying to be progressive, and the community wouldn't take it?
Nope. She didn't really do anything except be a woman, it seems.
That's not quite true, she was the one in charge during two major things that both caused big reddit uproars that made a huge mess of the site for days:
(@knocklessmonster)
I wouldn't blame Ellen for either of those. In fact, here's the former reddit CEO (yishan) calling out spez for using Ellen as a scapegoat (emphasis added):
And as a bonus instance of spez acting shitty towards Ellen, there's this exchange (which was posted in the wake of spez getting caught editing other people's comments):
Oh god is that second exchange so satisfying
There it is. I just remember seeing the hate, and some of the anger about fatpeoplehate (which was voiced by a small minority of users in fatpeoplestories, most people there were happy about it). It all came back.
I thought there was something I'd missed, apparently not.
Here's an article from the time.
Like all for-profit corporations: Reddit doesn't lean left or right. It leans pro-profits next Q.
So right. I mean, one side of the political spectrum is very clearly wants to benefit massive corporations whilst the other, not so much. It's not really just "wherever the wind blows."
Can the board of directors kick him out?
Ok I'm sorry but what the fuck? (At him not you) Can you link me to something about this please?
That's from this article: Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich
Thanks. Weird stuff. Why he would ever publicize this is beyond me.
I was just thinking about this statement and his prepper hobby. I found that his statement sounded insane at the time. The egotistical part aside, having just read this apocalyptic document it’s actually a very practical position, isn’t it?
This is just the rich thing to do. Even Post Malone, who is much younger, is setting up a survival bunker in Utah.
My favorite thing about preppers is that they'll have a garage full of guns and ammo, but 1 working toilet that assumes indoor plumbing will continue to work and a bin full of Brita filters. The apocalypse is going to be full of heavily armed morons dying of scurvy if they lucked into not shitting themselves to death first.
I think that's because it's more of a fantasy for them. It's like the walking dead and they want to be the winners/survivors. Which is amazingly lame, because I actually have an interest in prepping for realistic disasters. I would welcome interesting solutions to common problems such as sourcing vitamin c. If these people were actually half useful and focused on helping themselves and others survive short-term disasters they might actually do some good during disasters.
It is lame. If they wanted to embark on a zany flight of fancy they could build an earthship or something instead.
The problem is most of that stuff you're talking about involves actually educating yourself on nerdy things like botany, agronomy, etc. You can't just buy it at a store and feel "prepared." You need to both read it in books AND then go hiking and find it in the world.
FWIW, in a realistic disaster situation most of the knowledge that will save your life is going to need extremely hyper-local knowledge of the flora and conditions. And much of it involves knowing how to find emergency services and other trappings of civilization as anything else.
Depending on where you live I may have some solutions for you. Scurvy In The 1700s Q&A.
TLDW - Sauerkraut, Spruce Beer, and Cochlearia (aka scurvy-grass).
Where I live I would source vitamin C from rose hips such as Rosa nutkana and Rosa pisocarpa.
That's a sad thing to do, but at least they're spending some of that money, which is a good thing for us plebs. It is sad that these people are stupid enough that they believe they'll survive an apocalypse because they have a bunker tho. No society, no life. Without electricity, they'll starve in a few weeks at most. The most prepared among them could maybe make it for a few years if it was nothing nuclear or similar, living a middle ages peasant life of working the whole day only for survival.
Obviously you don't need to be too smart to become rich...
I hate how people keep bringing this up as a thing to criticize him about, when there are real things to criticize too. If I were stupid rich, I'd spend a little on a few backup plans too. Who wouldn't?
I frankly just meant it as an example as to how far-reaching it is as a thing, and it's not an age thing.
Arguably, Post would do better than an old man with a huge hired security force, assuming he's surrounded himself with friends.
Please don't attack people based on their appearance. That's low.
On the contrary. Reddit's standards aren't muddled or arcane at all. They're actually very simple. If you make money for them, you get a slap on the wrist. If you don't make money for them, they bring the ban hammer down.
the "average person" who doesn't know what reddit is probably doesn't give a shit about reddit or what goes on on the website, to be perfectly honest with you, and it's not like reddit is doing some sort of radical shit here, nor do i think any media storm is going to last or matter. ravelry literally just banned support for donald trump three days ago and the media storm surrounding that (which was huge, it was a trending topic on twitter for like 12 hours) is already done and over with because internet culture war bullshit has no staying power anymore. of course right wingers are going to be persecutorial about it, but they're always fucking persecutorial when shit they don't like happens.
reddit is also basically ignored by the media on a widespread scale, despite its "mainstream" popularity. can you name the last time reddit was actually in the news and not just being covered by one or two middle-tier news outlets from time to time? because the last time i can was literally over a year and change ago.
well, most of those seem more like reddit being offhandedly mentioned or being included as a small part of the story than reddit itself the website actually being covered like facebook or youtube or other big websites normally are, which is more what i was going for. reddit gets mentioned in the media not-infrequently for certain, but as far as actually being covered by media, i'd struggle to name more than a few instances, most of which are well in the past and come from the website's userbase exploding.
There are dozens of articles written everyday based on a handful of random people on Twitter expressing their opinion on something. By that metric, almost everything that happens on Reddit is far more newsworthy.
It's sad that banning hatred is more unacceptable than the actual hatred.
In an ideal world, what should be the news here? IMO, the news should be that t_d was hateful enough to get banned in the first place, with a focus on the disgusting comments that were getting upvoted, from a perspective of "who in their right mind would say such disgusting things?".
You basically just said they're not banning it because they're afraid of its users.
What I'm saying is that not removing a violent subreddit because you're afraid of them lashing out is a pretty poor justification. I don't think that's their real justification, probably more something between ad money and "libertarian views".
I was recently banned/suspended indefinitely from reddit for sharing a radio station's webpage that hosted that linkedin dump of ICE employees. My immediate response was "fair enough" although I thought it might be an interesting experiment to see if ICE themselves publish some sort of list of known "illegals" and their occupations to see if sharing it on reddit resulted in the same treatment. I'm sure several such lists have been published - if not by ICE than by some other paramilitary group or anti-migration or white nationalist organization - but it probably wouldn't be worth it to echo that information for something so arbitrary and personal.
At first I considered scraping my old comments and then deleting them myself but I just haven't bothered with it. That reddit account was 8 years old but I never really formed any lasting relationships on there. The community changed under my feet and I've had a growing desire to move away from it. Even though I can still log in and view my feed, I haven't been on there ever since the suspension and it honestly feels liberating.
Don't quarantined subreddits have ads removed? I suppose T_D zealots will look at ads when spewing nonsense on other subs, though.
they do, but i'm pretty confident reddit can and does still indirectly profit off of them (because they drive traffic which would be desirable to advertisers) and the users of course aren't confined by the bounds of the subreddit.
They also buy a lot of gold. Also, reddit has had no ads on T_D for a while now after people started sending advertisers screenshots of their ads next to the hateful shit they say in that subreddit, so reddit has literally been subsidizing T_D for years.
I really wonder why people with just abject hatred of a platform, that believe its run by fascist communist censoring lizards, also seem to exclusively stay on said platform and refuse to leave it.
Their beef is with "Reddit" not the website reddit.com, if that makes any sense. Reddit.com has been very accommodating to them by not showing them the door, where "Reddit" the culture enables the EsJayDubbaYews and the Feminists to oppress them.
Oh, they absolutely believe the site itself is against them. There have been a lot of accusations along those lines over the last few years: reddit's changing the algorithm to suppress their posts, reddit's showing fake subscriber numbers in T_D to make it seem smaller than it really is, reddit's community managers apply different standards to them, and so on.
One of those incidents is how the "fuck spez" thing happened, where he edited a bunch of users' posts directly in the database. The thread he did it in was T_D being mad that spez was singling the subreddit out for unfair treatment in some way.
This has been so extremely frustrating with the incredible amounts of special treatment the sub has had practically since it started gaining traction.
I've lost count of how many mods the reddit admins have removed from running the community, banned, how many chances they've given the mod teams to get things in order and on and on.
Wasn't that a misunderstanding in the end, as they were changing how the number worked site-wide?
I guess T_D reacting to something without evidence isn't that hard to believe.
nah, T_D users definitely have at minimum a lowkey beef with reddit the website too at this point, especially post-spez incident. they've locked down on at least one occasion over reddit website decisions and they of course tried to migrate over to voat that one time before being strongly rebuked by the actually fascist userbase there.
I get the feeling the majority of T_D's daily users are fake, with the much fewer remaining users being made up of people who believe they're "fighting the good fight from within", so to speak.
I've had that feeling for quite some time. It's pretty much just a bot meme farm at this point; with likely a couple thousand real humans.
You are asking for a level of self-awareness and critical thinking that T_D tends to shy away from.
As an aside, from the quarantine post:
I can't believe reddit still lets people get away with people using CSS to remove important functionality on the site. :P
A quick glance through the posts shows that quite a few people there find it unreasonable for Reddit to rely on users to report content violating site-wide policies. How do these folks imagine a gigantic site that relies solely on user-generated content operates? There's a team of people reading the millions of posts created each day? That subreddit moderators are paid employees that spend hours each day micromanaging their community? Sheesh.
Personally I think sites with user generated content should hire enough moderators to review that content. It'd mean an end to mass UGC as we know it, but I'm honestly fine with that. My impression is forum sites still work like that, but social media sites don't.
There was a post a while ago about Facebook, which contracts actual humans to moderate, and about how those moderators were literally dying -- one of them actually died on the job.
yeah, this one: Bodies in Seats: At Facebook’s worst-performing content moderation site in North America, one contractor has died, and others say they fear for their lives. in fairness, facebook outsources their labor on this and contractors for this kind of thing are all garbage and have literally no support for these people, which contributes to the problems and outcomes you see. i'm not sold on purely human moderation as an idea, but it would definitely better if people weren't treated as warm bodies by companies which specialize in it.
How do you distinguish between social media and forum sites?
In my experience most forums still rely on volunteer moderators, paid moderators seem to mostly exist in the occasional for-profit site, and even that seems rare (outside of the occasional "community manager" or social media team, which isn't quite the same thing).
To be frank, I don't think they do. I think they're more caught up in seeking vindication for perceived slights than anything else.
I'm in a subreddit where the CSS removes downvotes unless you're subscribed to help cut down on raiding. Obviously that can be overwritten by disabling CSS (or using a/z to vote in RES)
It also doesn't apply to anyone using a mobile app (which is the majority of reddit's users now), and anyone using the redesign. Hiding the downvote with CSS is almost totally ineffective at this point, because it probably only applies to about 10% of users or so.
I imagine that most people on the old desktop UI are also using RES, which lets you bypass that restriction in two ways:
Awith the comment/post selected.i think even the ceiling at this point can't be more 20% for the overwhelming majority of subreddits, just pegging it based on even my small subreddit of 1,500 which sorta prioritizes the old design but has a functioning redesign version. at this point there, old reddit traffic is only ~15% of the traffic on a good day, and sometimes it's closer to 10% because the redesign is increasingly eating into traffic that isn't mobile.
EDIT: running the numbers, in our best month recently (april of this year), old reddit traffic just barely topped 21% before dropping the next month to about 18%, so yeah.
This is how it looks in /r/SubredditSimulator (the largest subreddit I still "moderate"): https://i.imgur.com/liegHlv.png
The pageview numbers for the most recent month are:
So that's about 6% on old reddit and 87% on mobile in there. The traffic page doesn't include traffic from third-party mobile apps either, so it's actually even more tilted towards apps than it shows.
That's a very different distribution from the largest subreddits on the site (former "default" subreddits)
They look more like this:
In terms of pageviews, apps make up around two thirds.
I'd expect voting patterns would heavily favor non-mobile users to vote more.
Your main point still stands though.
Here's the traffic in r/HighQualityGifs, which is one of the larger subreddits now. r/ReactionGifs looks the same. Pretty much matches what @Deimos is seeing.
Interesting stuff. Let me share the same for r/polandball - 500k subs. Our traffic is almost similar, but stronger on the redesign, less so on the reddit app.
I guess the data I pulled from a sub in the top portion in the subs sorted by most active users trends differently for some reason.
Mobile web is more popular than apps? The mobile version spams you with buttons everywhere screaming at you to use the app, and if you click to make it go away, they show up again the moment you load a different page.
definitely variant on the subreddit, although i'd guess with size the two become more and more equal. on my small subreddit, mobile web usually gets doubled up by app use.
Slightly off-topic, but it's funny how different the platform distribution is. This is my main sub (food based), which is waaaaaay smaller (~150k, adding ~250 per day)
Removing downvotes is totally fine, imo. It's removing reporting that's an issue. At that point the mods are basically saying I want the power that comes with moderation without any of the responsibility. Plus, it completely eliminates the primary way a saner user could bring questionable stuff on the subreddit to the moderator's attention.
Iirc their reasoning for removing it long ago was that they were getting "report bombed" or something by "bad actors". Could be remembering incorrectly though.
Wouldn't that be considered bregading and worth bringing to admin attention though?
You are correct. As memory serves they allegedly did that and the admins kept ignoring them or something, because it was happening right around the time they were spamming the front page with T_D posts.
To be honest the whole sub's been a cluster fuck since its inception.
At one point, you could report any post on T_D, and it would be immediately removed until a mod manually approved it again. It worked the last time I tried it months ago. Not sure why they had the auto-removal report threshold so low.
Definitely agree with that. Meanwhile I mod a sub with over 100k subs and people bitch about posts but refuse to report them.
I think it's against the site rules (or used to be) but the admins do not care.
It definitely used to. I remember they used to really enforce rules like making sure there is a link back to the front page in the top left. Seems they gave up on that a while ago.
Hence why restools is pretty key for using the site. To disable the theming yourself, and enable those buttons.
Sadly, lots of subs do it, too, which is stupid.
I went there just to go downvote a bunch of shit just now. Felt pretty damn good.
They were actually all low quality posts though.
I want to know how they got away with only a quarantine.
If I had to hazard a guess, even when the mods say they are removing threatening material, there is still enough to draw attention, and the admins had to do something about it, but not enough to incur the wrath of all conservative media all at once. Quarantine gives them an out to say that they can unquarantine the sub later when this all blows over.
Because the Reddit admins don't want to deal with the absolute riot that would occur if they outright banned that subreddit.
The admins are not being driven by principle here, they're being driven by outside factors. They're not taking a stand against evil things and being willing to fight the good fight. They're just trying to damp down a bad public relations situation by doing the minimum necessary to make the problem go away. That's how they've always dealt with these things: wait until they become a problem, and then do as little as possible.
Sweet, sweet ad money.
How much traffic do you think reddit would lose, if it lost t_d?
They might make a lot of ad money, but I'm sure t_d equally creates a lot of work for the admins. Maybe things have changed recently, but historically it's been the well-paid engineers who have had to stop work to come clean up after petty squabbles. They'd probably be just as happy to be rid of them.
Most of the admin work is volunteer. It took news hitting media for reddit to lift a finger and do anything.
Eh. It's still a net positive profit line, is what matters.
Don't have the numbers, but I surmise you may be correct that the numbers have turned, at this point. Bots don't usually drive good ad engagement.
I don't have anything significant to add here, but I'm thrilled about the quarantine. Admins should have ripped the banned-aid off and shut down T_D for good though. We only have to wait another three years for that to happen.
Starting to hit lots of the major sites now. Link dump:
The sub's reaction is pretty predicable. People are claiming that there weren't any comments encouraging violence, or if there were they must have been written by liberals to make the sub look bad. One person suggested that the timing was due to the first Dem debate being held tonight.
I thought quarantined subreddits have their subscriber count hidden, how come T_D does not have theirs hidden?
I thought so too, that's interesting. I wonder if they've modified quarantine to be able to apply the different effects (no subscriber numbers, no stylesheet, etc.) individually.
Was there a public reason given why that water subreddit was quarantined? I haven't really been following it but I thought it was merely just... praising water? Or is it something more malicious?
Thank you for clarifying. The name is clearly not in the best taste, especially for a website which is overwhelmingly used by white Americans.
they did this with /r/watchpeopledie and banned it shorty after. quarantine seems to be a setup before the outright ban.
i'lll miss T_D when it's gone, it was a fun place to support DJT in 2016.
It's a cesspool of the internet. Nothing of value would be lost if t_d got flushed.
interesting, I wonder how many were able to get un-quarantined.
Hold on.
Just...just hold on a second.
There are SIX HUNDRED people threatening to enact violence upon the state capitol in Oregon, and there's YET TO BE A POLICE RESPONSE TO THEM?
What the fuck is going on in Oregon, guys?
As I understand it, the state government was about to pass a landmark bill addressing emissions for climate change, and the Republicans couldn't stop it, so they left the capitol to prevent the government from having a quorum (a minimum number of members required for any votes to have effect). The Democrats proceeded to vote to order the Sargent of Arms to bring the Republicans back (which is a right specifically guaranteed in the Oregon Constitution), and as a result, the Republicans fled to Idaho (outside Oregon's jurisdiction). Far right "militias" volenteered to be the Republicans' armed security and have threatened to shoot anyone who tries to come get them, and back home, they discussed an armed assault on the Oregon state capitol. Therefore, the Democrats shut the building down and suspended the legislature. Anyone's guess what happens from here.
This is like reading the script to a bad dystopian tv series. This would be absolutely impossible here in Denmark. WTF!?
We thought it would be impossible here too, until it happened. Telling yah man, this authoritarian streak going throughout the world scares the shit out of me. I can't imagine what would have to go through the minds of the people who do this.
My one consolation is that it's seriously hardening a generation of young people in America such as myself against them. We may have to wait 10, 15 years, but eventually these fucks won't have a viable base anymore. I just hope the country survives until then, we've been through some pretty bad shit before though.
Yeah, the past 4 years have shown us that a lot of the US government is glued together with "Good intentions".
Some individual states are taking up the mantle, to correct this, codify some of the "good intentions" into law (ie, releasing tax returns to be on the ballot, criminalizing things like taking foreign money to interfere in elections, codification of bodily autonomy of women, etc etc).
Same here. I still can't believe that we're doing this thing again; "we" as a species tried it 70-80 years ago, and we all know how that turned out. I'm truly terrified, especially because humanity has a lot of other pressing problems to get solved.
All the people that paid in blood for that are dead, though. The lesson has been forgotten, essentially.
People might bring up Wisconsin's Democrats doing something similar in 2011, so I'm gonna get ahead of that and explain why the two situations are different. In Wisconsin's case, the Democrats fled across the Illinois border to prevent a quorum from passing a law to take away teachers' collective bargaining rights. The border is about an hour drive from Wisconsin's capital and they stayed in a hotel there. They didn't threaten violence, nor did any left-wing militias (does such a thing exist?). In addition, there were protests at the state capitol that went on for three or four weeks in the Democrats' support, in which a hundred thousand people showed up.
TL;DR Wisconsin's Democrats didn't threaten violence and had massive public support and that's why the situation in Oregon isn't comparable.
Antifa is the closest you get on the left.
Not really. Antifa isn't some specific group, it's just a banner to unite under against the fash. There's the Socialist RA though.
Denmark? We're not surprised at much here in Turkey anymore (thanks Erdogan!?), but this would've made me drop my jaw if I'm honest.
So are they not having any sessions whatsoever since the entire legislature is shut down? How can this possibly be worth it?
It's not. I guarantee you this is being propped up and egged on by foreign intelligence in some capacity. Not saying it started there, just saying they're actively supporting it.
Even if it is the result of foreign influence, these people are still nuts for going along with it.
How can anyone justify this ridiculously destructive reaction to one bill they don't like? This is one of the most extreme cases of cutting off your nose to spite your face I have ever seen.
It seems pretty clear we need some form of 'dereliction of duty' clause for rogue representatives like this. Give them a set (and short) time window in which to appear, and if they don't appear, they are stripped of office completely, irrevocably, and automatically. I'd even go into dishonorable discharge territory for this. Then we don't need to worry about them anymore and can concentrate on replacing them with competent people.
I feel like we don't have laws like that is because it was assumed anyone this insane would never be able to win another election.
Oh, this is huge, isn't it? Long overdue, too.
Thank God. I swear the conspiracy theories and antisemitism on that place made it look like 4chan.
Sadly, this will only make that problem a thousand times worse.
Man, I totally forgot T_D was even a thing. I blocked it the second its bullshit started appearing on the front page 3 years ago and have never looked back.
It was worse then that. I kept having it pop up as the top search result when searching even the most irrelevent terms. No clue what the fuck is wrong with reddit's search algorithm if it keeps putting the least informative sub on the entire site at the top of every result.
I remember for a while people were convinced they had found a way to rig the search engine. This was further enforced by a lot of changes to the search engine after people started complaining.
If they did, I don't know exactly how it would have happened, but I would guess high participation, stuffing posts with key words, and posting certain times of day would get you pretty close.
I think it's simpler than that.
Just like with everything else, the admins were probably just too lazy to put much work into the search engine. so they just used a stupid algorithm that put high traffic subs at the top of the results no matter what. That's an extension of the bullshit "let the upvotes decide" philosophy the admins love. TD is an incredibly high traffic sub on its own. They don't need to do any manipulation to skew the results.
I know you didn't really have a direct hand in why T_D got quarantined, as it was most likely just the bad press that did it (as usual for reddit)... but you have been fighting the good fight against T_D by raising awareness of their insanity (and reddit HQs inaction) for a very long time now... so regardless, I just wanted to reach out to say congrats and good job. 🥳👍
Hah, of that I have no doubt. I got burnt out just observing the mess from afar, so I can't even imagine what actually trying to put in the effort to catalogue, report and raise awareness about all the insanity has done to your psyche.
And while the last year has been admittedly pretty promising on one front, it's been the opposite on many others, so how you still have any faith in Reddit HQ is honestly beyond me at this point. I completely lost my faith in them after all the lies we were told about new mod tools and transparency that came in the aftermath of the blackout all those years ago, which ultimately never amounted to anything despite two of my favorite admins being put on the job (but then quietly taken off it again once the hubbub died down). That whole situation pretty much broke my faith in reddit's upper management forever. And their inaction against T_D and various other horrible subreddits since then, as well as the horrible redesign and counterproductive monetization efforts they have been making lately, has just further sealed the deal for me. I am never going back there... other than to manage invite threads on /r/Tildes, and occasionally check in on the juicy drama. ;)