Reddit announced yesterday it will be making some changes in response to the site’s mishandling of the Orlando shooting. They will change their algorithm to promote a “diversity” of viewpoints and restrict the use of stickied posts.
This is an odd set of changes considering: 1) they have nothing to do with what happened Sunday, and 2) they are specifically targeting r/the_donald, Trump’s subreddit.
The mishandling of the Orlando shooting was a result of moderators on r/news mass-deleting comments, locking threads, and banning users talking about the shooting, seemingly because the shooter was a Muslim. For hours, there was no place on the site to discuss the shooting besides the_donald, and Redditors were furious.
Neither post diversity on the front page nor the sitewide sticky policy had anything to do with the weekend’s censorship problem. So why are they included in the list of solutions?
The most logical answer is that Reddit has been planning these changes for a while but are using the Orlando tragedy as a smokescreen for implementation.
The_donald has had a disproportionate influence on the frontpage for months. The “all” section is filled with posts from the sub, far more than ones from the Bernie’s subreddit or the general politics one.
This is partly because of the_donald’s use of “sticky” posts — posts made to stay at the top of a subreddit’s page — as a way to drive posts to the frontpage. The_donald moderators will find a new post that they believe their readers will like and sticky it to the top of the sub. When that post reaches a high number of upvotes they will replace it with a newer post. This allows the_donald to generate a high volume of content with very high upvote counts — thus dominating the front page, which aggregates high-upvote posts from subreddits.
Reddit’s new policy is to make it so that moderators can only sticky their own posts, not those of general users. These posts can only be text posts and not links to articles or images. Reddit essentially wants sticky posts to be used only for community announcements and not for driving upvotes. The new policy effectively guts the_donald’s front page strategy, but it won’t completely stop them from stacking the front page.
That’s where the change in the algorithm comes in. Increasing a diversity of viewpoints essentially means decreasing posts from the_donald, which clearly have a disproportionate influence on Reddit at the moment.
To be sure, the_donald does have what many consider to be too many posts on the frontpage, and it is probably turning more casual users off from the site. It is not surprising at all that Reddit’s admins would do something to mitigate it. But to implement these measures under the umbrella of the Orlando tragedy is most likely disingenuous.
When all the major subreddits were censoring discussion of the shooting, the_donald was the only place to talk about it. And now in response to this widespread censorship, Reddit’s “solution” is to weaken that subreddit? How out of touch are the employees of Reddit with their own community?
Of course in Reddit’s investigation of the Orlando debacle, they found no evidence to support the claims of censorship, despite how obvious it was to many Redditors. And because no one’s to blame and everything’s fine in their eyes, they may as well use the occasion to once again go after problem subreddits.
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