r/The_Donald

» see reddit.com/r/The_Donald as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Reddit's front page was supposed to be an average. This forum existed as a demonstration of what happens to an average when a large enough group agrees in advance to vote the same way at the same time, and the company spent four years rewriting its own ranking rules in response to one community.

It was created on 27 June 2015, eleven days after Donald Trump announced he was running, and it read as a permanent rally rather than a message board. Members called themselves patriots. Posts were addressed to the candidate in the second person. The moderators used the pinned-post function far past its intended scale, fixing dozens of items at once so that the top of the page was chosen rather than voted on. Subscribers passed 790,000.

Reddit's countermeasures are dated and they are specific. On 15 June 2016 the r/all algorithm was changed so that no single community could occupy the whole page. On 30 November that year pinned posts were excluded from r/all entirely. Both changes were about this forum and everyone on the site knew it. In between, on 27 July 2016, the candidate himself answered questions there, which remains one of the very few times a live presidential campaign has posted straight into a message board rather than through one.

I could not have voted in the election any of this was about, and I was not on that platform for its politics. The reason to write it down is not the argument. It is the machinery. This is one of the clearest surviving records of a single community forcing a general-purpose website to keep amending its own rules, and then being removed by the rules it had caused.

~ the case file ~

~ how the pinning worked ~

On most of Reddit the pinned slot was an announcement, one post, changed rarely. Here it was the layout. Pinning many posts at once turned a voting site into an edited one, because what a visitor saw at the top had been selected by five or six people rather than ranked by fifty thousand. The votes were still real, and they were what carried the selected posts outward onto the default page where everybody else lived.

The moderation ran the same way inward. During the July 2016 question session the moderators banned more than 2,200 accounts to keep the thread clean, which tells you exactly what the tool was for. A subreddit is a rented room with the landlord's furniture, but whoever holds the mod list decides who is standing in it.

~ the quarantine ~

On 26 June 2019 Reddit quarantined the forum after threats aimed at public officials during the Oregon Senate walkout, and cited the volume of reports the admins were being made to handle. A quarantine put an interstitial warning in front of the door, cut the community out of search and recommendations, disabled the custom styling and removed it from anything that made money.

The second stage was worse for it. On 26 February 2020 Reddit removed the moderators for approving and pinning content that broke the rules, then set the forum to restricted mode, which meant almost nobody could post. For four months it existed as an address with the posting switched off, which is a strange condition for a place whose entire product was volume.

~ the.win years ~

thedonald.win was registered on 21 November 2019, seven months before the ban. The lifeboat was in the water long before the ship went down, and that timing is the part of this story with the most general application: a community that expects eviction builds somewhere else while it still has the traffic to advertise the move.

The ban came on 29 June 2020, on the day Reddit published a rewritten content policy, in a sweep of roughly 2,000 subreddits. The company's stated reason was persistent rule-breaking and antagonizing other communities along with the company itself. In January 2021 a fight over control of the domain split the successor site again, and patriots.win was started. The forum was gone. What had been meeting in it was not, which is the difference between closing an account and closing a place.

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