Our sub, r/The_Donald, and political discussion in general.

[u/Doxep]

Hi everyone!

As you may or may not have noticed, we have had an influx of posts calling bullshit on /r/the_donald users, mods, comments or posts. I have personally removed, I think, more than ten posts in the last 24 hours, because they didn't respect our rules, because they were duplicate, or similar reasons.

We already tag Political posts with the Politics flair, and we have provided the Hide Politics button. That worked until now.

These are the issues now:

1. /r/quityourbullshit is currently being flooded with posts that incite harassment against another subreddit. This violates rule #3.

2. /r/quityourbullshit is currently being flooded with anti-/r/the_donald posts. We don't have a specifical rule for this, but we don't want /r/quityourbullshit to take any political position in the American elections. This subreddit is being used to push a political agenda and I personally hate that. I would hate that even if it was against Sanders, against Clinton or against any political figure.

We have already talked about forbidding political posts, and honestly I have always thought that it was bound to happen sooner or later.... Shit has hit the fan today, so this is my suggestion.

It's not an easy decision to take, but I really want this subreddit to stay completely neutral. This is a fun subreddit, used to call bullshit on liars, and the fact that it's being used politically is hurting its nature. We have a set of rules and we always enforce them, but we were clearly unprepared for this kind of event.

My suggestion is that we ban political posts from /r/quityourbullshit at least until the American elections are completely over. This rule will NOT be retroactive (i.e. we won't delete the current top post on r/all).

I'm just posting this as a heads up to the community, and to see if in the next hours someone comes up with a better idea, but honestly this is a pressing matter and I think we're going through with it within the day.

I apologize for the situation that was never intended to happen.

Thank you for your attention,

• Doxep

PS: If anyone accuses me of supporting one political party of the other because of this decision, I will start murdering adorable kittens.

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edit: since we've received an overwhelmingly positive response from the community, we're going to enforce the rule.

edit 2: /u/AnastasiaFahrenheit has created a Political Bullshit subreddit to collect the posts that would otherwise be removed here. Please refer to that subreddit for political bullshit from now on.

edit 3: I have now also received the full support of all our moderators.

[u/ALoudMouthBaby]

How is it an abuse of the sticky system to use it exactly as it was intended?

Can you please indicate where Reddit's management indicated that was its intended use?

[u/NotNolan → u/ALoudMouthBaby]

Sure...

The fact that they coded "stickies" and allowed moderators to use them.

I mean, what kind of a response is that? That's like asking "can you please indicate where Reddit's management indicated that we were allowed to use vowels in our comments?" The mechanic exists; it was allowed to be used in certain ways; it has been used in those ways universally across the site for years. Only when The_Donald began to dominate r/all did it come time to rethink the mechanic that had existed for years. It was good enough for everyone until enough Trump supporters got together to get posts on r/all. Then it had to be changed.

Shutting your eyes does not make the sun go down.

[u/ALoudMouthBaby → u/NotNolan]

The fact that they coded "stickies" and allowed moderators to use them.

Oh, so it was never actually stated as their intended purpose. You just know better. I see.

The mechanic exists; it was allowed to be used in certain ways; it has been used in those ways universally across the site for years.

Which other sub has used rapidly changing the stickied threads to coordinate getting posts to the front page?

Seriously, do you not understand what is unique about how the_donald uses stickies?

Shutting your eyes does not make the sun go down.

You should probably take this to heart rather than mindlessly throwing it at others.

[u/NotNolan → u/ALoudMouthBaby]

Rapidly changing stickies is not against the rules. It is also not "coordinated," it is simply the result of an incredibly active community that upvotes content. Also known as, the entire point of Reddit.

The only reason this is acceptable to you is because you don't like Donald Trump. Let me offer a hypothetical. Let's say you were a Brony. I'm not saying you are, but hypothetically, for the sake of this argument, let's say that you have a deep, deep sexual connection with My Little Pony dolls. And let's say that you set up a subreddit and you attract thousands of people to your cause, and eventually you get so many subscribers that all of your Brony posts start making it to r/all. And you expect us to believe that after you have done exactly what Reddit encourages you to do, creating a community of like-minded people and having enjoyable Brony-related discussions, you'd be perfectly fine if the longstanding rules of the site were changed to suppress your Brony love from the rest of the users?

If so... why are you still here? What is the point of trying to build a community if you are going to be arbitrarily prevented from expanding beyond a certain size?

[u/ITS_JUST_SATIRE_BRO → u/NotNolan]

Your political choices are going to ruin this country to the ground, just wanted to tell you that.

[u/NotNolan → u/ITS_JUST_SATIRE_BRO]

Hey, if George Barack W. Hussein Obambush hadn't done such a spectacular job turning this country into one I no longer recognize, maybe I'd consider another establishment puppet for President. But they did, and I'm not.

The bigger problem for our republic is not so much who becomes President, but how long we can continue as a nation when so many people think it is acceptable political discourse to chase down Trump supporters in the streets and throw eggs in their faces. We can survive a Trump presidency even if he's a bad President, as the last sixteen years will attest. What we can't survive is a system that relies on thuggery and intimidation tactics to win elections.