In communities like this, for which actual community formation is beside the point, Ms.
It also provides something like deniability within the community itself. This debt to the infamous message board that delights in chaos is stylistic but also functional: to always seem like you might be joking, well beyond the point at which you should be taken seriously, is to guard yourself against accurate interpretation and evaluation. Users of both The_Donald and WallStreetBets acknowledge a debt to 4chan (WallStreetBets’ tagline: “Like 4chan found a Bloomberg terminal”). This strategically disingenuous approach proved effective, not just on Reddit but well beyond it. Among its unspoken rules was an expectation that users manipulate the platform as a matter of course, upvoting pro-Trump content regardless of its relative quality, because doing so would make it visible to users elsewhere on the platform, or force Reddit to intervene, inviting the Redditors to cry censorship. The_Donald ruthlessly antagonized other candidates’ subreddits, then Reddit as a whole. It made a mockery of Reddit’s rules, and of its stated intentions around cultivating communities. Trump’s supporters, The_Donald was at war, immediately, with the platform around it. In addition to providing a staging ground for some of Mr. “That will help them consolidate a stronger position.” “What I’m interested in is letting Donald Trump supporters speak among themselves,” a moderator of the subreddit told me in early 2016. The_Donald wasn’t a place to debate the presidential election, or discuss the latest goings-on with their preferred candidate. “In the early days of The_Donald, there was an interesting mix of gleeful disbelief around the success of the subreddit,” said Lana Swartz, a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia and the author of “ New Money: How Payment Became Social Media.” Their stated goal, after all, was “to make a meme president.”
It’s this performance that feels so familiar. Some commentators have suggested that the activity represented by WallStreetBets and Trumpism are part of the same populist, anti-elite phenomenon, but if Trumpism in general is instructive at all here, it’s as a reminder that self-described anti-elite movements can, in fact, turn out to be much more complicated than that. To be clear, these precedents aren’t necessarily about ideology or broad style. Like other social platforms, Reddit has struggled with harassment, hate speech and abuse, and sometimes banned communities whose influence concerned them.įor people who study social platforms like Reddit, WallStreetBets - a clear example of an insular Reddit community breaking through to the larger site, and then beyond - called to mind a specific recent precedent: The_Donald, the subreddit that was, for a few years, the staging ground and the central organizing platform for supporters of Donald J. More likely, it’s a place you’ve heard of and perhaps visited before, where you know people are up to lots of things, most of which don’t concern you, until they do. Perhaps it’s a place where you hang out with a small group of friends, or post to a community of millions. Maybe Reddit is where you find interesting links and watch funny videos. Its business is to let people gather for free, generating communities and content, and then assigning value to that content so that it can be sorted and shown to millions more people, some of whom see ads. It inhabits a gray zone between small, intimate communities with shared expectations and norms and the mega-platforms that tend to obliterate such things.
On its face, Reddit is a huge collection of forums overseen by a single private company.
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