Reddit has quarantined /r/The_Donald - <AUTHOR> https://old.reddit.com/r/the_donald <comment><USER3> I was actually very disappointed when Reddit banned r/WatchPeopleDie. Sure, there were some idiots there - there always are, insensitive comments sometimes, and a lot of gallows humour - sometimes literally. But there were thoughtful comments as well, and the content itself could be... well, educational, in a brutal kind of way. I visited occasionally as a kind of _memento mori_ , and I feel like gained a lot of appreciation for the fragility of life from that sub - as well as a very healthy respect for safety around industrial machinery, and a resolve to never again ride a motor scooter in South East Asia.

Sweeping it away - sure, they likely made their lives easier. But what's the real outcome? The real freaks who get off on that stuff will go off to some horrible other site to ferment and radicalize away from the normalising influence of the more well-adjusted participants there, and regular people, who just might have been curious, have been deprived of whatever insights they might have found. I think it's a real shame.

And for what it's worth, I don't think The_Donald should be banned either. People have a right to speak, and we can ignore them if we want - or we can at least try to engage. I don't buy the "private company, they can do what they want!" argument. The age of the internet has introduced powerful network effects into where we can conduct our public discourse with any efficacy - Reddit is huge and there's no real competitor. It's basically a monopoly, in its niche. "Deplatforming" whole groups because of their political views, however nutty, is a very slippery slope. Unless you also support speech you don't like - you don't really support free speech!

<comment><USER4> > Reddit is huge and there's no real competitor. It's basically a monopoly, in > its niche. "Deplatforming" whole groups because of their political views, > however nutty, is a very slippery slope. Unless you also support speech you > don't like - you don't really support free speech!

Unlike Facebook and Google, which exert truly horrendous amounts of power over very significant aspects of people's lives, Reddit is, fundamentally, just another forum. It even has its older versions open-sourced.

In fact, There are reddit clones where these things are perfectly allowed.

And those clones are cesspits of schizophrenics, fascists, and deeply disturbed people.

<comment><USER5> To be honest, you could say HN is just another forum (although it's more like a news & comment site with less self-posts by character) but Reddit's place in the social media landscape gives it a lot more power in addition to the loss of a community when it is banned from there.

<comment><USER6> This is one of the most moderated sites on the web

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I suspect this isn't going to accomplish much of anything and may even backfire. According to published statistics by Reddit as of this writing, this subreddit has 755k subscribers and over 45,000 members online right now. For comparison, the official politics subreddit has 5.2 million subscribers but fewer online members (42,000). r/the_donald has an extraordinarily high level of activity and engagement. So long as r/the_donald exists and is maintained, it can act as a sort of black hole so that official subreddits can be heavily moderated to support certain platforms, politicians, and advertisers. If it were actually shut down, though, the users there are so numerous and active that it probably wouldn't be possible to maintain r/politics or other official subreddits in their current moderated state.

Perhaps worse, this quarantined state -- which really doesn't accomplish or do anything of substance -- just creates a sense of martyrdom in the already extremely active userbase there. I suspect this will energize them 10-fold.

<comment><USER8> I thought that would have happened too when other subreddits were quarantined or banned (and it briefly did when fatpeoplehate was banned) but honestly the banned discourse does not show up on the front page or /r/all, as they intended.

However, because of this, Reddit is becoming increasingly sterile, single- minded, and most importantly ad-friendly to the point where its fairly difficult to have an honest discussion about anything remotely controversial.

Unfortunately their selective banning of communities that I would associate with the "far-right" has seriously hurt any attempt to migrate away from Reddit (specifically Voat.co is unbearable for me trying to participate).

I don't know if there will ever be a straw to break the camels back, but I have been actively searching for reddit alternatives for years and have not found a truly viable replacement.

<comment><USER9> > its fairly difficult to have an honest discussion about anything remotely > controversial.

Like most media companies, reddit wants to promote its political agenda. It's natural and common (and expected of the traditional media), but since reddit doesn't pay for their own content, can only be done with censorship.

So they're making it difficult to have an honest discussion about anything they have an opinion about.

That's particularly concerning because reddit seems to be a natural monopoly, having operated for years with no successful competition. Perhaps this censorship will be the impetus that finally allows some competition to break through.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> [https://thenextweb.com/opinion/2019/06/25/you-cant-offer- to-...](https://thenextweb.com/opinion/2019/06/25/you-cant-offer-to-murder- cops-on-reddit-unless-youre-on-r-thedonald/)

This article is probably what triggered it.

<comment><USER11> Interestingly that article continuously refers to the sub as 'r/TheDonald' (which is about Donald Glover) instead of 'r/The_Donald' (which is the sub that's been quarantined).

<comment><USER12> Looks like it's been corrected

<comment><USER11> Hmmm mostly yeah. The title + 4th from last paragraph still have it wrong though.

<comment><USER13> Probably auto-formatting that removes underscores.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> In the thread that allegedly lead to the ban (you can see an archived version here - [http://archive.is/vpvb4](http://archive.is/vpvb4)), The_Donald users post comments like:

\- 'get a rope' \- 'So, firing squad time right?' \- 'If he is not fired for this then wtf do we do next? Take matters into our own hands?'

What was Reddit supposed to do? Tolerate death threats on its platform? Then get sued if the person gets murdered?

And this isnt an isolated example.

<comment><USER15> >what was reddit supposed to do?

Probably treat the situation the same way they do in other subreddits. The whole "taking matters into our own hands" and calls for violence against politicians happen in other subreddits, and yet they don't get quarantined (looking at you, r/politics). Either quarantine them all or none of them.

<comment><USER16> r/politics perma-bans those commenters with a quickness, unless I'm out of date.

Meanwhile, r/LateStageCapitalism, a sub whose premise is to induce lust for the guillotine, has been quarantined before because one user was running around yelling about Guillotines in the comments. This would happen periodically.

So the admins changed up the mod team. They kept the Anarchist/Communist asthetic, but Social Democrats run the sub now. And they keep the space guillotine-free.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Hmmm... I think that the_donald is on its way to get banned. I wish I knew how much was real and what wasn't on that subreddit. I worry that the sentiment on that subreddit is genuine and by banning it we draw lines as to what is acceptable discourse that excludes a large segment of the population.

Of course I am not referring to the worst stuff on that subreddit, there is shit there, and much more than average, but if a sizeable part of the population has views like this is banning it really fair? I worry that banning public speech by a large segment of the population fractures the population that makes things even worse. And once fully separate it leads to even more echo chambering and divergent realities and more problems, not less.

But again that is assuming it is genuine and not trolls or foreign interference and it is truly sizable and not fringe.

<comment><USER18> > _by banning it we draw lines as to what is acceptable discourse that > excludes a large segment of the population._

I don't think reddit is the measure of acceptable discourse. If the_donald was banned it would just mean that its users would have to find another subreddit or site to use, it says nothing about what type of discourse is generally acceptable. Further, I think it's pretty obvious by now that reddit's problem with the_donald is not related to their political ideas since there other subreddits supportive of the president that have had no conflicts with the site admins (e.g. /r/conservative, /r/republican).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm fairly certain /r/The_Donald already didn't have ads on it as the article implied it did. Reddit only allows ads in white-listed subs and T_D was never white listed AFAIK.

Edit: Found where I read this: [https://www.reddit.com/r/stopadvertising/comments/85vdwo/gro...](https://www.reddit.com/r/stopadvertising/comments/85vdwo/groundrules_for_this_community/)

Edit 2: my comment was moved from a different thread that was on a TechCrunch article on this. TechCrunch claimed that this quarantine would mean that ads would no longer run on T_D.

<comment><USER20> As far as I know ads are served on all subreddits until they are quarantined. According to [https://reddit.zendesk.com/hc/en- us/articles/205701245-Quara...](https://reddit.zendesk.com/hc/en- us/articles/205701245-Quarantined-Subreddits) they totally demonatize, meaning even reddit gold doesn't generate profit for reddit.

<comment><USER19> Found my source: [https://www.reddit.com/r/stopadvertising/comments/85vdwo/gro...](https://www.reddit.com/r/stopadvertising/comments/85vdwo/groundrules_for_this_community/)

This source also shows T_D wasn't on the whitelist, since it was on of the subs being protested by /r/stopadvertising.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The subreddit moderators provided the admin logs, showing that on average, 1 post per day was actioned on by reddit admins. "Biggest headache" yeah, right.

<comment><USER22> The members of the the_donald had a history of breaking rules and crying foul any time any sort of administrative action was taken against them for it. Whether it was for brigading and harassment, or flooding modmail in other subreddits, or other actions.

The result was that after the banning of the just as toxic "fatpeoplehate", admins were loathe to interfere with t_d. Any administrative response was met with charges of politicization, "liberal bias", and more rule-breaking.

I'm surprised it's taken this long, but it appears that Reddit's staff waited until they had an obviously non-partisan reason for doing it. In this case, threatening police officers. I think they wanted to wait until they had a reason that would be difficult for people to turn into a partisan brawl that would give Reddit bad publicity.

Imagine if you will the difficulty conservative sites may have in threading the needle that t_d is simultaneously being persecuted here for their conservative, pro-Trump political views, and that the particular views they were banned for were making violent threats to law enforcement.

<comment><USER21> I don't think there are many subreddits that praise and love law enforcement more than the_donald. They used a Media Matters hit piece to censor and contain one of the most popular subs, for purely partisan reasons.

<comment><USER13> Did you read the Media Matters piece? Here it is in case you hadn't:

[https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2019/06/24/A-pro- Trump...](https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2019/06/24/A-pro-Trump- subreddit-is-full-of-calls-for-violence-in-support-of-Oregon- Republicans/224018)

Scroll down and read the screenshots. It doesn't quite matter what the subreddit praised before when they still broke the rules.

<comment><USER23> If I make a sockpuppet and post the same comments in r/politics, does that mean it should get quarantined?

A lot of those screenshots are "1 point, 11 minutes ago" or "2 points, 17 minutes ago". If that's being expanded to cover an entire subreddit, then no sub would be safe when applied consistently.

<comment><USER13> If you look at these accounts, many are 1+ years old. Calling them sock puppets is confirmation bias to avoid reading the article.

<comment><USER23> Age is not a good determination of sockpuppetness, at least with competent opponents. Past activity might be, since that at least costs _something_ , while age just costs prep time.

<comment><USER13> Okay, did you look at the age _and_ the comment activity of these accounts? Because they're not sockpuppets accounts.

You're making a textbook _No True Scotsman_.

<comment><USER23> I don't doubt that many of the accounts screenshotted in the article linked are actual, active accounts on /r/The_Donald. I doubt that you can usefully distinguish real accounts from fake ones for the purposes of identifying false flag attacks in other subreddits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> So many of the users defending The_Donald here (as if it was a serious political platform) are users that seem to comment mostly on political threads or submit only political articles. At least the form they've used so far is a bit more acceptable than average T_D post.

<comment><USER25> I kind of dislike when Reddit bleeds onto HN. Any comment not fanatically supporting extreme right wing narratives gets downvoted to oblivion. We're generally not a toxic community and the mods and community here does a pretty good job at keeping a it's on things. It's why I prefer this as pretty much my primary social network. I learn useful things here, have meaningful disagreements that don't end in name calling, and learn tons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> A little observation: this subreddits posting and commenting habits were not like other subreddits. The users used the system more like chat than a forum with no long threaded discussions, very short one line replies and new posts being created instead of comments in an established one, for example.

There are a few other subreddits like this and they all appear to work in a similarly ephemeral way. It's odd to me how they use the system. It's similar to 4chan in the ephemerality but it's more like IRC.

</comment><comment><USER27> I feel like reddit ends up playing whack-a-mole with toxic subreddits because it's not like the problem users disappear - they just move onto another subreddit and slowly turn it into some flavor of the place that got banned/quarantined. This might be an unsolvable problem long-term without something like real IDs tied to user accounts, which brings its own slew of problems.

<comment><USER28> > I feel like reddit ends up playing whack-a-mole with toxic subreddits > because it's not like the problem users disappear - they just move onto > another subreddit and slowly turn it into some flavor of the place that got > banned/quarantined.

On the contrary, at least one study found that what you describe does not happen. Rather, a quantitative reduction in hate speech was observed when Reddit banned a number of toxic subreddits in 2015.

Inhabitants either moved off the platform entirely (accounts that frequented those subs ceased to be active) or those that stayed appeared to modulate their behaviour to conform to the norms of less-toxic subs.

[http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand- hate.pdf](http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf)

<comment><USER29> >On the contrary, at least one study found

Among social sciences a single study has very little weight. Given how often it is quoted despite this signals a flaw in popular cultures relationship with the field.

<comment><USER28> > Among social sciences a single study has very little weight.

Sure. "I feel like ..." has absolutely no evidentiary weight, though, so in this case, a little weight is strictly preferable to nothing.

> Given how often it is quoted despite this signals a flaw in popular cultures > relationship with the field.

I'd say rather it signals a blind spot in the social sciences, where researchers are failing to investigate emerging online phenomenon wrt communities and moderation in significant numbers.

More studies confirming or disproving the results of this one would, of course, be preferable. But we should hardly apologize for turning to what little study and evidence there is rather than pulling "this will cause X to happen" assertions directly from our asses.

<comment><USER29> >I'd say rather it signals a blind spot in the social sciences,

Apologies, it appears I wasn't clear. I meant the extent that psychology and sociology studies in any part of their fields are quoted when there is only a single study, not just in relationship to internet/social media.

>But we should hardly apologize for turning to what little study and evidence there is rather than pulling "this will cause X to happen" assertions directly from our asses.

The difference is in the latter case we are well aware of the origin, while in the former case many can mistaken think there is the full weight of science behind the findings comparable to the theory of gravity or evolution. They shouldn't make the mistake, but I've seen it made enough times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> That's a quick turn from their stance on the same issue just 22 days ago.

/u/spez:

> While they can be offensive and antagonistic to the rest of Reddit, we have > not found them to be in consistent violation of our content policies.[0]

[0] [https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/bwpqqi/we_are_us_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/bwpqqi/we_are_us_senator_ron_wyden_and_reddit_ceo_steve/epzk051/)

</comment><comment><USER31> Here's an article with a collection of threats of violence that may have precipitated this: [https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2019/06/24/A-pro- Trump...](https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2019/06/24/A-pro-Trump- subreddit-is-full-of-calls-for-violence-in-support-of-Oregon- Republicans/224018)

Representative quote: _A user wrote, "Rifles are the only way we 're going to get any peace in our lives ever again," adding, "It's either war and we get rid of these guys or a lifetime of listening to this shit over and over again start getting yourself ready."_

</comment><comment><USER32> Thank god, that subreddit was insufferable

<comment><USER33> Sure, but you didn't have to visit it. The worst part of the increasing corporatization of the public-facing internet is that we no longer seem to be content leaving well enough alone.

<comment><USER6> The problem with that subreddit was more that it made headlines. If it wasn't named in dozens of articles, all over the news, and an overall very public embarrassment for reddit for three years now, everything would be all fine and dandy for the donald.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Hmmm... I think that the_donald is on its way to get banned. I wish I knew how much was real and what wasn't on that subreddit. I worry that the sentiment on that subreddit is genuine and by banning it we draw lines as to what is acceptable discourse that excludes a large segment of the population.

Of course I am not referring to the worst stuff on that subreddit, there is shit there but if a sizeable part of the population has views like this is banning it really fair? I worry that banning public speech by a large segment of the population fractures the population that makes things even worse. And once fully separate it leads to even more echo chambering and divergent realities and more problems, not less.

But again that is assuming it is genuine and not trolls or foreign interference and it is truly sizable and not fringe.

<comment><USER34> Have you tried searching reddit for threads about a current event, only to find pages of results of vitriolic/psychotic ("trolling!") /r/The_Donald posts? I'm pretty tired of it and I hope they ban that sub and similar ones. I couldn't care less about the political aspect, it's the 4chan lulz crap that has to go. From reddit's point of view these users are parasites, who basically deface the website in an attempt to control it. That's their M.O., good riddance.

<comment><USER33> I can't say I've ever experienced this. In fact, I would occasionally browse r/T_D just to temper the overtly left-leaning bias of /r/news and /r/politics.

<comment><USER35> /r/news is not left-leaning by any reasonable metric (there is frequently blatant racism heavily upvoted).

/r/politics is only left-leaning because of how heavily skewed right american politics is. Most of their opinions are centrist at best. Their obsession with trump is a bit annoying, but it's only annoying, not actively harmful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> reddit censored the_donald long before this. It was completely filtered off r/all. This effectively changes not that much.

</comment><comment><USER10> About time. I am looking forward to the drama.

<comment><USER37> Perhaps we can anticipate an angry tweet from the White House about this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> From what I gather, the reason was that there were calls to violence that weren't deleted sufficiently fast by the mods. Someone correct me if this is wrong.

This seems like it would be easy to replicate this on any subreddit, doesn't it?

Get a group of people and deliberately target subreddits in various hours of the day with calls for violence, and then report them to the admins of reddit.

Wouldn't this, in theory at least, quarantine any subreddit?

Something doesn't add up here.

<comment><USER39> The Against Hate Subreddit orchestrated similar false-flag attacks last year and successfully shut down many other subreddits.

During 2016 on Facebook, similar spamming tactics were used to shut down many pages promoting Bernie Sanders.

If it really were something orchestrated by users of T_D, then why would they report it to reddit? It's more likely that outside forces had a hand in this.

<comment><USER38> Maybe it's unclear from my post, but I don't think T_D users did this, or even deserve this.

I was merely commenting how easy is to do this to other subreddits, so any subreddit can get banned etc.

So maybe Reddit should reconsider their position on banning solely because of this, if this is in fact the only reason they quarantined T_D.

<comment><USER39> So I think we're on the same page. Not sure why you got downvoted, but that wasn't me. I was only trying to list a couple of examples that might add to your theory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I didn't vote for Trump, don't support him, and think he is a worthless human being. That being said, its become crystal clear that a large part of our "cultural elite" at the pinnacle of most big tech companies, media outlets and universities in this country have taken it upon themselves to decide what social and political opinions are acceptable, and are working hard to erase and/or silence anyone who doesn't adhere to their cultural/political ideology. Given the largely centralized nature of modern society and modern communication, this gives tremendous power to those at the top to decide what views are acceptable to disseminate (or hold at all). This is extremely troubling to those of us who believe in the concept of free speech and free expression as being the bedrock of a free society (which is distinct from the legal mechanism of the 1st Amendment). The results of this lockdown on free speech are not necessarily the results being sought or desired by our tech/corporate censors. Ideas and philosophies that are deemed taboo and banned don't simply disappear, they go underground and find alternative communication networks, often becoming even more radical in the process. Those who prefer to keep their heads buried in the sand and suggest that monopolistic behemoths like Google are simply exercising their right as a private company to decide who to silence and who to promote are simply ignoring reality.

</comment><comment><USER41> So whats keeping r/The_Donald from just endorsing a new subreddit to replace the old one?

</comment><comment><USER42> Interesting, I've saved multiple comments on r/politics that explicitly call for violence against trump supporters that I've reported and they still aren't deleted. It is also unfortunate that reddit doesn't think it needs to provide any evidence for this action, considering that it is the beginning of Trump's 2020 campaign and on the eve of the Dem primary debates.

<comment><USER43> It's easier to police threads than comments... there's hundreds of thousands if not millions of comments on thousands of different threads, the T_D is known to allow full threads devoted to violence, and they just leave them up. They are known to let slide MANY innuendos of violence, I'm sure if you did a statistical analysis of violent enacting comments across r/politics and r/The_Donald that you'd find way more on the donald than politics. Would you find 0 on poltics? probably not, some probably get overlooked and go unreported or overlooked, doesn't mean they shouldn't be moderated, just means there's not enough resources all the time to get the job done.

TD has always been toxic, racist, and bigoted, it was just a matter of time before this happened. I think it happening near an election cycle is just coincidence, I think more the civil-war inciting of the current events in Oregon is at play here.

<comment><USER36> > the T_D is known to allow full threads devoted to violence, and they just > leave them up

that is not true

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> One thing we can all agree on: Donald Trump attracts attention like no other.

Years from now, controversy will still roil. Historians will have a colorful character to teach about.

</comment><comment><USER45> I'm just going to tell you all: I'm a life-long libertarian. You're not going to sway my opinions because I get censored online and my posts deleted. I am limited to 2 posts like every 4 hours lest I poison your minds with theories about free markets and personal freedom. I guess I'm lucky I can post at all, probably someone will come along to fix that glitch or delete my posts or whatever. What are you afraid of? Is freedom really so dangerous? Why have so many tech companies closed ranks around such anti-freedom concepts? What changed since the late '90s and early '00s when tech was so anti-authority and wanted to disrupt bureaucracy and give a voice to other ideas? Freedom is not racist, sexist, or anything else. It is definitely terrifying to someone, though.

Is the Millenial generation just so indoctrinated that they can't see how destructive what they are doing is? When you side with the left, you are making a very clear statement about the value of individual human lives (zero). Try having a little self-worth.

An estimated 262 million people were murdered by their own governments between 1900 and 1999. That toll is a silent testimonial about misplaced trust and idealism. It is real, it is reality--bodies stacked like cordwood, piled by the thousands, mass graves, misery beyond comprehension. Are we doomed to repeat that? If so, in the next conflagration it will be billions.

<comment><USER46> _Is freedom really so dangerous?_

Selfishness is the root of it. Can you imagine giving up your place of superiority so that someone else gets a chance? They can't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> According to the post about this in SRD [0], this was because of repeated calls to violence (something that has been well-documented), and the final straw was repeated incitements to commit violence over the situation in Oregon.

The following is an excerpt of the message the Reddit admins sent the moderators of /r/The_Donald:

(Edit: I originally posted an excerpt of the message from the OP in the SRD post. I've since found the full message in a comment [1], so I'll be replacing it here with that version. Of note is that the admins have disabled /r/The_Donald's ability to use custom styling, as _they abused CSS to hide the report button in order to prevent people from reporting violent content to them_. The comment also mentions that one of the moderators of /r/The_Donald was stripped of most of his permissions as well.)

> 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.

[0] [https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/c5safq/rthe...](https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/c5safq/rthe_donald_has_been_quarantined_discuss_this/)

[1] [https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/c5safq/rthe...](https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/c5safq/rthe_donald_has_been_quarantined_discuss_this/es3sin0/)

<comment><USER48> For context, the admin logs show that the Reddit Corporate Admins only bothered to remove on average one comment per few days. It wasn't a deluge. The Oregon post is an anomalous casus belli.

[https://twitter.com/thedonaldreddit/status/11439265704086446...](https://twitter.com/thedonaldreddit/status/1143926570408644608)

<comment><USER49> A regular subreddit would see almost no admin interaction, so if the admins are needing to correct failing moderation every couple of days that's a very bad sign. I helped moderate a large subreddit teaching people how to buy drugs on the darknet and we had zero admin interactions despite being very close to the line of what was allowed because we were aggressive with our moderation. The subreddit only ended up being banned after SESTA/FOSTA passed.

Edit: It's important to note that there isn't a report function that bypasses subreddit moderators, unless you directly message the admins. So if the reddit admins are having to step in on reports it means that the moderators are ignoring them, either deliberately or due to a poorly managed moderation team (not enough members or time zone coverage).

<comment><USER50> It's understandable that an engaged, political subreddit revolving around a controversial figure requires more admin oversight.

<comment><USER13> Isn't that the job of the mods though? Admins are not moderators.

<comment><USER48> Over the same period the mods handled 83,000 cases.

<comment><USER51> You mean the_donald mods handled 83k cases?

<comment><USER48> Yes

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Why? I don't like Donald Trump, so I don't go to Donald Trump fan sites.

Can't people that don't like the content just not read it?

<comment><USER53> Read reddit's linked description of what a quarantined community is - <USER2> explains the answer to your question.

It's not about people who want to go to fan sites (or don't want to go) - it's about misinformation / inappropriate content leaking out to folks who might inadvertently view it and not understand the rat hole they're about to go down.

Putting the subreddit into the quarantine just means that there's an extra disclosure and opt-in before viewing content from that subreddit (and content won't be shown in popular, /r/all, etc.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Anything pro right is a headache while extreme left (aka AOC) is Jesus' gift to the world!

<comment><USER55> Please don't take HN threads further into partisan flamewar.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER54> The entire thread is going to be about partisan flamewar Dang given the context. It might be best to flag the thread vs. flagging my comment individually.

<comment><USER55> It's a matter of degree. What you posted was a degree worse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Dissapearing a subredit devoted to Trump immediately before the Democratic debates?

Election meddling.

<comment><USER57> Probably not. If it were before the Republican debates (if there is a Republican challenger), that _might_ be actual meddling. But before the Democratic debates? How's that supposed to actually change any election outcomes?

<comment><USER58> My guess? Issues that get raised on a major information platform such as The_Donald could turn into policy debate questions for the Democrats. Questions like "Given the Project Veritas video and associated leaked documents on emails, what is your position on big tech social media platforms and free speech? If you are President, what is your agenda for balancing the exchange of ideas on arguably private yet mass-media platforms?"

A question like that could a) but some of the Democrat candidates in a bind comparing their answer to any voting history/previous statements on the issue or b) could cast light on the sort of topics that obviously Democrat- supporting/anti-Trump big tech doesn't want people to investigate or learn about for themselves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> I don't understand the cat and mouse game conservatives play with Bay-area companies. These companies are blatantly bias against anyone right of their political bubble, but conservatives keep using them and being surprised and outraged when they're censored. On the other hand, these companies are playing dumb and doing mental back flips to try to justify their blatant bias and claim neutrality because they only want to run off the conservative thought leaders, and keep most of the users.

Conservatives just need to move off of these platforms. They're private property, let them have their bubbles. This moral outrage at being censored is a waste of time, and staying on these platforms just continues to enrich them. I'm all for avoiding echo chambers, but it's futile to try to have neutral debate on a biased platform.

<comment><USER60> On the contrary, bay area companies _want_ right wing politics on their platforms (it generates a lot of content and thus a lot of money, after all) but some conservatives tend to break code of conduct rules regarding hate speech and calls to violence, and for whatever reason when they do it makes the news, even though it is a minority of conservatives.

There are still going to be lots of conservative people on reddit even if /r/The_Donald gets banned, and there are still _tons_ of conservative people on youtube, facebook, etc. Just because a few highly controversial right wing personalities have been removed from these platforms (usually for hate speech) doesn't mean the platforms are biased against conservatives in general

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Voat with your feet, as they say!

<comment><USER62> They did try that once, the sane ones among them ended up loathing that site

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Interesting, because the The_Donald has always been toxic, but now action is finally being taken. The narrative on The_Donald this week has been about Google's interference with the political process such as manipulating search results (e.g. the Project Veritas Jen Gennai video)[0], and why the media is ignoring this after obsessing over Russian interference.

[0] [https://old.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/c4miq0/insider_...](https://old.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/c4miq0/insider_blows_whistle_exec_reveals_google_plan_to/)

<comment><USER64> Referring to TLA, the rationale for quarantine may have been calls by T_D users for violence against police officers, not (if you're implying this) an attempt censor news about Google.

<comment><USER65> It's an average of less than 1 per day in a very busy subreddit. That is an impossible standard to meet. It would be trivial for a false flag operation to post that often, and there clearly is a motive for that.

Meanwhile, as rhegart commented below, far worse is permitted in other subreddits. The bias is clear as could be.

It's not crazy to think this has something to do with Google. Immense pressure is being applied by Google. Nobody dares risk being blacklisted from Google search. We've partially lost our ability to have public debate that might negatively impact Google.

<comment><USER48> For those interested in the source, the admin logs show that the Reddit Corporate Admins only needed to remove on average one comment per few days going back 30 days. Then they removed 9 comments on one day on a post about Oregon - a somewhat anomalous casus belli. Apparently that was enough to quarantine a subreddit of 750k subscribers.

[https://twitter.com/thedonaldreddit/status/11439265704086446...](https://twitter.com/thedonaldreddit/status/1143926570408644608)

<comment><USER66> That belies the point that admins are not having to do this with other communities. they simply don't need to step in unless it's overly egregious as it seems to be here. admins are not there to moderate communities; that's the mods job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> The perception of bias from liberal tech platforms will lead to a large group becoming "conservative" when in actuality they are just contrarian and go for the counter culture underdog side. It's a real phenomenon. The artificial religious right in bush era constantly pushed in our faces led to liberal values completely dominating mainstream society partly because it all felt too fake and suffocating it forced average person to think and the right turned into a joke. I predict liberal values that are mainstream today will be met with the same fate. They are filled with as many fallacies if not more than the religious right and the more suffocating almost religion like feel they get when someone tries to argue against one aspect, the more people will rebel and fall into the arms of conservatives.

<comment><USER68> The values you are objecting to are not "liberal" values but radically collectivizing ones. Liberals value freedom and have always done so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> I'm actually sort of scared with the way that censorship of different views is becoming the norm. I'm predominantly left leaning but I'm seeing more and more moderation where the only allowed opinion is the correct one. I seem to recall that a lot of horrible things were started with good intentions, ie Nazi book burnings were censoring the wrong views.

It's also incredible divisive. In my country we had a football star doing a GoFundMe for legal fees after he was sacked for a religious and homophobic cartoon on his social media. GoFundMe blocked his campaign, as it's against their views, and now he's making more money than before through a private donations drive.

The banning of The Donald is going to drive an even bigger wedge between the two sides of the political spectrum. For a political movement obsessed with power/privilege, the left seems oblivious to its own power/privilege. They wield the cast majority of the societal power currently and they're throwing it around like a hammer.

<comment><USER4> > The banning of The Donald is going to drive an even bigger wedge between the > two sides of the political spectrum.

This keeps getting repeated over and over again and does not correspond with reality.

/r/the_donald is a forum full of obvious bots, spin doctoring, and people with openly extreme and antisocial views. Out entire history has shown that the "deplatforming" of these views works.

The views in that forum are not part of a majority, nor what most people would associate with mental sanity. You would do well to dive into the content.

<comment><USER70> > _This keeps getting repeated over and over again and does not correspond > with reality._

Like it or not Donald Trump actually is the president of the United States. It's not like this is some fringe forum of weirdos, it's _the_ fan site of the sitting president of a major country. It's also very likely that it played a big role in helping him get elected.

If you think quarantining or banning The_Donald won't sow the seeds of discord, you're sorely mistaken.

<comment><USER4> I'm sure it will. And I'm sure that the damage is less than the damage behind his policies. At this point, I don't think people should care about inflaming the alt-right anymore.

<comment><USER70> Do you really consider everyone who voted for Trump "alt-right"? If that's the case does that mean all Republicans are "alt-right"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> Frankly, I think they've effectively killed Reddit with this move. Like it or not, it was one of the last places to discuss right-leaning politics on the site. Every major "neutral" sub (ex: /r/politics) has notoriously biased mods placed in by the admins. Now with one half chopped off from political debates, is the site still fun?

</comment><comment><USER72> Observe the rinse-and-repeat patterns here:

1\. Openly leftist media outlet [1] sensationalizes posts by a _few_ users, and proclaims a non-sequitur - that the problem lies with the entire sub- reddit, instead of with a few users

2\. SV tech company feigns umbrage, cowering behind the sensationalism of said media outlet, legitimizes their false claims and BANS the entire sub-reddit. Instead of banning the offending users.

3\. Ecosystem of left leaning outlets (techcrunch et. al.) publish opinions in agreement with the actions, though similar actions from their preferred political faction (say for a few illegal posts by far-left activists on AOC subreddit) goes ignored and free of media amplification.

The frequency of the above steps happening has skyrocketed as the democratic presidential campaign gains steam. If you trained an AI on the above phenomenon, the internet would be rid of _any_ speech not condoned by the left faction of the democratic party.

Techno-fascism is well and truly here.

[1] [https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/26/18759967/reddit- quarantin...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/26/18759967/reddit-quarantines- the-donald-trump-subreddit-misbehavior-violence-police-oregon)

<comment><USER73> > (say for a few illegal posts by far-left activists on AOC subreddit)

[Citation Needed]

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> That's pretty ridiculous (and I'm sure counter productive). If you look at /r/politics, it's as bad as The_Donald yet remains a default sub.

[https://old.reddit.com/r/politics/](https://old.reddit.com/r/politics/)

<comment><USER48> Perhaps a better counter-example would be /r/ChapoTrapHouse, which routinely promotes generalized violence against landlords and police.

<comment><USER74> Wasn't that subreddit also quarantined a while ago? No idea what its current status is, but when I tried to click-thru a post there a while back it wouldn't let me in.

Edit: the Chapo one is out of quarantine. Apparently there were a bunch of posts soliciting violence towards slaveholders and once the mods removed them they lifted the quarantine.

<comment><USER75> >bunch of posts soliciting violence towards slaveholders

Slaveholders? What kind of violence?

<comment><USER76> The memes were about shooting slave owners, both in the American context and others. Similar to the Dave Chapelle skit.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Vlajipno: Full Text Lojban Dictionary - <AUTHOR> http://vlajipno.sorpaas.com

<comment><USER2> I get pretty excited about languages, but I admit that I'd only ever heard of Lojban via XKCD[1]. You might want to provide a link to the Lojban homepage[2].

[1] [http://xkcd.com/191/](http://xkcd.com/191/) [2] [http://www.lojban.org/tiki/Lojban](http://www.lojban.org/tiki/Lojban)</comment>


Two months of hard work. What do you think of my startup? ZoooV.com - <AUTHOR> http://zooov.com/ <p> <comment><AUTHOR> Note: I had to put the description here because it didn't show below the title.

So, this is my second attempt at building something people want. How am I doing? ZoooV is a social news site for niche subjects. Here is why I built it:

With the big social news sites: Digg, reddit, and recently after the name change, news.yc, the discussions tend to become more general as the communities grow because we, the readers, have different interests. And because of that, only what's common to everyone goes to the top. Smaller communities have more focus, but it's hard for them to survive because there is less to read, and therefore, we tend to visit them less often and eventually forget about them.

I'm trying to solve this by keeping the communities smaller and focused, but allow the individual reader to choose the communities they like and I create a custom page for them where they only see what they're interested in. This way, even though the individual communities might have low volume of stories, the reader will always find something interesting to read in one of his communities or the other. It's like how an RSS reader allows us to keep track of low volume blogs because we don't have to remember to visit each one of them.

<comment><USER2> i like the idea of customized social news gathering, but i'm not sure if a community structure is the right way to do it. i don't think most people want to limit themselves to a particular community of stories. most of us have pretty broad interests and, while we may want to read more about a particular field over other fields, that doesn't necessarily mean we want to read ONLY about that field.

i envision a system where you sign up for an account and you subscribe to your own personal RSS feed with content similar to Digg/Reddit and over time the site learns your interests based on the stories that you click on from your RSS reader. each feed would have user-generated tags associated with it and will begin showing more (but perhaps less popular) feeds that share tags with feeds that you've previously viewed. over time, your personalized RSS would contain only feeds that it knows you're interested in, and the random feeds it included at the beginning in order to learn your interests would gradually be phased out.

the layout of the site is great though. i'm just not into the community/forum idea too much.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess there might be a misunderstanding here. The idea behind Zooov is that you can join multiple communities at once, not just one. Then, your home page will show the communities you joined all in one page (but in separate sections, like Google News).

Your idea addresses the same problem from a different angle, and it's a good idea, actually. Though it's much harder to implement.

<comment><USER3> I don't really see how this is much different from my.reddit.com, but I could be missing something...

EDIT: sorry, I jumped the gun before I started reading more of the discussion. I look forward to seeing what comes out of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Lol. When I landed on the home page, my first thought was "Why did this guy post a link to a site that hasn't launched yet?"

I thought it was one of those parking pages chock full of ads. You really might want to change the design a bit...

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I do realize that Web sites with ads are sometimes looked down upon, especially in the tech community. Because that's how I used to feel. But recently I started embracing the fact that ads are what makes the Internet free. Without them, we'd have to pay 5 cents for every email and 15 sent for every search. I'll see what I can do about the design, though. Maybe I can make it less "messy".

And, none of the ads on the home page are paid, by the way. They are links to other very good startups[1].

[1] [http://selfdebugging.com/2007/09/24/list-of-selected- startup...](http://selfdebugging.com/2007/09/24/list-of-selected-startup-ads/)

<comment><USER5> No, he means the entirety of your site looks like a domain squatting ad page. Most domain squatters put categorized ads on their pages, and your links look similar to that. Have a think about the design of your content. But two thumbs up for the idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like the idea, but don't really like the look. Kind of messy.

And the "niches" that I'm seeing are: "Beautiful mind", "Post launch", "Break time", etc. Those aren't niches but uber-vague references to niches.

<comment><AUTHOR> These are the ones I could think of. Hopefully, people more creative than I would suggest new subjects that are more interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > ZoooV.com

> Read amazing stories submitted by amazing people, like you.

Always make your users feel smart. Nice touch.

</comment><comment><USER8> Congrats!

The front page seems a little noisy.. Perhaps the box on the right that explains what the site is about could be colored to draw attention to it?

</comment><comment><USER9> I'd like to see a service like this designed for easy exploitation of 3rd parties like myself who want to create a social news community for their own organization/website, but don't want to have to run it off their own server (I don't want to have to install and manage one of the digg/reddit clones myself). It could remain 100% public and controlled by ZoooV, and I simply add a snippet of code to make it available on my site with all interactivity enabled (No, I don't want to just include an RSS feed, I want it to feel like my own site's community area).

I don't see why the functionality of reddit/digg couldn't be applied to small/medium-sized groups with great success. I don't see anything about this style of interaction that makes it exclusively valuable for catch-all site like reddit.com or digg.com. I think it could/should become a standard feature for all kinds of intranets / blogging platforms / website providers.

For example, I might start a community called 'Product Development in China' and integrate it into my website, or my Ning social network, or my FaceBook Group... then if some of my friends (or strangers) like it, they can add it to their websites/blogs as well.. soon enough the ZoooV community is getting a lot of users as a result of exposure on these 3rd party websites...

Maybe the feature set I'm looking for is available elsewhere (is it?).

</comment><comment><USER10> I think it's got potential, but you should work on your design and copy. It wasn't obvious to me at all why I should use it over instead of one of the many popular "social news" sites. For inspiration, take a look at what 37signals does with their products.

When you've got a startup that essentially revolves around one improvement on what vast numbers of competitors are already doing, you've got to make it blindingly obvious what I'm gaining by using your app.

</comment><comment><USER11> Cool!

Ask HackerNews: How many of you were working on pretty much the same idea? I was :-(

</comment><comment><USER12> I understand that its niche subjects _but_ I wouldn't describe it that way in your tagline. Its doesn't sound very interesting. I also wouldn't say "social news". keep it simple. Say: news about "all" subjects (instead of niche) or "new/fresh links about the topics _you_ want to read about" or something along those lines.

<comment><USER12> Also where it says "Customize this page to see only the communities you like", "Communities" is too confusing to someone just landing on the page. And the names of the communities are kind of cool but too confusing. When I read "Beautiful Mind" I glossed over it.

This could really work if executed right. I think tighter focus might be something that could partially solve the social news "lowest common denominator" problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> This kind of feedback I can only get from someone seeing the site for the first time and reporting their first impression. Thanks a lot. I'll see what I can do about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I like your execution: the site just screams quality, and I would surely read it if there was content. But I am not convinced this is _different enough_ from reddit with more categories, or "communities" how they call them. And they (reddit) _are_ adding more.

</comment><comment><USER14> Can someone make their own niche site themselves, or do you have to make it for them?

<comment><AUTHOR> They can't yet; but the plan is to allow it later. I need time to understand what's involved in building a community and maintaining it so I can put the right governance model in place. For example, if someone creates a community, do they get the right to censor it? Who decides what's considered spam and what's not? Voting or the admin? Things like that.

<comment><USER15> I think you should plan on making that a feature ASAP. My interest level just went down when I read that it's not available now. Giving people the tools to create a community is a very powerful concept.

I think your idea could really work waleedka, get that feature out now and refine it as you go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I like the concept.

However the question is, why would people go to this site as a destination instead of a niche site itself. Example: If I wanted to learn about internet marketing news - which isn't covered by digg, reddit etc, i'd go to plugim.com which is focused on that. Why would I go to zooov as a destination site? and then would you be able to build an audience enough for each and every niche. That's the problem with building a site that's wide enough ...

good concept though - good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe (or hope) that it's not an either this or that situation. I read digg, reddit, and news.yc. Each has a different flavor. My favorite is news.yc because of the narrower focus and the quality of people, but I read reddit when I'm looking for random stories.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The community boxes look like ads.

</comment><comment><USER18> The page looks good, I like the layout, the only thing I would change is the header.

About cool the startups sidebar, that would make a great community!

What do you think about that?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it would be great if we have a community for low-budget startups to help each other. Getting new users is hard. And you don't get a real appreciation for how hard it is until after you launch. That I learned from my last project. So, I created the "Post Launch" community because I realized that there must be a lot of people in a similar situation like mine: launched and trying to market their startup. I hope we can use it to share marketing ideas, arrange banner exchanges, and so on. Is that along the lines what you're thinking?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Not sure it matters _too_ much for sites that have login page that aren't https, but better not to email people their passwords (clear text). It also indicates you're probably storing passwords in the clear, see <http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000953.html>

</comment><comment><USER20> What languages/frameworks did you use?

<comment><AUTHOR> On the server, ASP.NET and the free version of SQL Server. On the client, the Yahoo UI library, which I highly recommend, and a lot of hand written javascript. But I tried to avoid being too fancy with AJAX, so I used it only for things like editing in place and voting without reloads.

The only fancy AJAXy thing I have is the bookmarklet. Which is kinda cool, if I may say so myself :) I haven't seen any other web site use something like it.

<comment><USER21> Yuck, asp. Why did you choose .net over lamp? And I agree, the Yahoo UI Library is awesome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Stick with it. Nice start. I like the improved logo from last time i looked as well.

</comment><comment><USER23> I found 3 interesting articles I hadn't read before right away. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER24> This is pretty cool! Your idea is good, but the implementation needs improvement. Please keep working... if done well I'm pretty sure I would use this!

</comment><comment><USER25> So.. like a web forum meets reddit/digg?

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Keep up the great work waleedka. The site looks much better from when I last looked at it.

Mark

</comment><comment><USER21> For some reason, parts of that site look extremely familiar...

Nah, I'm crazy.

</comment><comment><USER27> good work, i think you didn't waste your time... your article amazing and new..

</comment><comment><USER28> Great idea!

</comment><comment><USER29> oh common. yet another rippoff. this web 2.0 is getting silly.

dig+reddit+collegehumor+??? = profit</comment>


China blocks South Korea companies (and assets) from leaving - <AUTHOR> http://www.businesskorea.co.kr/english/news/national/19352-exodus-china-s-korean-companies-suffering-omnidirectional-retaliations-china <comment><USER2> > If a worker is employed for less than six months, the compensation should be > a 0.5-month salary. A one-month salary should be given to those who worked > for six months to one year.

Is it too much?

<comment><USER3> well, more stuff:

> South Korean manufacturers have been not allowed to bring production > facilities back to South Korea

also, the Chinese gov's stance (and BTW, gov != people) on THAAD is ridiculous at best: China has nukes, acquiesced to NK having nukes, but are opposed to other countries having defense mechanisms...?

<comment><USER4> China's response to ROK's THAAD deployment provides obvious proof of complicity, even support, of DPRK's nuclear program, and should be treated as such.</comment></comment></comment>


Elm – "Designing to infantilize a target audience is how we got Java" - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/elm-lang/elm-compiler/issues/621#issuecomment-221053554 <comment><USER2> ...and then in the very next breath:

      JavaScript dev's who are
      interested in Elm, are the
      cream of the crop imho and
      good engineers will step
      upto the plate when
      challenged.

Ha ha! Okay, buddy! So long, and thanks for all the fish!

(cringe)

<comment><USER3> Yes, that's an incredibly bold statement. Javascript today is probably the most popular language in the world (according to Github; other indices tell a different story), and that gives it the very same role that at once was fulfilled by Java or even PHP: it's probably the first language a newcomer will learn programming with, hence you'll find a lot of unskilled engineers as well as some experts.

So, saying that Javascript devs, just because they're interested in Elm, are "the cream of the crop"... sounds ludicrous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Good for him. Let's compare the 2 languages in 20 years, and see how the language for the infantilized target audience is doing. I'm fairly certain Elm won't even be a footnote in history.

<comment><USER5> To be fair, many items in history got popular being ... err, for the infantile; some primarily because of it. But I don't think popularity is one of Elm's goals.

I use what I use because it works for me, and not because it's the fashionable trend; similarly, I think while Java has its place, I'll use Elm when it works for me. And not being dumbed down certainly serves some functions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Whereas taking something old but reliable and throwing whiz-bang new footguns at it is how we got C++. Don't get me wrong, it's still one of my favourite languages, but damn if sometimes it isn't like an alligator with a bunch of broken glass glued to it.

<comment><USER5> To be fair to the context here, neither is:

1\. JavaScript reliable like C, nor

2\. Elm an addition of "whiz-bang new footguns" to JavaScript.</comment></comment>


Show HN - Client-side Google Analytics without using cookies - <AUTHOR> http://www.humane-tehnologije.si/client-side-google-analytics-without-using-cookies

<comment><USER2> This will not work in the Netherlands (although, see below, the law here might change soon). The law as written in NL prohibits reading data out of a user- device (fingerprinting) when not strictly necessary for delivering the service that was asked for. So getting things like screen-size and browser-name just for identification purposes is not allowed, because you wouldn't need those to deliver the service as requested by the user. Next to that, IP-addresses are under discussion for being "identifiable information", as is already the case in Germany.

Please do take this all with a grain of salt, because not a single website here actually adheres to the current implementation of the cookie-law. The political process has been set in motion to change the law and exempt anonymous statistics from the permission-requirements. This "soon to be exception" is already used by virtually all website and the regulatory agency responsible for enforcement seems to have decided not to make a problem of it for the time being.

<comment><AUTHOR> Despite EU directive, cookie laws across EU differ quite a lot in terms of how they define acceptable/unacceptable use. I added the following notice to the original text to reflect this:

Use this code (GitHub) to implement client-side Google Analytics without storing data on user's device (cookies, cache, local storage, Etags...). The solution still uses the data from client devices to facilitate user tracking. Please check cookie laws of your individual country to see if you can legally use this approach without user opt-in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Universal Analytics has a built-in feature for cookie-less tracking already: [https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...](https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/domains#disableCookies)

Edit: I guess this is what the OP's link is actually using.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good catch. GA added this after we came up with our solution. We are using custom Javascript code that uses Measurment Protocol to send data to GA.

EDIT: Client Id still needs to be generated for Google's Analytics.js. In my experience, the approach we took for that works quite well without using complicated browser foot-printing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This seems to violate the spirit of the law if not the letter. Still, kudos.

<comment><AUTHOR> The words of the law are actually not supporting the spirit of the law, at least when passing data to Google is concerned. Data protection can not be enforced with messing with cookies. EU should focus its influence on ensuring that companies operating in EU (like Google) respect user's privacy - including not passing data to third parties, like NSA.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Do people actually care about the EU cookie directive? I haven't seen many sites obeying to it.

<comment><USER6> The rules also changed. Now it's enough to just show some text that you want to store cookies without obstructing the website.

<comment><AUTHOR> It differs from country to country in EU. In Slovenia we have a very passionate data-protection-officer and a strict opt-in law was passed.</comment></comment></comment>


Scientists Warn the UN of Capitalism's Eminent Demise - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/43pek3/scientists-warn-the-un-of-capitalisms-imminent-demise <comment><AUTHOR> It's critics have predicted the end of capitalism for over a hundred years and yet it's never been stronger. Capitalism is not without its flaws but man hasn't invented anything better.</comment>


Symbolic mathematics on Linux - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/710537/31440d3205ea5d83/ <comment><USER2> Emacs' calc can also be surprisingly powerful. Not quite at the level of Maxima, but still perfectly capable of basic symbolic algebra and calculus, arbitrary precision arithmetic, linear algebra, and other good things.

I use it quite heavily since it's right there in my editor. It's kind of like a good-enough phone camera that's always close at hand vs. a dedicated camera that's better but takes more effort to have ready.

<comment><USER3> That's neat. I had no idea calc could do calculus!

<comment><USER2> It can indeed! Adapting the first example from the article, in Emacs type:

        M-x quick-calc RET
        integ(exp(-x^2),x) RET

You'll see that it immediately responds back with:

        erf(x) sqrt(pi) / 2

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Also worth noting is scmutils [0], which is a symbolic computing library for MIT Scheme that Gerry Sussman [1] wrote and uses to teach 6.945 Symbolic Systems and 6.946 Computational Classical Mechanics. The documentation is sparse, but it's incredibly powerful, especially if you're already familiar with Scheme.

[0] [http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6946/refman.txt](http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6946/refman.txt)

[1] ... And many others including Hal Abelson and Jack Wisdom

<comment><USER5> I thought it was merely a starter kit for SICM not something used elsewhere.

<comment><USER6> I wish I had the background to understand SICM. Tried to read it, failed immediately.

<comment><USER7> Gotta say - the projects in the book made all the difference for me. It's one thing to read their high level, notation-heavy chapters, but I found that working through the exercises really solidified everything in my mind.

That said I got pretty lost near the end. I want to go back in a year or so once I have a bit more math background.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is probably obvious to most people here, but I just want to mention that such software should not be trusted blindly for mathematical correctness. It is easy in most computer algebra systems to find false results (and trivial if it includes numerical computations).

An interesting related thread: [http://mathoverflow.net/questions/11517/computer-algebra- err...](http://mathoverflow.net/questions/11517/computer-algebra-errors)

<comment><USER9> I never thought of that, just assumed correctness is top priority, but like anything bugs happen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> There's a cloud version of Sage called SageMathCloud. Sage is supported in many distributions, and is also available in a docker image for convenience.

Note that that's not all. Major commercial math packages like Maple, Mathematica, Mathlab all support Linux as well.

Then you have Scilab, Octave, R, and many others... which happen to also be integrated into Sage, that you can use independently or through some GUI.

</comment><comment><USER11> Also see PARI/GP [1] (specialized CAS for number theory) and GAP [2] (specialized CAS for group theory). These systems are very prominent within their fields.

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARI/GP](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARI/GP)

[2] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAP_(computer_algebra_system...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAP_\(computer_algebra_system\))

<comment><AUTHOR> These both happen to be included as components in Sage, which was why I didn't mention them separately.

<comment><USER12> And, they are both _very_ tightly integrated with Sage via C library interfaces (between Python and Pari/GAP), which took many years of pain to properly write and debug. I wrote the first versions of these interfaces, and Jereon Demeyer and Nils Bruin massively improved and rewrote them over the years. Much core functionality in Sage fundamentally relies on Pari and GAP in order to work efficiently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Another cool one is Mathics, which is a Mathematica-like system implemented in Python, using SymPy behind the scenes:

[https://github.com/mathics/Mathics](https://github.com/mathics/Mathics) [http://www.mathics.org/](http://www.mathics.org/)

</comment><comment><USER14> I strongly recommend maxima. Great tool, and a clean language as well. I am shocked so few people have heard of it or use it.

<comment><USER12> +1 -- Maxima is used under the hood for many key symbolic functions in Sage, e.g., limits, symbolic integrals, many simplifications, etc. We Sage devs (mainly Nils Bruin) also wrote a very efficient C-level bridge interface between Python and Maxima, which uses ECL (embedded common lisp). We also try to make Maxima easy to use from Sage, e.g., you can type "maxima(sage expression)" to convert an expression to Maxima. Maxima developers regularly post on the Sage mailing list too.

<comment><USER14> I am really glad to see Sage is still going strong. I used it years ago, back when I still had delusions of trying to be a mathematician. Really useful stuff.

<comment><USER12> I was just checking recently, and was pleasantly surprised to see that the amount Sage __development __, has gone up enormously in the last 2 years, especially thanks to Europeans![https://github.com/sagemath/sage/graphs/contributors](https://github.com/sagemath/sage/graphs/contributors)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> torrent-of-ions No mention of Axiom: [http://www.axiom-developer.org/](http://www.axiom- developer.org/)

As far as I know, it's the only CAS to have a full implementation of the Risch algorithm for symbolic integration, and it's also written in a literate programming style.

<comment><USER15> I've always wondered about the Risch "algorithm". It's not really an algorithm because at one crucial step it says "determine if this expression is zero" which is essentially an open problem. What is it that Axiom does? Does it find antiderivatives where others fail?

<comment><USER16> The Risch "algorithm", in this sense, is an implementation of the Risch decision procedure; in particular, the Risch-Bronstein-Trager algorithm. Axiom's version was written, in large part, by Bronstein, himself. Axiom's implementation is _complete_ in the sense of capturing the entire Risch decision procedure for elementary functions: it either returns the antiderivative or returns a proof that no such antiderivative exists.

However, while elementary functions are extremely important, they aren't the whole story for functions; in that sense, Axiom is far weaker than, say, Mathematica.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> My favorite tools for symbolic math are Maxima as discussed in the article, for interactive exploration, and GiNaC for large-scale computation.

[http://www.ginac.de/](http://www.ginac.de/)

GiNaC is really fantastic for problems where you have symbolic models that are generated from large data sets, especially iterating between solvers and symbolic forms.

For example, high-dimensional Cox proportional hazards models have semi- parametric forms that require a mixture of symbolic and numeric computation. In this case, our study run-time was over 3 days, over a few thousand cores. Without compiling the numerics to native code, taking advantage of symbolic simplifications, and calculating Hessians symbolically then evaluating millions of times numerically, the same study would have required years of runtime.

In a computer vision application, I used GiNaC::compile_ex for a similar advantage, solving stochastic functional equations, and selecting optimal model parameters, while accounting for noise. In a way, the massive boost in symbolic + numeric speed made this practically interactive, since previous models could be cached in a compiled form, meaning that instead of plodding along, looking at a few stills here and there to see if the algorithms were producing good results, I could use live video feeds and interactively get a sense of whether the noise and stochastic model were functioning as intended.

One of the most fun programs I ever wrote is a program that generates symbolic forms for stochastic models, runs them against live camera feeds, which in turn generates optimal copulas and so on, that get reduced to C code, that ultimately produces optimized VHDL. Every step involves iterations of symbolic calculation, numeric calculation, and generating the code that will perform the next step. The code is a mixture of C++ (model computations, camera IO, optimal pipelining for VHDL), Octave (graphical views), R (statistical routines), C (mostly generated code), Perl (code transformations), and VHDL (mostly generated code). The only part that wasn't so fun was actually invoking the windows-based Altera VHDL compiler, which could take an hour or more to do the synthesis.

Also, GNU Octave also has a nice package ("symbolic") for using GiNaC interactively.

[https://octave.sourceforge.io/symbolic/](https://octave.sourceforge.io/symbolic/)

</comment><comment><USER18> Lots of alternatives in the answers to this _Unix & Linux_ StackExchange question:

[https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/20438/open- source-c...](https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/20438/open-source- computer-algebra-systems-for-linux/20441)

</comment><comment><USER19> I don't see Maple mentioned, but that was occasionally useful for algebraic geometry type stuff

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maple_computer_algebra_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maple_computer_algebra_system)

<comment><USER20> The article restricts itself to free and open source software. For algebraic geometry I can usually get by with Macaulay2, which is mentioned at the end.

<comment><USER15> What kind of computations do you do with it? What's your field (of study)?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I know it's proprietary as hell, but, honestly, you can't beat _Mathematica_ for general symbolic math use. It has an incredible array of libraries available for just about every need, and the language is very pleasant to work with.

<comment><USER12> I've devoted my life to beating Mathematica for general symbolic math use. Don't tell me I can't. :-)

<comment><USER21> I took a "Computer Algebra" class in undergrad which was taught entirely in Mathematica. It was a lot of work to convert everything (and the instructor would jokingly refer to me as "sage guy") but I got an awful lot out of using Sage instead. What keeps me from using sage nowadays is that I have a great jupyter workflow, and last time I used Sage it was just a worse version of that with better symbolic support.

<comment><USER12> Sage 7.4 now includes Jupyter as our main personal notebook UI.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just went to sagemath.org to check it out. The link to the changelog is broken.

My editor was concerned about the two names, Sage and SageMath. As far as I could tell they're just synonyms, but do you have any guidance about which is to be used when?

<comment><USER12> Thanks. In the meantime, see [https://github.com/sagemath/sage/commits/master](https://github.com/sagemath/sage/commits/master) or [https://git.sagemath.org/sage.git/](https://git.sagemath.org/sage.git/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> No mention of Axiom/Fricas? IMO, they are the most powerful.

<comment><USER23> [http://axiom-developer.org](http://axiom-developer.org)

Axiom was originally developed at IBM Research, was a commercial competitor to Mathematica and Maple, has been open source since 2001.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The article mentions a PPA for SageMath; in fact we recently (re)packaged SageMath for official Debian, here:

[https://packages.debian.org/sid/sagemath](https://packages.debian.org/sid/sagemath)

If all goes well it will be in the next Debian stable. Please help test it! It has ~180 build-dependencies, possibly the most of any Debian package.

</comment><comment><USER25> I used Sage many years ago (around 2008/2009). Awesome project.

It had the "notebook" for Python before iPython itself had it (now called Jupyter).

<comment><USER12> Macsyma had a notebook long ago, which probably inspired Mathematica notebooks. Those inspired an early IPython non-web notebook, developed by some UCSD students in 2006. They demoed it at Sage Days 1 then, and me, Alex Clemesha, and Tom Boothby spent 2006-2007 that building the first version of the Sage notebook. Then a 16 year old kid in the Philippines (Tim Dummol) did a truly massive amount of development on the Sage notebook. Mike Hansen and Robert Bradshaw (lead dev of Cython) also did a lot around then. Then we all kind of got tired of working on the Sage notebook, and I think Tim went off to college, and it started to linger. IPython (now Jupyter) then got going in around 2011, with very strong grant support from the Moore and Sloane foundations, which Fernando Perez (and others) put a huge amount of work into getting. In 2013, I bit the bullet and got back to web development (SaaS is really important to bring open source to the masses), and have been working fulltime (now with a team!) on SageMathCloud since then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I discovered this a couple of years ago, but never had the opportunity to use it extensively:

[http://en.smath.info/](http://en.smath.info/)

Anyone having experience with it?

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm always slightly sad to see a reference to TeXmacs [1], while it is not developed anymore. Does anyone know why the project has been abandoned? Always amazed by the beautiful layout of the interface.

[1] [https://www.ceremade.dauphine.fr/~mgubi/tm- web/documents/tut...](https://www.ceremade.dauphine.fr/~mgubi/tm- web/documents/tutorials/maxima-tutorial/maxima-tutorial.en.html)

<comment><USER15> It was basically a one-man project by Joris van der Hoeven and nobody has come to pick up the torch from him.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Ket is a minimalist approach. It's a maths text editor. The basic idea is that algebra is just rapid text editing. Equations are written in mark-down, displayed in conventional notation and edited with Vim commands. [https://sourceforge.net/projects/ket/](https://sourceforge.net/projects/ket/)

</comment><comment><USER29> Back in the days I used Magma for symbolic algebra/geometry. Not sure about the status of the project today, but it had absolutely unique features to work in extension fields, rings, and build abelian varieties on these.

</comment><comment><USER30> Why does lwn.net look like its straight out of the 90s? Poor ugly duckling... surely there is a designer out there willing to give you some love.

<comment><USER31> You mean why does it load instantly, pulling 100K, and not need JS and Disqus for comments? After a makeover it'll want to pull 2M+ for a short piece of text and 5M if there's a few images.

Like with HN I prefer speed and simple for a _text_ medium over watching it assemble load on demand JPGs like we're on dialup. :)

<comment><USER30> lol you think pages in the 90s loaded instantly? No, poor design doesn't have to do with loading time. CSS load time is minimal.</comment></comment></comment>


Twitter gets another round of funding - $15-20m term sheet reportedly signed - <AUTHOR> http://www.news.com/8301-10787_3-9929792-60.html

<comment><USER2> So how does Twitter start earning some of this money back?

Ads are the obvious answer, but is that enough considering their massive SMS/API-only usage that wouldn't see ads?

Some kind of Pro version? (I suppose it could remove the API restrictions, but it seems to me like there would need to be more value there than just more API calls and more tweets per call.)

Combination thereof?

<comment> a-priori Actually, the obvious one is to charge people monthly, or per tweet (say a scheme like $5 per hundred tweets).

<comment><USER2> It seems problematic to charge for the basic functionality of something so simple; there are plenty of Twitter competitors that offer what Twitter does and more, still for free. ( _cough_ pownce _ahem_ )

They could charge for expanded functionality (again, removing API and SMS limitations, and possibly additional features), but I don't think they can take away what they've already given for free for so long, and I have to wonder how many people need more than what's already free so much as to pay for it.

Just thinking out loud, anyway.

<comment> a-priori I agree they should be very careful, otherwise they could be looking at a mass exodus. However, I think that with how popular they are, they could get away with a reasonable fee.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Android Market: 80% Apps Hardly Downloaded Ever - <AUTHOR> http://digitizor.com/2011/05/30/android-market-fail/

<comment><USER2> That's 80% of paid apps.</comment>


Lisp Hackers: Marijn Haverbeke - <AUTHOR> http://lisp-univ-etc.blogspot.com/2012/04/lisp-hackers-marijn-haverbeke.html <comment><USER2> Marijn has an elegant way of scaling his thoughts to the rhythm and measure of whatever medium he happens to be writing in, a quality which makes him consistently good to read.

His response to the workflow prompt is especially good. I'd like to reproduce it here as a way of flagging it for people who might not otherwise read the entire thing:

 _My approach to writing software is embarrassingly unstructured. I'm not sure I can claim to have something that merits the term 'workflow'. One thing that is very important for me, and that, had I figured it out earlier, would probably have saved some past projects from dying, is to never have a system in a half-refactored, non-functional state for longer than an hour or so. A lot of momentum and motivation comes from having a working program in front of me. This sometimes means I have to split up big changes in a number of more indirect, trivial steps, and resist the temptation to start hammering out my big change in one go (which, even when seems straightforward in my head, will always hit some complications during implementation)._

 _Also, really learning git in depth has had a big influence on how I code. Once you really understand that changes (if you bother to commit often and with care) can be reverted and picked at will, and that branches are cheap and easy to create and maintain, you start to see a codebase differently. I often take multiple shots at making a tricky change — if it feels like my first approach is not working out, I simply commit it, back up, and start again, knowing that if the new approach doesn't work out, I can simply flip back to the old one again. Knowing that this is theoretically possible is not enough—you need to have actually done it, often, to start applying it properly._

</comment><comment><USER3> I was interested in his response to the question, "What you dislike the most about Lisp?"

 _I must say that the lack of static typing really gets in the way on larger projects. Being able to confidently change datatypes and function signatures, knowing that the compiler will point out most inconsistencies that you introduce, is something that I've really come to appreciate after working with Rust and Haskell. Test coverage helps, of course, but I'm not a very diligent test writer, and tend to feel that type signatures are easier to maintain than an exhaustive test suite._

<comment><USER4> I've had the same experience. After working almost exclusively in dynamic languages for ten years I've been back to static typing in Scala, Java and C++ and in many ways its a welcome return. Dynamic languages are great for quickly hacking around small problems but I really appreciate the help of a good compiler and the kind of refactoring that modern IDEs can do in static languages.

<comment><USER2> Dart takes an interesting hybrid approach, making static typing optional but enforcing it rigidly wherever it is declared. (I'm not sure it originated with Dart, but that's where I encountered it.) This allows you to prototype things quickly without having to fuss about types. Later, when you're satisfied you've got the right idea, you go back and add static typing wherever having the guarantees that it provides would be useful.

I haven't had the chance to try this out yet. I'm sure some people like the fact that their programming language won't put up with fast-and-loose code -- you probably don't want your workout buddy to agree too eagerly to your suggestion that you skip the gym and grab a milkshake instead. But I think it might work for me. I'd be interested to hear about people's experiences, at any rate.

<comment><USER4> I like this idea in theory at least. I think Dylan worked this way too.

It's kind of shame Dylan died out. It seems like it was ahead of its time in many ways.

<comment><USER5> Recently, there is some activity to revive Dylan.

<http://opendylan.org/>

<comment><USER6> In fact, we're working towards a new release in the coming month or so. :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Adam Smith, Disproved? How ants may have disproven the importance of specialization. - <AUTHOR> http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/adam-smith-disproved/

<comment><USER2> Fortunately we don't live in a collective like ants and aren't driven by biological forces to carry out tasks we were predetermined for at birth. I call bullshit.

<comment><USER3> Do you not believe you were predtermined at birth to do what you do? Your thoughts and interests drove you to your current profession.

<comment><USER4> Your thoughts and interests were influenced by everything you saw and heard since the day you were born... regardless of your genetic makeup.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We are not ants.</comment>


Alexander the Great and Aristotle - <AUTHOR> http://www.livius.org/aj-al/alexander/alexander_t04.html

<comment><USER2> Don't forget that Plutarch wrote this 400 years after Alexander and Aristotle were alive.</comment>


Spanish Design Student Creates Sleek New Spotify Gadget - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/13/spanish-design-student-creates-sleek-new-spotify-gadget/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content=Google+Reader <comment><USER2> This:

 _Perhaps the coolest feature of the product's design is its inclusion of 192 LED nodes, which display volume levels, battery life, and Internet connectivity on the device's face._

Has got to be one of the silliest sentences on TC today, at least. Calling LED:s "nodes" in a tech-oriented publication just makes me cringe. What is a "node", anyway? Also, I guess the idea of using LED:s to display information is not totally novel, I think I've seen that done before.

I agree that using said LED:s to form what appears to be a matrix display filling the entire front of the device, while _looking like_ old-school ventilation holes, is clever.</comment>


Subreddit generated playlists, YouTubes content + reddit love = awsome - <AUTHOR> http://www.tubalr.com/r

<comment><USER2> This was a concept that was hanging in my mind but I couldn't quite grasp it and make a prototype! Very nice

</comment><comment><USER3> How does it work? Does it read comments? Posts?</comment>