2020 was a huge year for The Donald.

It was only November 2019 when we first announced Win's existence, following a warning of a potential subreddit ban due to posts and comments which mentioned Eric Ciaramella's name.

In February 2020, half of our mod team from /r/The_Donald was removed, and Reddit created a post under the u/reddit account calling for new moderators.

It was at this point that we made the decision to permanently close the subreddit, and move exclusively to Win - which, at this point, still wasn't something that we had determined we would do.

In the following ten months, we grew our new home 1.68 million posts, 13 million comments, and over 2 billion pageviews. We're currently ranked in the top 450 websites in the U.S., and #61 in 'News and Media'.

In our best 30 day period, The Donald received over 310,000,000 pageviews. In our best 24 hour period, we received over 20,000,000 pageviews, and separately over 2.5 million unique visitors.

If we had stayed on Reddit, we would not be able to allege fraud. That is all I need to say about that.

This project has been a tremendous success, and something that we intend to build upon. The Donald's success is because of you all - you rejected Reddit at a rate that we never expected. In our initial planning, we expected 30-40K users to make the switch, but instead we have grown to be bigger than we ever were at our peak on Reddit.

Rule Changes

We've reviewed our rules and made a couple of changes. Mostly adjustments to wording, but we did remove the "Be Respectful" rule and brought in a new rule, which we are calling "High Energy", which says "No forum sliding, consensus cracking, topic dilution, etc.". You can see all of the changes here.

These updates do not indicate any change in moderation.

New Moderators

Up until this point, we have maintained the same moderation team from when we left Reddit. We have added nobody new, but today that is changing.

Three weeks ago, we put out a call for new help. We've finalized our list and, after performing the extreme vetting that we always have, we are ready to bring them in.

Note that when we believe a new moderator can be easily identified based on their old account, we do recommend that they make a fresh one. This is why some moderators may be brand new accounts. Of course, everyone who is joining our team is a long-term user of The Donald.

THANK YOU!