A friend of mine is sort of interested in politics but mostly just asks me my opinion of things going on in the news, which of course, I'm happy to oblige.

I spent about 10 minutes typing this up and thought it might be useful for people who've recently joined or forgot what happened.

I'm 100% missing important details and timelines might be off by a little, but this is how I broadly remember it.

The Donald was created back in late 2015 for supporters of trump. It ended up being the most popular spot on the internet for Trump fans to get together 4chan was popular too but its a mess, threads come and go very fast and got deleted every few hours because of how 4chan works.

So reddit became the main hub. All young Trump fans went there and many contributed with new memes, and it was also popular for people who were older and just wanted to laugh. Like any group, there were people who had more extreme views than others. A lot of people who didn't even like Trump posted, and were banned early and often.

It was VERY active. In 2016 it had more activity than any other page on reddit, if I remember correctly. The reddit admins were actively suppressing the subscriber count to downplay how popular it was.

The_Donald was a mix of people who actually supported him and people just supporting him because it was funny. People going really over the top with how great trump was. That’s why they called him “God Emperor” and stuff like that.

The_Donald contributed bigly to his election..... tech savvy people were making really incredible (dank) memes that joked about Trump being a genius, playing 12d intergalactic checss, ridiculed the republican candidates and Hillary and Bernie. Trump even did an 'Ask me anything' thread on there during the election.

They would get a zillion people to just upload a simple photo of trump, so that everyone on reddit would see it. Upvote a meme about how Clinton has a body count, etc.

Here are examples of some memes you'd find, some of which even got tweeted by Trump and get mainstream coverage. CNN even threatened to dox the reddit user who made the gif of trump tackling CNN!

https://imgur.com/a/Y3q7R6J https://youtu.be/TV2AUoY5JI8 https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/881503147168071680?lang=en

The subreddit sort of became a meme of itself. A lot of people were doing it just cause it was highly entertaining. On top of that, people made memes that really resonated with how people felt about the political climate and options.... and then those memes were shared on facebook.... and many of them leaked into other subreddits

So..... reddit was flooded with real trump supporters and people who were just there for the laughs.

And it started leaking out. Pretty soon, the front page of reddit, the /r/all subreddit, and the /r/ popular subreddits (which are very popular) got flooded with submissions from the Donald, and it really pissed off people who didn’t like trump, like the folks who run reddit.

reddit was getting pissed about all the Trump posts. They tried making a ton of anti trump subreddits to drown out the noise but people just didn’t give a shit enough to fight back. Reddit admin was worried about becoming a target and going down a slippery slope, because they weren’t technically doing anything wrong

So they tried changing the algorithm to make it so that no trump posts would make it to the front page.

Except it backfired. They instead made it so that literally ONLY posts about trump would be on the front page. For basically an hour people would only see trump posts if they went to reddit and the Donald was dying of laughter. Eventually it got fixed and they removed it from the front page

Then, Hillary campaign chairman john podesta had a ton of emails get released by Wikileaks. Dumbass literally has “password” as his password for his gmail and every morning for like 3 months leading up to Election Day, emails of his were released on Wikileaks.

The Donald has a lot of people with autism and they’d comb through hundreds of thousands of pages looking for dirt. They called this “weaponized autism” it worked great!

Some of the emails looked super sketchy and a lot of people took that to mean something about political elites engaging with pedophilia. They kept talking about pizza in these emails in a way that didn’t make sense and comet pizza was talked about, and people found some kinda scary stuff about the guy that runs it. Some people took that a little too literally and went to a pizza place to rescue kids who were there, shot it up... what a dumbass.

So that’s the whole pizzagate thing. A lot of that took place on the Donald and media went bonkers for it cause they LOVE covering right wing conspiracy theories and making fun of them, while also propping up left wing conspiracies like Russia.

Additionally, Julian Assange insisted that Russia did not give him the podesta emails like Hillary accused, and everyone figured it out that it was very likely a DNC staffer guy named Seth rich, and then this theory came out that maybe he was the guy that did it. So, more conspiracy stuff, his parents weren’t pleased and went to media to get people to shut up..... I say all this to make clear that this is the sort of thing reddit didn’t like

So. Reddit admins are like, moderators, y’all need to lock this shit down. No more conspiracy theories being posted, no more “boston bomber” like mystery research and doxxing.

On top of that the CEO of reddit was caught editing posts making fun of him on the Donald. He literally went into the system and edited comments himself that were made by other people and did not disclose it. this did not help relations at all, and it proved that reddit can edit peoples comments which is a huge court liability thing Reddit admins had had enough. the rest of reddit didn’t like all the Donald stuff leaking out. Many subreddits like /r/politics were banning people who had liked posts in the Donald or posted in the Donald. TD also was anti illegal immigration, didn’t want war with russia... unpopular opinions to have.

Reddit admins ended up quarantining the subreddit. What that means is that every time you try to go to the page, you get hit with a warning that the subreddit is toxic, you shouldn’t be going in there, its full of racists... that sort of thing. Admins told moderators they must keep the subreddit clean without threats, racism, etc.....

The mods did a GREAT job. They aren't even paid, yet they were deleting false flag posts left and right, banning people saying horrible things, shutting down all Q and other conspiracy talk. They banned fake news sites like anything ending in PUNDIT. They actively posted measures they were taking and asks reddit admins for communication.

But reddit admins would not lift the quarantine and wouldn’t explain why. They stopped communicating entirely, and should have restored the subreddit because they weren’t breaking any rules, and many subreddits were FAR more egregious in their behavior. Today, /r/politics had a major thread saying that someone needs to put arsenic in republican water or something.

Then about 4 months ago the reddit admins deleted about half the moderation team. One of the moderators they deleted owned the robot that did about 95% of the moderation on the sub, automatically removing toxic posts by people So, the Donald was basically dealt a crippled blow 4 months ago. The moderators decided to lock the subreddit and move to another website, one they made entirely on their own and looks like a reddit clone.

Nobody has even posted on the Donald subreddit for 4 months. So todays gesture was basically just the absolute final nail in the coffin. They deleted ALL of it.

Honestly its a piece of history I wish was preserved. Without it, he wouldn’t have been elected, and there were some very hilarious memes on there. I regret I won’t be able to see more of them, unless someone on the moderation team has a backup

There’s some other stuff in there somewhere, too. Trump actually did an Ask Me Anything in there once, and some autists actually found a reddit post from Hillary’s IT person asking how to delete everything on a “VERY VIP private server”

They also found Seth Rich’s reddit account about a year after he died, and someone logged in a few hours later and deleted all the posts.

Now compare that fucking article with whatever bullshit the NYT and WaPo wrote out their ass earlier today. BITCH!