I agree that /r/the_donald is a poor quality experience, but it's analogous and in response to the poor quality experience of the /r/politics. They're both "circlejerks" that don't allow competing views to be posted. So while you may need to take the_donald with a huge grain of salt, if you're only get your news from left wing site like /r/politics, npr, huff po, new york times, and even hacker news for the most part, you could do worse than checking it out. (Though I would recommended Daily Wire, Daily Caller, and Reason as a counter points.)

politics might downvote something they don't like to oblivion, but TD will ban you for violating the narrative.

And if by take it with a grain of salt you mean that nothing in there is actually relevant or related to reality.

TD isn't meant to be a bastion of free speech. It's candidate support website. They say it in the sidebar: "This is a forum for supporters of Trump ONLY". They obviously won't allow anything which does NOT support Trump. /r/politics is supposed to be a neural subreddit, is not even close to it.

It's a forum dedicated to a certain political candidate and their views. By definition, such a place will be an echo chamber with a (usually) low regard for neutrality.

It's no different from a hobby forum simply not tolerating people who don't like that hobby. You don't go to say, a Microsoft specific forum and expect to hear why Apple or Linux operating systems are better. And if you did keep saying that, you'd probably be chucked out or flamed to a crisp.

Check a Usenet archive and see what the alt.* groups looked like in 1997. Lunatics and assholes have always been present on the internet; the difference is that in 1997, we saw the necessity of creating private spaces that excluded undesirable people.

Facebook and Twitter are virtually unmoderated. As long as your comment is legal and non-pornographic, it's probably staying up. The "communities" used by the majority of people the majority of the time are less well moderated than a lot of 4chan boards.

Of course the debate on Facebook is uncivil. Expecting otherwise is a peculiar kind of madness.

And if you have civil debates on Facebook, your social circle is extraordinarily strange.

Also, Facebook is moderated by the person whose wall you are posting on. I've seen effective moderation in this way. If you have friends that value good discourse norms, and you shitpost in the discussion around their posts, they can and will delete your shit and tell you to knock it off.

>Go spend some "quality time" on /r/the_donald for a more typical experience.

/the_donald has almost 400k subscribers. It is what it is. Do you assume these people are stupid, or do their beliefs and interests (and sense of humour) differ from yours?

>>Do you assume these people are stupid

I dunno... every time Trump fucks up in a big way, the_donald folks genuinely think he is playing "five-dimensional chess" and that he fucked up on purpose as a way to outmaneuver his opponents without them realizing it.

So yes, they are absolutely, definitively stupid. I mean how else do you explain the attribution of superhuman intelligence to someone who is an incredible cretin?

The exact same thing could be said about the people celebrating the DNC and Hillary's race to the White house on reddit. An obviously flawed actor with few redeeming qualities, yet still held in high regard in the minds of people on r/politics. The only difference I see on the left side of the divide is lack of humour (which tends to invite trolling).

I don't want to get into a political argument, especially with someone who thinks Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are even remotely comparable. And I say that as someone with a deep dislike of Hillary.

Interesting that you think the left side lacks humor. Last time I checked, all parody shows on TV were liberal. What is the right-wing equivalent of SNL?

> What is the right-wing equivalent of SNL?

Bullied off the air long ago. Remember people tried to get people like Thiel fired from FB for daring to donate campaign funds to a mainstream candidate.

Name a single good TV parody show.

>implying late night shows are funny

Just checked it out. I see a meme with the text: "[..] There is no bigotry here. We do not look down on snowflakes, cucks, neckbeards or landwhales. Here, you are all equally worthless".

> Do you assume these people are stupid

probably, although it's their morality that's more of a problem than their IQ.

> do their beliefs and interests (and sense of humour) differ from yours?

yes.

Yeah, but you don't have to go there. That's the point.

Trolls aren't winning the Internet, for the most part they're loitering in those corners of the web you'd expect to find them.

if the internet is supposed to be a truly public platform, that is to say a space where different opinions can collide productively then the internet at the moment is clearly losing.

It's not that the trolls occupy the corners, it's that they occupy the big, visible public spaces of the internet, while everybody else is driven into digital sanctuaries. That clearly is a failure if the stated goal is to genuinely democratise knowledge and discourse.

I'd even go further than the author and say that we're way past a 'potemkin internet with a nice facade'. The facade is pretty darn ugly as well. The kind of stuff people are willing to post under their actual name is pretty scary.

What if the so-called trolls are actually just the majority of people?

big, visible spaces of the internet - you mean the media?

sure, those are affected to. The comment sections originally intended for discussion on most big media sites are toxic even with moderation or have become so bad that some news sites have ended the experiment altogether.

That's a pretty sad result given that the whole idea was to break down the barrier between journalists and readers.

Not only the comments, the actual articles are full of trolling, too.

For something like /r/the_donald, you're right. But for something more general, like general Twitter, you're not.

Vote with your feet/filter/time. Don't go to to /r/the_donald.

I just use HN and twitter mainly. I keep Facebook because many friends can only be kept in touch with (out of the blue) via facebook. Otherwise, just block a lot of it.

I don't feel any need to do that on any kind of regular basis, any more than I feel the need to browse pro-anorexia or pro-suicide forums. I certainly take the view that one should keep one's eyes open, but the presence of human garbage (which is a cultural constant) has never bogged down the internet for me. (The worst of the internet - snuff porn, child porn, violent hate groups, people selling people, or murder, or weapons, or whatever - is as old as the internet. /r/the_donald is just like, I don't know... whatever).

Like, why wouldn't I think that the contents of the internet would be a reflection of the contents of our society?

Nobody is forced to go to "the_donald". What would "the_donald" without trolling supposedly be? I dont know "the_donald", but doesn't the name itself already say "this is for trolling"?

I'd rather go bathing in a volcano.