Oh yes, the tired old "allege massive voter fraud without a shred of evidence" argument. Please. If you seriously believe that, then I've got a bridge to sell you. If you actually gave a shit about the democratic process, you'd be pushing for campaign finance reform and anti-gerrymandering laws. But no, you'd rather blame it all on the boogeyman. Voter ID laws aren't just racist, they fuck over everybody on the lower end of society. All those laws do is make people jump through a bunch of unnecessary bureaucratic hoops in order to claim their *constitutionally guaranteed* right to vote. If you're poor, if you've got to work two jobs, if you're in any sort of situation where you don't have a lot of disposable time to navigate a labyrinth of paperwork, you're much less likely to make it to the polls. We don't have enough Americans voting as it is, and you want to make it even harder? Come the fuck on. It's a smokescreen. You won the fucking election on a technicality and you're *still* alleging fraud? Are you kidding me? Even when you *win* you play the victim card. Un-fucking-real, you are. You're so deep in denial that you can't even begin to comprehend your own inconsistency.

Dude, are you listening to yourself? Go back and look through this conversation; virtually everything you've said has been misleading, blatantly false, missing the point, and now you're just dodging. Okay, 63 million people voted for Trump. So what? What's your point? That there's a lot of you? Well, there's several million more people who voted *against* him, so what does that tell you?

It was a rhetorical question.

> I mean the bots wouldn't work on Reddit. Not quite sure what you mean by this, considering that the very post we're commenting on is proof that bots *do* work on Reddit. > The Donald was fueled by real, live people. Bots wouldn't function in this climate, only real people made it happen. Even if the posts in T_D were made by real people, they still purposefully gamed the system in bad faith. As I understand it, T_D operated by getting their entire userbase to just upvote *everything*, which basically turned the sub into a conveyor belt to put shitposts on the frontpage. Maybe the voting was supplemented by bots, or maybe it was just real people with a comparable capacity for independent thought as bots (which is to say, very little). It doesn't really matter, because the end result was the subversion of an algorithm that assumed that a sub of that size would never be able to act with that degree of cohesion. T_D found the flaw in the system, exploited it, and the mods finally patched it when they updated the algorithm. The algorithm wasn't modified to suppress T_D itself, it was modified to cut the legs out from a Reddit-breaking mob behavior of which T_D was the innovator. > Aka the silent majority isn't so silent anymore. Except you're so very clearly *not* the majority. You lost the popular vote in the election. Trump has [an absurdly low approval rating.](https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/) You're not a "majority" by any definition, you're a *minority* that has gotten extremely good at making a lot of noise.

> 51% of people can nearly completely silence the 49% because no conservative post would get traction. I'd say that T_D is pretty far from "silenced," even after the algorithm changes. "Normalized the volume" might be a better description, because those algorithm changes were basically only made because T_D exposed a flaw in the algorithm itself: if you had a large enough sub and you just upvoted *everything*, you could basically make a conveyor belt to get posts to the frontpage of r/all. The algorithm was designed with the assumption that a group of that size would never act as a monolith, but clearly that assumption was wrong. It's the "Zerg rush" approach to visibility, and it undermines the nominal purpose of the algorithm of selecting quality content. The way I see it, T_D found an exploit, and the admins patched it. > It sounds like you just really don't like the culture of T_D, and that's fine, but there is no contradiction between calling Reddit overly liberal, and T_D attempting to take credit for "memeing Trump to the White House" You're right, it is the culture that I have a problem with. I'm fine with opposing political views, even if I disagree with them, but it's their behavior that I find intolerable. The brigading, their paranoia, and their constant antagonism towards anybody who doesn't 100% agree with them; it's all just a political palette-swap of every intellectual sin that they project onto the Left. If there's one thing that I can't stand, it's hypocritical self-righteousness, and T_D embodies that to it's fullest extent. Did meme'ing work as an effective marketing tool? Maybe, maybe not. Hard to say, really, in something as complicated as a presidential election. I'm sure the meme war seemed effective *to the people waging it*, but how many minds did it actually change? Did it actually sway people's opinions, or was it all a self-satisfying circlejerk for Trump's base? I've seen plenty of political memes on both sides of the spectrum, and I've rarely ever had a reaction other than to roll my eyes and say "*this* shit again?" Jokes and insults make the side that tells them feel good, but they just alienate the people who aren't already on that side.

I was phrasing it as a rhetorical question. Of course they're doing it, everybody's doing it, and that's why shit is so fucked right now.

You were *literally* just saying how you "meme'd your way to the White House." Now you're telling me "Reddit is too liberal, we would never operate here." So which is it? It can't be both. Or are you too mired in the doublethink to realize the inherent contradiction there? Thing is, Reddit isn't actually that liberal, on the whole. I say this as a registered Republican. It may lean left, but it's far from a monolithic community; it has pockets of pretty much anything you want, if you know where to look. If there's a liberal lean in the user base overall, it's because the users are generally young, and young people are generally more liberal. And yet somehow, in this "liberal" site, it's nearly impossible to get a word out without some Trump-stumper jumping into the thread with vitriol about how we're all "cucks" and "shills" and whatnot. But sure, keep telling yourself that is everybody else that's the problem.

My point was more along the lines of that the GOP definitely has equally-sketchy shit going on, and pretending that the DNC is fucked up but the GOP isn't is nothing less than a smear job. I don't defend how the DNC operates, but I also don't pretend like the Republicans are any different in the dark. You're not one bit concerned with transparency, truth, or accountability. You just want to *win* out of sheer partisanship, and are completely willing to apply a double standard if it suits your needs.

So what are you saying? Even as the actual issues under discussion change, both sides have resorted to utterly manipulative and deceptive tactics. Both sides have the same incentives and resources to pull the same underhanded shit, so they **both** do it. Saying that The Donald is any less manipulated than MAT is just being blind, and saying that it doesn't matter is pure hypocrisy.

Funny, I didn't realize that leaking one side's dirty laundry emails counted as "memeing"

Why would liberals do the same for a candidate who already lost? Just because the election is over doesn't mean that the propaganda machines stop.

Its because the continued toleration of T_D doesn't fit the narrative of the guy you're responding to. He's ignoring evidence and playing the victim, as per usual for reddit partisans.