A lot of people are terrible people, and there is significant overlap in them.

Those people never visited The_Donald and didn't see the racism and bigotry there. It was a cesspool had no other purpose than to circlejerk over Trump and malign, and attack his political opponents.

It added no value to reddit.

> It added no value to reddit.

Well, many subs don't add a value to reddit. At least from my perspective and personal opinion. I don't understand why you cannot just unsub and don't read it.

> I don't understand why you cannot just unsub and don't read it.

Because they radicalised each other and then went out into other subs no longer caring to hide their bigotry and racism.

If you you live in an apartment on a street with a nightclub on it, you're going to have drunk jerks on your street at night.

The chance of being on the internet for an extended period and not running into a troll is 0%.

I can tell you as a former forum admin, that there is no way to avoid these people showing up. The rules don't matter, banning them doesn't matter, being a calm and relaxing place won't matter either.

What did matter is that the rules made sense and were followed indiscriminately by the mods and admins. It also helped to have a forum dedicated to spam and allowed for breaking of many rules (racism/harrassment and CP being excluded from the exception)

My banlist over a million users was 20 people long. I don't consider this sum to be hard to handle and at 1.2m registered users (without a need to register to read), I think maybe the problem is actually in the rules/application.

People hate feeling like they are being treated unfairly.

We would also enforce the rules when racism was targeting white people.

Hard agree. I deleted my reddit account over the fact that they kept letting T_D exist despite its obvious flouting of the rules around brigading (they arranged brigades on discord and took over other subreddits, repeatedly, after being warned) and how it was an increasingly obvious alt-right funnel full of some of the absolute worst people on the internet.

They ultimately closed the subreddit about a year later, but I had already deleted my account at that point. I was better off in the end though, as the entire site is now just a giant meme dump with no redeeming qualities (it felt like all subreddits eventually saturate with memes on their main page as a function of their popularity, and it gets tiresome and same-ey after a while.)

> they kept letting T_D exist despite its obvious flouting of the rules around brigading

Some like to claim that it's because high engagement means more advertising dollars, but I think it's more like they knew that banning T_D would cause a massive backlash as people claimed they were banned simply for having different political opinions.