Reddit News: The Donald Sub Set To Private, Maybe Done For Good [UPDATE: It's Back]

UPDATE: It's back, guess the mods needed more attention.

On Saturday evening, The_donald, the main sub on reddit dedicated to President Donald Trump, went private. After reddit admins removed three T_d moderators from the sub, the rest of the mods went on an epic tirade claiming that free speech on the site is dying and that the sub will be going private temporarily in protest.

When you try to access The_donald’s page, you get a message saying the mods were removed because they “refused to comply by a special set of rules that were solely imposed on this subreddit to marginalize the only community which doesn’t conform to the echo chamber of Reddit and corporate media.”

The_donald sub has been on thin ice with the rest of reddit for a long time, but everything started to crack on Friday. The main The_donald moderator, u/YouGotServed, posted a long, rambling post about how unfairly their sub gets treated. It starts off with an antagonistic threat: “Reddit will lift all restrictions on us, or we'll make absolutely sure this is the beginning of the end for Reddit.” u/YouGotServed also claimed without T_d, reddit couldn’t exist since it needs their traffic and that everyone should move to Voat, a competitor of reddit, which is closing it’s doors fairly soon.

In the last message before The_donald was taken offline, moderator shadowman3001 asked why other subs are allowed to brigade their users against T_d. The mod claims T_d only made threats “that were in response to threats made by liberals” and that this is a “terrorist” threat by the mods.

The_donald is arguably the most polarizing sub on reddit – users spam their love of the current president, attacking all who oppose their view points. During the election, T_d got banned from linking to /pol and since then has become the main political subreddit for continued conspiracy theories, like Pizzagate or that the DNC murdered Seth Rich. U/spez, one of reddit’s co-founders, has been a target for the sub for months after he changed some comments that called him a pedophile without informing the original users. Every thread had at least one message calling him a “cuck” – the sub’s favorite slur for all who oppose their view points–and other terminology I couldn’t get away with writing here.

I’m sure this isn’t the end for The_donald. The moderators are too vocal to simply let the sub close and leave its thousands of users to scatter to the corners of the internet. While they pronounce reddit's need for their sub, there are few online forums with the kind of notoriety and freedom that reddit provides. The “take our ball and go home" attitude ensures all sides lose. The_donald has bent the rules and standards of reddit for a long time, but is now facing the reality of dealing with those consequences. It picked a fight with the front page of the internet but now wants to be left alone.

We will have to wait until 9 p.m. EDT tonight for an announcement from The_donald mods in order to find out what’s next for the Donald Trump subreddit.