21ST CENTURY POLITICKING: Donald Trump’s Reddit Fan Club Faces Crackdown, Infighting.

The subreddit, managed by a handful of mostly anonymous fans, is a breakout success. But it’s also plagued by constant infighting among its leaders, infiltration by white supremacists and clashes with the site’s administrators over complaints that its users game the system to make their content more visible.

Reddit’s content is promoted on a competitive basis: The more users “upvote” an individual post, the higher it appears on r/all, a homepage that encompasses the whole site, with certain exceptions. The popularity of r/the_donald meant ordinary users who visited Reddit in recent months faced a regular bombardment of Trump posts, including some that critics found grotesque, racist or just plain obnoxious.

These complaints reached a crescendo in June when Reddit’s founder and CEO Steve Huffman announced that he was changing the algorithm for r/all to ensure more “diverse” posts and prevent users from colluding to force their content to the front page.

The Trump subreddit is the most obvious example, but even blog comments have seen infestations by trolls, bots, and sockpuppets on behalf of various candidates. The signal-to-noise ratio of this election cycle is often indecipherably low.