Reddit users were shocked earlier in the week when the site’s front page suddenly became populated entirely by posts from the pro-Donald Trump subreddit, /r/The_Donald.
Late Thursday evening the front page of /r/All became entirely populated with content from /r/The_Donald, an error that according to /r/Pics moderator /u/allthefoxes, was caused by an unexplained “bug.”
Initially users questioned whether or not the sudden page change was an accident or an active effort to take over the /r/All subreddit by /r/The_Donald subscribers. However Reddit admins confirmed that this was not the case and was in fact due to a database issue.
Reddit admin /u/redtaboo said, “My understanding is a database update caused the process that updates /r/all to stop working properly, the long and short of it is that /r/the_donald is incredibly active voting wise, so when the algorithm [that] sorts /r/all broke…that subreddit was the one to be pulled into the vortex.”
“The /r/all algorithm doesn’t single out any specific subreddits, but it does make it so no single subreddit can take over completely,” they explained. “The_Donald happens to be incredibly active voting wise (more so than larger subreddits) so when things broke the posts in that subreddit were the ones most actively being voted on and got picked up.”
The explanation seamingly admits that posts from the Trump subreddit would make up the majority of Reddit’s front page if not for the algorithim artificially suppressing them.
The pro-Trump subreddit has come under fire from Reddit admins in the past who have actively worked to prevent /r/The_Donald content from reaching the front page, even going as far as to alter the Reddit front page algorithm to deal with the influx of /r/The_Donald posts to the site’s frontpage.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart Tech covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan_ or email him at lucas@yiannopoulos.net