Item — HN Reader

>There should be Moore's/ Poe's law for the correlation of the size and influence of a site to the amount of corporate influence on said site.

For parody subreddits, I think there's a rule that at 80k subs, it starts to become the very thing it was parodying in the first place

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Its kind of astonishing to me how no one even seems to notice. Its not so popular now, but the /r/murica used to be a joke about overzealous patriotism, then it became something... else. pcmasterrace way back in the day did the same, now its just a pc enthusiast subreddit. I didn't pay as much attention to it, but the the_donald originally was tongue in cheek before it was overtaken by trump zealots and just strangeness...

> but the /r/murica used to be a joke about overzealous patriotism, then it became something... else

Maybe people did notice, and just decided to take this subreddit for something else than laughing at over-patriotism. It's a very successful strategy against shaming, if you can pull it off - just not being ashamed and not being afraid to demonstrate it. Reddit provides excellent venue for that, subreddits being good Schelling points.

Reminds me of a quote that goes something to the effect of "If you make company pretending to be idiots, than you'll eventually be in company of idiots."

Right that's basically Poe's law. Paraphrasing here but: "When a subject becomes sufficiently extreme, it becomes nearly impossible to differentiate serious discussion from satire".

I was thinking a combination of Poe's approach to subject matter with Moore's approach to the increase of transistors (users/ traffic in this analogue) over a period of time.

Isn't that how /r/the_donald started?

Not really no.

It was more of an offshoot of the gamer gate crowd. There were a few different pro Trump subs; TD just so happened to be the one that took off.

It is a pretty honest sub though; It's supposed to be a non stop Trump rally - clearly subversive content and discourse will be banned and removed.

Source: was there when the original mod drama was kicking off at around 30k subs. Can't remember the guys username but he got booted once the sub took off (around 100k subs) and its almost certainly run by mods on the campaign dole currently.