Late Thursday evening, chaos ensued on Reddit when its main subreddit /r/all started exclusively featuring posts from the website’s unofficial Donald Trump subreddit /r/The_Donald.
The issue has since been resolved and the page is back to its normal state. According to Reddit moderators, the Trump takeover occurred as a result of a “bug” – but it remains unclear what caused the glitch in the first place.
Redditors were quick to notice the occurrence and rumors about the possible cause began circulating on the platform shortly after.
While reactions varied from genuine excitement to utter frustration, some members of the Trump subreddit suspected this could be a “false flag” operation aimed to smear the page and justify its removal.
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Reddit mods responded to the glitch promptly, eliminating the issue almost instantly. Later on, Reddit admin redtaboo said the bug most likely came about as a result of a botched algorithm update on their end.
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.
Members of the prominent Trump subreddit have previously been accused of artificially upvoting threads to send them to the front of Reddit, but it seems this wasn’t the case this time.
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