on the morning of nov. 9, a moderator who goes by the handle ohsnapyougotserved posted on a reddit topic page called the_donald: <u+201c>how does it feel, centipedes? the god emperor said that we would get tired of winning. are you tired of winning yet? feel vindicated, centipedes. it<u+2019>s over and there is nothing they can do about it. we are the future .<u+201d> within minutes, the post had accrued more than 2,000 comments. within days, they numbered more than 12,000. reddit, a hodgepodge of message boards about everything, from kiteboarding to financial advice to photoshopping human arms onto images of birds, is the eighth-most popular online destination in the united states. the_donald, devoted, of course, to donald j. trump, has become one of the most influential communities within one of the most significant websites on the internet. yet that post by ohsnapyougotserved is probably largely incomprehensible to most people. the_donald has around 300,000 members. some are conservative stalwarts, others are meme-making teenagers; all are anonymous, hidden behind user names, making their origins and motivations difficult to pinpoint. but it<u+2019>s fair to say that many saw themselves as political outsiders who reveled in rallying for the underdog. the community is home to copious islamophobia, trolling of liberals and near constant bashing of hillary clinton. it has evolved a dialect decipherable only to insiders, which includes acronyms like <u+201c>maga<u+201d> (make america great again); epithets like <u+201c>god emperor<u+201d> (for mr. trump); insults like <u+201c>cuck<u+201d> (short for cuckold and often deployed against feminists); memes featuring a cartoon frog associated with racism; and nicknames like <u+2019>pedes. (centipedes, a term for trump supporters adopted from a youtube mash-up of the song <u+201c>centipede<u+201d> by the band knife party and clips of mr. trump<u+2019>s speeches. it might also be a penis joke. seriously.) this, according to its moderators, was <u+201c>the largest, best and closest thing to an official campaign subreddit for donald trump 2016.<u+201d> if barack obama<u+2019>s 2008 online presidential campaign was a well-oiled machine that made effective use of supporter data, analytics and social-media tools, mr. trump owes some degree of his success to an online mob of rabid, self-organized supporters. politics has always been a popular topic on reddit. the site came of age during the administration of george w. bush <u+2014> and reddit, in general, despised mr. bush. it has leaned liberal-to-libertarian ever since, the most popular candidates being barack obama, bernie sanders and ron paul. until the_donald. when created by a couple of volunteer moderators in 2015, the community was just one of many straightforward political-support pages (r/sandersforpresident and r/hillaryclinton were already going strong) that sprang up to aggregate news articles from sources such as cnn and the hill. today the_donald is something different. its memes and slang serve as the passwords to an internet speakeasy, a secret club whose rules one moderator justified as existing to create a <u+201c>safe space<u+201d> for trump supporters. <u+201c>everyone wants to have a sense of belonging,<u+201d> reddit<u+2019>s chief executive, steve huffman, told me last week. <u+201c>at some point, it becomes almost cultlike.<u+201d> the_donald<u+2019>s policy states <u+201c>no racism/anti-semitism,<u+201d> but it also warns <u+201c>no dissenters or s.j.w.s,<u+201d> as in social-justice warriors. <u+201c>concern trolling,<u+201d> or questioning views expressed on the subreddit, is also banned. the community is notoriously difficult to manage. its top moderator team has turned over at least four times, according to mr. huffman. (this usually happened because the community revolted, as in one instance in which a lead moderator wrote that he believed he could get away with raping undocumented immigrants.) moderators also suspend and bar members more frequently than do moderators of any other section of the site. still, by early 2016, its content so regularly took over reddit<u+2019>s most popular lists that the company decided to change its algorithm to make it harder for posts from groups like the_donald to reach prominence, according to employees. when he announced the change, mr. huffman said it had been in the works for a while, but also that reddit was being undermined by the_donald<u+2019>s attempts <u+201c>to dominate the conversation.<u+201d> the community<u+2019>s power soon reached beyond reddit. mr. trump tweeted out memes and videos that originated on the_donald and in july he participated in a popular reddit <u+201c>ask me anything<u+201d> discussion, after his team communicated with the moderators. this would make little sense if the_donald were all memes and derision. but according to reddit, the_donald<u+2019>s moderators <u+2014> nearly 50 far-flung volunteers <u+2014> deftly managed to channel action out of the chaos. they hosted an extensive and at times informative wiki about mr. trump<u+2019>s policy proposals and instructed supporters how to help with the campaign. members often suggested strategies for arguing persuasively against opponents. perhaps most important, members organized an effort to comb through the democratic national committee emails released by wikileaks over the summer. in order to interpret and disseminate these documents, the_donald relied on a network of subscribers it (adoringly?) named <u+201c>weaponized autists.<u+201d> of particular fixation were emails from the clinton campaign chairman, john podesta. in a debate in october, mr. trump said to mrs. clinton, <u+201c>john podesta said some horrible things about you.<u+201d> there is no way to know how much all this online activism made a difference on election day. but there were many discussions of how the_donald<u+2019>s hundreds of thousands of members could persuade their friends on facebook and elsewhere to get out to vote. and, after all, they spent months discussing nov. 8 on reddit; it<u+2019>s hard to imagine they didn<u+2019>t spend a few minutes in a voting booth. but now that mr. trump is the president-elect, what will happen to the_donald? what will the centipedes do when the trump administration becomes the establishment, engaging with lobbyists and compromising on ideals, and all of the typically <u+201c>washington<u+201d> behaviors they despise? the_donald is still very active, and is gaining subscribers. ohsnapyougotserved wrote: <u+201c>where do we go from here? we stay the course. this is our home and we are on the winning team. they cannot silence this movement. trump has much work to do to drain the swamp of corruption in all corners of the country. we have an opportunity to dismantle the establishment. we can still use our platform to aid in these endeavors.<u+201d> recent posts on the_donald have promoted a letter-writing campaign for julian assange and wikileaks. there<u+2019>s support for protesters countering the anti-trump legions in midtown manhattan. there<u+2019>s a proposed boycott of harry potter books and movies, with a reminder that j. k. rowling tweeted that voldemort was <u+201c>nowhere near as bad<u+201d> as mr. trump, and a proposal to defund npr. there was also, for a moment this fall, a movement to set up a political action committee, something to be expected of a candidate<u+2019>s fan base after the campaign wraps up. the proposal was met with bile, and rejected as a money grab. moderators issued an apology and a retraction of the idea. organizing the <u+201c>weaponized autists<u+201d> worked. asking for letters to support mr. assange is working. asking for money did not. whatever the_donald<u+2019>s moderators say, the community<u+2019>s future is uncertain without a controversial, underdog candidate to rally behind. it<u+2019>s hard to imagine that the allure of insider-only memes and perverse laughs will be enough to sustain it over the next four years. <u+201c>there are no brakes on this train,<u+201d> wrote ohsnapyougotserved. no brakes, perhaps, but it will almost certainly run out of steam. christine lagorio-chafkin, a senior writer for inc., is the author of the forthcoming <u+201c>we are the nerds,<u+201d> about reddit. follow the new york times opinion section on facebook and twitter (@nytopinion) , and sign up for the opinion today newsletter . a version of this op-ed appears in print on november 20, 2016, on page sr5 of the new york edition with the headline: god emperor  of the internet. today's paper | subscribe
reddit and the god emperor of the internet
christine lagorio-chafkin