The New York Times recently ran a piece called “Reddit and the God Emperor of the Internet” about a pro-Trump online community called The_Donald on Reddit. The purpose of the article was to explain to non-Redditors what The_Donald is, who populates this community, and some of the specialized vocabulary used by its 300,000+ members.

It’s a pretty good article, but it’s missing some important things. I’m going to expand their analysis, but first let me give you some quick backstory about how I got involved in this stuff. Back in March, during the presidential primaries, I realized could not name any real live Trump supporters from my various friend circles. I could not think of a single friend in real life or in social media that had mentioned liking Trump or supporting him. And yet he kept winning, so I was really confused. Who is voting for this guy? Am I being pranked? Trump voters must exist, but why haven’t I met any? If they’re not talking to me, who are they talking to?

So, I decided that my social media must be an echo chamber, and decided to find some Trump supporters elsewhere. At this point, I was already a Reddit user, but I had mainly posted in computer science-related subreddits, and occasionally wandered into the SandersForPresident subreddit. But everyone on Reddit seemed to know about The_Donald, the subreddit that was ground zero for mocking Bernie supporters, starting flamewars with the Hillary “shills”, and trying to get their “spicy” Trump meme images promoted to Reddit’s front page. Since I study online software development communities in my academic research, it seemed natural for me to collect data about The_Donald, just like I would do in my normal research.

The first thing I noticed about The_Donald is the highly specialized vocabulary used by the in-group. The learning curve is not terribly steep, but there is definitely a set of jargon that is used to signify belonging. The NYT article touches on some of the terms, but here are my additions:

Another thing that was very interesting to me was a type of initiation ritual that was developed for former Bernie supporters to pledge their allegiance to Trump. The ritual goes like this: first, the “afterberner” publicly declares his support for Trump by posting on The_Donald. Next, as part of that post, the afterberner disavows Bernie Sanders. Finally, the afterberner is welcomed onto “The Trump Train” and given a coat (see #6 in the vocabulary list above).

Aside from initiating new members, The_Donald posters primarily spend their time generating memes, criticizing opponents, and sharing and commenting on links. Near the end of the general election process, some of the more weaponized autists (see #11 above) donated substantial time to working on Wikileaks, specifically in finding anti-Hillary evidence within the leaked Podesta emails. I was also working on the Wikileaks emails, so I noticed them a lot. Their presence on the DNCLeaks and WikiLeaks subreddits was definitely noticed and not always appreciated.

In a prior posting I compared some of the language and beliefs of participants on The_Donald to other online communities, such as free and open source software communities, some white supremacist online communities, and the alt-right media.