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September 12, 2024

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Open Measures Datasets: What is Scored?

Open Measures’ datasets include millions of posts from Scored, an alt-tech platform spun-off from the banned subreddit r/TheDonald.

TLDR

Background

Scored (sometimes also known as scored.win, communities.win, Win Communities, or TheDonald) is a collection of Reddit-like sites that spawned from the now-banned, once-popular Reddit community r/TheDonald. The community was dedicated to discussion about Donald Trump and cropped up during his first run for president in June 2015. 1Timberg, C., & Dwoskin, E. (2020, June 20). Reddit shuts down r/the_donald after years of problems with racism, anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories – The Washington Post. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/06/29/reddit-closes-long-running-forum-supporting-president-trump-after-years-policy-violations/

Previously, Open Measures (then called SMAT) researchers worked with the transparency collective, Distributed Denial of Secrets, to release nearly two million posts related to the January 6, 2024 attack on the Capitol.

History 

The pro-Trump subreddit r/TheDonald, which Scored grew out of, regularly found itself in hot water with Reddit administration for not meeting the site’s moderation standards. In June 2019, Reddit quarantined r/TheDonald, making it more difficult to find and access.

As a result of the ban, moderators of r/TheDonald launched the first Scored community and encouraged users to move to the site. The subreddit was officially banned at the end of June 2020. Reddit later made an announcement with the reasoning behind banning r/TheDonald on their own site:

The community has consistently hosted and upvoted more rule-breaking content than average (Rule 1), antagonized us and other communities (Rules 2 and 8), and its mods have refused to meet our most basic expectations.2R/announcements on reddit: Update to our content policy. Reddit. (2020). https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/hi3oht/update_to_our_content_policy/

At the time, channel admins directed users to thedonald[.]win, which was later renamed patriots[.]win. Since its inception, there have always been a variety of Scored community forums. TheDonald (or patriots[.]win) is far and away the largest, most active community.

Graph showing Open Measures' scraped data of Scored
Activity across Scored communities from September 2019 through August 2024 on Open Measures. Each bar represents one month’s worth of posts and is broken down to show the top five most active Scored communities (all other communities are lumped into the yellow “other”). Patriots[.]win (appearing above as “thedonald”) is the most popular community.

Scored Communities

Open Measures’ list of datasets includes Scored, which includes scored[.]co (also found at communities.win) and the renamed community patriots[.]win (the successor of Reddit’s now-banned subreddit r/TheDonald).

Due to the [.]win top level domain used by many of these communities and the site’s evolution over the years, it is also sometimes referred to as communities.win, Win Communities, or TheDonald. Various other .win sites also exist under Scored’s umbrella. 

Scored sites’ user interfaces are similar to Reddit’s. Users with accounts can create new threads on the site to share text, videos, and/or images. Other members can comment on threads as well as upvote or downvote them, thereby “scoring” a post. Threads that receive higher levels of engagement appear higher on the page, regardless of how recent they are. To determine engagement, the site takes both aggregate score and volume of replies into account.

Front page of scored[.]co on Aug. 30, 2024.

Sub-Communities on Scored

Also like Reddit, various sub-communities exist within Scored communities (using the prefix “c/” rather than Reddit’s “r/”). Some communities, such as c/animals and c/positive, are relatively innocuous, with posts ranging from cute cat photos to family home videos. 

Scored makes the following disclaimer on their site:

Scored is not itself a free speech platform, and users should abide by the rules of each community that they participate in.3Is scored a free speech platform?. Scored. (2023, November 1). https://help.scored.co/knowledge-base/is-scored-a-free-speech-platform/

However, many Scored communities are filled with content that would likely violate terms and conditions of other mainstream platforms. One such community is c/MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way), which hosts chauvinist and misogynist content purporting to promote the individualism and self-ownership men achieve when they “avoid the dangers of interacting with women”.4Bates, L. (2020, August 26). Men going their own way: The rise of a toxic male separatist movement. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/aug/26/men-going-their-own-way-the-toxic-male-separatist-movement-that-is-now-mainstream

Other communities are modern iterations of communities that have been banned on other platforms. For instance, here’s a direct quote from the c/OmegaCanada community [sic]:

F​​ormerly known as r/metacanada, a reddit forum largely (but not exclusively) populated by conservatives, many of whom were arbitrarily banned from other forums for being conservatives.

The content Scored users share is moderated by each individual channel, a policy which appears to entail less enforcement. Among other unmoderated extremist content, one poster on the c/OmegaCanada community was seen spreading anti-trans propaganda including untrue statistics and the implication that violent impulses follow gender affirmation.

Structure and Business Model

Scored is owned by a Delaware corporation, True Domain Privacy, LLC. The main site, scored[.]co, is hosted on Cloudflare and appears to be based in Florida.5Whois scored.co. whois.com. (n.d.). https://www.whois.com/whois/scored.co The site is funded by premium user subscriptions and donations, in addition to advertising revenue. 

Open Measures researchers have observed that advertisers on Scored include gold brokers. These brokers’ ads often suggest that Scored users invest in gold through their 401(k)s. They also often include clickbait-style health tips promoting “unique rituals” and “simple tricks.” Some of these advertisers include American Hartford Gold, slimming Tea [sic], and Arius Solution.

example ads from score
Examples of advertisements on Scored, both from gold brokers and various alternative health companies.

Open Measures researchers also found a number of ads from WellnessGaze, sometimes known as WellnessGaze Men or Wellness Gaze Neuro. The company’s ads promote “solutions” to medical issues ranging from erectile dysfunction to neuropathy. Upon further review, researchers found the following disclaimer at the bottom of the WellnessGaze solution site: 

This is an advertisement and not an actual news article, blog, or consumer protection update.

These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. This information is not intended to be a substitute or replacement for any medical treatment. Please seek the advice of a healthcare professional for your specific health concerns. Individual results may vary.

This website is a market place. As such you should know that the owner has a monetary connection to the product and services advertised on the site. The owner receives payment whenever a qualified lead is referred but that is the extent of it.

WellnessGaze is headquartered in Hong Kong and appears to be a wholly-owned subsidiary of Neuropathy Alliance. The various companies and subsidiaries buying ad space on sites frequented by alt-tech communities may warrant further research.6https://wellnessgaze.com/terms-conditions/

Dataset

Open Measures has collected over 60 million posts across many Scored communities since its first sites appeared in late 2019. The dataset has information on over 100,000 accounts. From our data, the highest activity on Scored was from November 2020 to January 2021, the period of time encompassing the 2020 Presidential Election in the US until the riot at the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

posts on scored from Jan 2019-June 2024
Number of posts by month within Open Measures’ Scored dataset from January 2019 through August 2024, showing a spike of activity in November 2019 to January 2021.

There is a notable spike in chatter on Scored starting in mid-July 2024, lasting for a few days. The assassination attempt against Donald Trump happened on July 13, 2024.

number of posts a day on Scored from July 2024 to Aug 2024
Number of posts by day within Open Measures’ Scored dataset from July 2024 through August 2024.

Search

Open Measures plans to continue to monitor, collect data, and surface insights from various Scored communities. For researchers interested in using Open Measures’ Scored dataset, the fields below can be used for specific searches and functions:

Field Explanation 
html_parsed_html The content of a post on Scored. The content field also exists, though the data still contains html formatting tags. html_parsed_html is easier to read and contains the same content.
author The username associated with the author of a post.
community site These two fields can each tell you which Scored community forum a piece of content was posted to. For example, it might tell you that a comment was made on patriots[.]win
datatype This field tells us whether we are looking at a post or a comment (a comment is a response to a post).
title The title of a post, or the title of the post that a comment is replying to.
score The cumulative number of upvotes or downvotes a comment or post has garnered. 

Conclusion

Because the American political right drives much of Scored’s activity, our dataset may be useful to researchers. Open Measures’ Scored dataset is available via our Public App or API.

Researchers can also use our platform to track users’ migration patterns from one platform to another. This may be useful for evaluating platforms (like Scored) with a policy of self-moderation for individual users and channels.

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