Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
It's not just the ad hoc unintuitive "solution" they came up with to mask votes (which most people agreed was a user-antagonist step in the wrong direction). It's a lot of things: their inept response to spam/vote brigading/other abuse; their lack of personalized content discovery (state of the art from 10-15 years ago would probably suffice). I could go on, as a product-driven data scientist who has been on reddit since the early days, I'm constantly struck by how little they do with the amazing data they have.
I'm usually on the fence of bringing personalized content on platforms where you usually want to remain anonymous.
I think there'd be a lot of interesting discovery available to reasonably active users of reddit. (I've spent a significant % of my career on personalized recommendations, and in my opinion reddit's product is close to ideal in many regards).
The "like X subreddit and Y subreddit? Here's Z" is not infeasable to do with ALS on a similar dataset, but requires a better computer than I have. :p
That is: compute a "similarity score" between each pair of users, higher for each post they both voted on the same way, and lower for when they voted oppositely; then, when computing the ordering for the "You Might Like" page, multiply each vote on the posts by the voter's similarity to the viewer, instead of counting each voter equally.
Or something like that - I'm just a layman tossing ideas around, no doubt there's more rigorous and/or performant statistical methods out there.
Sure for very narrow subs, with adequate moderation manpower, the filtering can be done this way.
If you participate in a subreddit, but filter out 70% of the content, in what way are you participating?
Example - and I clicked exactly once on a headline and selected the very first comment tagged "Insightful", so I made no attempt to find an example that fits my narrative:
Win 10 is good OS that would be quickly adopted if/when MS
decided to remove or make optional bolted-on telemetry
malware. Such "feature" is simply not acceptable on a non-free
product.
If you now think "They need meta-moderation, moderation of the moderators! This should improve quality!" - well, I'm sorry to tell you they've had just that for ages...
So simply implementing any mechanism in software is not sufficient. There is no magic algorithm or method, thus far anything someone tried eventually deteriorated. I must say reddit is actually doing surprisingly well, mostly because they managed to have "sites with in the site" with their individually managed subreddits.
https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/25/reddit-cto-marty-weiner-on...
I'd argue that without some guided exploration it's much easier to fall into your self-made bubble. For example unfriending people on facebook, or listening to the same 5 artists on Pandora.
It's your front page, but the method of filtering is a little different. It's gradually turned into an echo chamber filled with like-minded people, and everyone else has been driven off the site or forced to post in "fringe" subreddits that you'll never see unless you make a concerted effort to seek them out.
And that's one of the biggest problems with filter bubbles: You're so insulated from reality that you don't even realize you're in one.
Reddit is one of the worst filter bubbles on the internet. All of the top "informative" subreddits are (or have been) heavily censored by cliques of moderators who rule by opinion: Politics, News, WorldNews, etc. Even /r/Videos and gaming subreddits are heavily censored. Try talking about legacy WoW in /r/WoW and watch how fast all your posts are deleted. Most of them will be automatically filtered by AutoModerator keywords.
Or look at how much coverage all the WikiLeaks releases received during the election. Arguably one of the most important stories of the election cycle, yet without /r/The_Donald (which Reddit is now trying to suffocate and ban), there would've been zero sign of them on Reddit.
That's what happens when you let unpaid volunteers rule without rules.
Often, I learn more from watching two people from opposing sides debate a controversial topic via a podcast than reading debates on Reddit whereby it's usually a popular opinion that is defended by a majority of subredditors vs. one dissenting voice that may have a legitimate argument (e.g. asking for proof of allegations towards a certain President-Elect).
Also strangely, questions that elicit excellent discussion can often even get downvoted. I think that even if you ask a question based on a faulty premise, you shouldn't get downvoted if you have the openness to admit your ignorance and help others understand a point of view. By downvoting those questions or opinions, it only pushes that potentially popular viewpoint down to the bottom, whereby instead of helping others who may have the same POV understand the counterargument and enable true discussion between two viewpoint, it can make one side feel ostracized and unwelcome.
I'll even give a specific example: On the topic of encryption and privacy, I'm sure some people believe that "Well, I have nothing to hide, so why should I care about a government who wants to expand their surveillance capacity if I know I'm not a terrorist?" I feel like on /r/technology or /r/politics you'd get downvoted for that question, despite the fact that I'm sure a lot of readers have that particular point of view and could benefit from having someone gently articulate counterarguments.
And to make matters worse, many subreddits rate-limit your account if you receive too many downvotes. You are literally silenced for posting unpopular opinions. They also usually block new accounts, so you can't even participate in the discussion via throwaway.
"Only posts that agree with us" isn't an official rule, but it might as well be.
I've found that I only notice "echo-chamber inducing" algorithms, while I'm sure I don't even notice good algorithms.
Most users will not show an affinity to conflicting positions. It is confirmation bias in action.
I realize that Voat is a cesspool, but anonymity -- real anonymity -- tends to let you see peoples' real dark opinions (hence all the chans .. and why Google requires real profiles for YouTube comments now).
I think Reddit filters a lot more than people realize; more than just the banned subreddits and edited comments. It's been a filter bubble for quite some time.
In anycase, I've given up on Reddit .. and Voat. I guess my big addiction now is Hackernews. :-P
Which is fine, I guess. That's why we have things like Reddit! Perhaps it's a variant of the Unix Way: have sites that provide a specific style of service, either in content management or filtering or whatnot. And appreciate them for that!
And in full fairness, when I made that comment, a whole bunch of stories were non-tech related, but interesting, so I probably should retract my comment =/. (One was about bread!)
For clarification, only the breakdown of up/downs was hidden, not the overall score, and it was hidden because when people saw posts with tons of downvotes, it invited more downvotes.
You tell me.
I'm in the same lab, but I don't work on the Reddit projects currently (although I am on the most recently submitted paper, which, due to it not being accepted yet, is not on the website, either).
No, it lets you see a narrow slice of people's real, dark opinions. There are a whole host of opinions you'll never see on Voat because the user base is antagonistic to the basic ideas which underpin them, so there's no point in trying to express them on that platform. For example, the notion that men are psychologically torturing women just by enacting common male body movement patterns in the workplace would never see the light of day on Voat. That's dark. It's my real opinion.
There's no such thing as a "bastion of free speech". One person's safe space is another person's hell of antagonism.
If that's an example of what's being referred to, it's really, really unfortunate, because it's a matter of one party acting totally innocently (most of the time), and the other party being conditioned to take it in a non-innocent way. That said, I could be totally off-base.
> Why bother when we know what the response is going to be?
Perhaps I should have refrained from getting out in front of a possible reply, but I'm really interested in what that statement is referring to, and beyond what I speculated, I'm completely clueless as to what it could be, and I would rather be aware of a way behavior of mine might negatively impact others. If it is what I speculated, I'm prepared to have what I consider a substantive discussion on about that topic.
No.
> Like, you didn't even wait for me to answer the question before deciding my answer was likely to be something bogus.
Is it that hard to assume I'm acting in good faith, and just trying to figure out what what you are talking about. It's obvious by this point that a statement like that caught a few people as odd. I don't think it's realistic to expect people not to speculate when you make statements that allude to behavior that many people take very seriously, and rightly so, without providing any sort of example. I wouldn't make a statement like "I believe my mayor is implicated in a murder" without providing at least some details, or at least some generic reasoning if I wanted to keep it fairly anonymous. Otherwise I would omit a statement like that. Expecting people not to speculate after something like that is unrealistic.
To be clear, I stressed the "If", and I followed up with "I could be really off-base". I'm trying to have a substantive discussion, and allowing for myself to be wrong. If you aren't prepared to do either, please don't post bait statements like that.
Men and women move in very different ways due to gender policing. Things like how much you are allowed to/required to move your hips side to side are different for men and women. Sometimes in the workplace women are put in positions of less influence and less pay. They experience repeated instances of being passed over, thwarted, harassed, etc, while men with less capabilities, less force of will, in many workplaces advance further on average. Something as small as the way someone moves their hips while they walk immediately signals their gender, which on a given day could trigger feelings of powerlessness.
Or consider a woman who was being harassed by a man at work, and the first man she told was skeptical it was meant in the way she thought it was. She went home and got support from a bunch of girlfriends. The next day you walk into her cube with your male movement, and she's thinking "is this one on his side too?" It's possible that a more female-typical mode of moving and entering would've been less triggering for her even on an otherwise male body.
I probably need to note that I am not suggesting that ONLY women experience things like this, or that ALL women experience things like this, just that it is something that happens.
I'm not sure what you're suggesting. Do you want men to sway their hips? You think something like that would help? Or would that be a reasonable thing to ask since it sorta reduces to the structure of the body?
> Things like how much you are allowed to/required to move your hips side to side are different for men and women. I had interpreted "common male body movement patterns" as movement patterns unique to males, which severely limits the possibilities of what they could be, which is why I had speculated on movements regarding adjusting the crotch area. Given how I had misinterpreted that statement to limit the possibilities, that's the only thing I could think of.
Okay, if you're talking about double standards, and how a woman that moves her hips more might be seen a different way than one that doesn't, and this may affect perception of her, I totally agree. That's a double standard issue, to a degree, and it's not okay.
> The next day you walk into her cube with your male movement, and she's thinking "is this one on his side too?" It's possible that a more female-typical mode of moving and entering would've been less triggering for her even on an otherwise male body.
I don't really understand this. How is your mode of walking, which is natural, or any other feature, such as facial hair or just the fact that you are indeed male, anything you can help? It may sound like victim blaming to say that I think in this instance, it's really the responsibility of her to make sure she's not projecting her feelings onto innocent people, but I don't think it is. I'm not sure how this situation is any different than a white man that feels threatened by a black man one day, and the next day a separate black man approaches him casually and he feels threatened.
That is, I accept that some women, and men, might have exactly these feelings, but I'm not sure that it's the responsibility of the other party to solve that problem. Is that the point you were making, that just accepting that this situation is possible is not allowed by the point of view of those forums, or is it a step farther, and it's the idea that this is the responsibility of the other party (the man in your example, the black man in my example) to somehow change their natural state to address this? I understand the former, even if I don't know enough about Voat to assess whether I agree about them, but I'm not sure the reasoning behind the latter, if that's something you are trying to express.
I'm also an ally - I call out male coworkers who talk over or interrupt my female coworkers. And if a group of male coworkers get too "bro-y", even without women around, I'm the villain to say "yo dude, don't be sexist", and not back down from the "It's just a joke" defense. I'm a software engineer and I regularly introspect about how I can take active steps to make my environment more welcoming to women engineers.
I say all this to give you SOME of my beliefs before I say the next thing as un-insultingly as I possibly can.
The stuff you are talking about is a step too far, and it actively actively harms the cause of progressive feminism by making it seem frivolous, and immature. There is real harassment going on all around us, active/aggressive, and passive/insideous. But the way people WALK? Are you kidding me right now? I am an ally with my words and my actions. I will not change the way I walk because it signifies my maleness to a sensitive little wallflower who apparently feels powerless in front of 50% of the visible population?
I hate the "#notallmen" hashtag because it was reactionary and distracting from women who were at the time trying to speak real truth about their experiences. It misses just as much of the point as "All Lives matter".
But in the case of your example, a woman who is being harassed at work surely does not assume that all men in her workplace are against her by default, on account of their maleness. If she does, it has more to do with how they treat her, and not how they walk through the office.
I don't know how it is on Voat, but on 8chan I'm a frequent user and poster of /leftypol/, titled "Leftist Politically Incorrect", which is basically the flip-side to the infamous /pol/ boards of {8,4}chan. On there people generally don't get banned for having "wrong" opinions (though it does sometimes happen). There are no votes, there are only threads on the board.
I like this a lot more. Taking 8chan as a whole, you get to see different sides. Recently there was something at 4chan's /pol/ where a janitor was removing posts of someone espousing left-wing opinions. The board moderator intervened and said that any political position is allowed on the board.
It really depends where you go, but you are right - the user base of a site is antagonistic to people with opposite views. But they can live side by side, even with an occasional 'raid'. I don't know if I can thank the founder of 8chan enough to have a place where people of my particular opinions (Marxism, socialism) can talk. I'm sure people across the spectrum say the same.
Take a look at /leftypol/ if you want and see that there are frequently debates between sides, and it's absolutely great. I wish I could say the same about /pol/. I posted a comment saying that no matter what position you are on, a vote re-count would be good for democracy. I was permanently banned for, and this is a direct quote: "defending jews". That was the reason.
Depends where you go. That's my 2c on the issue.
Someone could post a thread with an interesting premise, and the first response could be $racial_slur, and then the hivemind would repeat the process and spam $racial_slur indefinitely without any kind of real discussion going on. For the lulz.
Right now on /leftypol/ there aren't many threads of what you describe. They do exist, but they aren't numerous. What you describe is more similar to 4chan's /b/, but even 4chan's /g/ has "tightened up" and is being steered more toward discussion (still with racial slurs but not entirely focussed on them). A notable exception is the "DESIGNATED SHITTING STREETS"/ "POO IN LOO" meme, though.
I don't know if these are just my experiences.
/p/, /trv/ - slow boards that have their own shitposts.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/09/11/terrorist-t...
This guy got articles published as radical feminist as well beyond being a fake isis terrorist, fake white nationalist, fake jewish lawyer.
But I wouldn't say that chan culture is about this, or that there is an inextricable link between them. It's simply a common occurance by nature of being anonymous. More often than not, "bait" is called out as such, but even if you're being serious, you can ignore that.
A mixed bag, but certainly not representative. I know of many on the politics board who do sincerely hold nationalist or white supremacist views, and I have argued against them. I also know many on the left-politics board who will talk you through Marx's critique of capitalism.
There is some nuance in my opinion.
Because I have oft floated the idea of starting just such a site.
Anyway, I somehow (as an avid Reddit user) missed the news that they lost their warrant canary (probably because I unsubbed from almost all the default subs due to low signal/noise ratio): https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/4ct1kz/reddit_de...
But in googling it, I did notice an interesting site related to warrant canaries: https://canarywatch.org/ EDIT: crap, no longer being updated: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/05/canary-watch-one-year-...
On top of that , there's the fact that the average user, simply doesn't care about all this freedoms or number of upvotes and stuff like that. They just want content and reddit right now has enough for everyone.
What specifically would you like to differently? I'm interested in more good discussion sites.
Once upon a time I was subbed to /r/redpill, usually to counterpoint their many arguably-false conclusions. Naturally I was downvoted to oblivion most of the time, because Reddit does not do anything to prevent echo-chambers (in fact it probably outright encourages them... because engagement), and thus, echo-chambers are a natural result of subreddits and "comment percolation via upvoting in agreement and downvoting in disagreement" (the fact that Reddit TOS says you should only downvote on irrelevancy, NOT disagreement, doesn't matter, because people are assholes and critical-thinking skill is apparently an extremely precious commodity these days).
At the same time I was subbed to a number of, eh, feminist subs, like TwoXChromosomes. Sometimes, I disagreed with them too (and got downvoted), but most of the time (slightly most of the time), I got upvoted on those.
One day, I got banned from ALL feminist subs. ALL. OF. THEM. Simply because some mod with a god complex did a cross-reference of everyone subbed to /r/redpill, and mass-banned them. My entreaties to the mods ("just look at my fucking comments in there! I'm actually fighting for you guys!!) resulted in no reinstatement. (While this should not matter, it probably didn't help that my username at the time was "GSpotAssassin".)
Around that point, I kind of lost faith in Reddit as a thing not fatally-flawed. (While deciding to completely step out of the modern gender wars. It's a cesspool, anyway.)
I cannot emphasize how much I loathe echo-chambers. And it seems to be getting worse. I literally do not understand how people cannot tolerate the occasional discomfort of a dissimilar viewpoint, especially if it is well-argued. But I'm a rationalist, and we love a good debate, basically. Sadly, this does not at all account for most people, who I like to joke "prefer to belong than be right".
There's a ton of discussion sites. It's not "reddit or HN or nothing"; it's a question of which of the bajillion forums, blogs, link aggregators, email lists, or other things you're interested in joining. There's room for all kinds of more of them, too. There's so many choices it's more a discovery problem than an availability problem.
However, if you go into it with the hopes of being the next thing that is the size of Reddit, statistically, you're going to be disappointed.
It isn't even clear to me that this is a very good goal, either. Running a site the size of Reddit is an enormous, enormous hassle. The controversies currently associated with it at the moment are merely specific instantiations of the general fact that you can count on being vilified by a good 20%+ of the community once you reach that size, that every change will be met with a huge outpouring of hatred straight into your contact box, and so on. Goodness help the poor person trying to start The Next Reddit (TM) with the naive idea that it is a good idea to be very available to the community... all that does is add to the inevitable flames some fresh flames when you have to reneg on that promise too. Unless you've got a solid plan to monetize enough to make it worthwhile, fast enough for it to be worthwhile, while still somehow organically growing without that getting in the way, I'd suggest shooting for starting a community for $X, for some value of $X of interest to you, rather than trying to be The Next Reddit (TM).
This was rolled back a couple years ago: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/16/youtube-t...
(Disclosure: I work for Google, on unrelated things.)
And consequently, Youtube comments now solely consist of civil dialogue and scholarly critiques of videos.
Some of the most interesting commentary on reddit are buried at -5 votes because almost all voting is an emotional reaction or treated as a "disagree/agree" button. I think its bad enough as-is. I don't want to see reddit build out a 'safe space' for me by analyzing my views and what subs I visit. If anything, I really want to see the threshold for when comments are collapsed to be much higher than -5, which seems easily gamed and way too quickly drowned out by knee-jerk disagree voters.
I wish these sites would move towards a slashdot-style moderation where your vote needs to be justified. Like "funny," "controversial," "insightful," "well sourced," or "poorly sourced," etc. Then you can adjust your algorithm as needed to promote quality comments, even if they go against the grain. Or users can tweak their own prefences like having a tick box or drag-n-drop to prefer 'insightful' over 'funny', for example. Or 'well sourced' over 'insightful.'
Sadly, social networks, forums, etc probably are highly disincentivized to do this as they assume we all just want tailored content. Or that if there isn't enough tailoring then users will just jump to the competition. I think most people can be okay with contradicting or some low effort, but still, insightful commentary. Perhaps we're overly coddling each other.
Some official folk from Comcast eventually showed up and almost immediately got it fixed (!). Afterwords, there were posts about how "reddit saved the day again". The customer rep who helped out ended up getting more upvotes than any of my posts. I really don't get it.
This is also why /r/askhistorians is so heavily moderated. If you just let it run itself the top comments would be low-effort junk like "Tesla god; Edison devil" and other nonsense with almost no discussions that go counter to the grain or discussion of the many shades of gray between "good and bad" and "right and wrong."
>Afterwords, there were posts about how "reddit saved the day again".
I feel sorry for the people who post incredible things, especially some of the short story writers, but the press narrative becomes "Reddit did it again!" It wasn't "reddit" it was a single author. I really wish there was more of an emphasis on individual contributions there and the people behind the usernames.
Similarly, if a newspaper publishes something about how a local company hurt a customer, it's the clout of the newspaper that "did it", not the customer.
The skillset to find a unknown security issue is rare. The skillset to post to reddit is common. I think you're wrong here. The author deserves the credit, not the site.
>Similarly, if a newspaper publishes something about how a local company hurt a customer, it's the clout of the newspaper that "did it"
Because the reporter is an employee of the newspaper and like all employees is part of the organization, so its easier to credit the organization. How is reddit like a newspaper? They aren't his employer. Its more like publishing something to the classified sections of a paper than being a reporter. It would be crazy to credit the paper for its classifieds.
FWIW, the disclosure sparked the discussion about a bug bounty program and a strong interest to reorganize their methods of raising security issues. I'm told both will go public, "soon". Whatever that means.
I don't even care which argument won in the marketplace for "music filter bubble" or even "news filter bubble" but it is interesting that very strong, perhaps equally strong, arguments exist for both.
Some of this would be forming a bubble (e.g. similarly minded subreddits to the ones you're following), and some not (e.g. somewhat random thing that you might like to binge read). You might find small subreddits on your own, that's great, but that might help other users.
No need to paint algorithmic stuff only in such dim light.
I think that's absurd. When personalization is done right you probably just don't notice it. For example, Google search makes fairly heavy use of personalization (in a great way IMO), but most people don't even remember it being added ~5-10 years ago. But, if you took it away, I think it would be starkly obvious to a lot of people.
I have come to the life conclusion that owning your own thing is the ultimate path for anyone who wants to fully realize their expert vision. That's what motivates me to do my startup.
It's really just making the math less complicated.
Their paranoia is not justified, not to the extent of the conspiracy that they so routinely engage in.
Just this week a man brought a rifle into a restaurant a fired a shot because of the conspiracy and vitriol of that side of reddit.
It destroys the legitimacy of all parts of the site and enflames conspiracies even more.
People are not stupid, my first thought was how many times did he do this without getting caught.
Then I'll leave. Simple as that.
I don't want an anarchist site where malicious actors and nasty people are free to race to the bottom because we're afraid of polite society.
The Founding Fathers of America differentiated between Liberty and Freedom.
Freedom is anarchy, but Liberty is freedom with common sense restriction. Liberty is freedom from onerous interference.
I don't want a Free Reddit, I want a Reddit that respects Liberty.
Not a Reddit which lets maliciousness exist because it can, but one which has common sense restrictions to create a better community.
It's no secret that far-more-strict control on Hacker News produces far-better outcomes for discussion than Reddit.
The hands-off approach to Reddit creates a race to the bottom for trolling and nastiness.
- http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/296789-gop-chair...
- their AMA's with famous people are pretty amazing, steve wozniak's was great.
- Can't forget their net neutrality protest either http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-29127179
- Alot of the programming related subreddits are pretty nice. It's how I got connected with Django Girls.
But did it tell us anything new? Are we surprised that Reddit admins have the technical ability to edit records in their own database? (As do the admins of other social media sites...)
That's the confusing bit about the outrage to me: I think people expected it to be secure and tight, and ... well... I'm not sure what led to that conclusion. I can easily imaging that until Spez pulled that stunt, they just figured it was too hard to screw with and that the databases were sufficiently secure. After all, the techs have full access to the machines*. It's like being surprised that your ActiveDirectory admin can change your password at will.
But you can bet your booties they'll try to lock it down a bit better now. Wouldn't expect it to be the TarSnap of forums, though. Reddit's not exactly a bastion of authenticity :P
EDIT: What I mean here is that someone has physical access to the machines, right? Or at least some amount of root? Or can log in? I guess to me it's like being outraged that the guy who targets the Hubble telescope abuses his position and points it at Earth or something as a joke; huge amount of time and money on the line and it would be a dumb thing, but it's also pretty harmless. Might still get fired for it, though.
Public key cryptography is really neat if you haven't played around with it before.
I was being half-facetious, but if you want to be able to prove that a post is actually written by you, you probably want something like PGP.
Are you meaning a feature of the site that let's you sign your post with your key as opposed to pasting your public key in the post?
So in theory, yes. But in practice - people are too lazy to validate or check the key (if the attacker replaces it with their own signed message) for every single post. This is a bigger issue the more users you have signing messages - as users begin getting lazier with checking each and every signed message.
Unless they are under a lot of eyeballs from people who do care. If Wikileaks "signs" a message and it doesn't verify or wasn't with their key - a lot of people will call it out. If I "sign" a message or use a different private key (very possible that I sign with the wrong key when I have multiples) - I doubt anyone would call me out on it.
[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!msg/golang-nuts/XoOhzUCl...
There's even a clear note that the /top stuff should go back to normal after the recalc is finished and it's back up to speed.
Frankly, I was a bit shocked by the scope of it. Seems like a huge and terrifying update.
I guess you start with backing up the production DB to an offline location. The fact that votes can be placed on old posts makes it difficult, I'd assume.
So this update? Updating on Production, baby!
Edit: I bet they do have test servers, but nothing full scale. Which really may emphasize your point more: I would love to know how they tested it and merged it in when there's only so much they can do offline!
At the least, this will break statistical analysis of Reddit data for awhile since the public datasets will not have their scores updated, which I in particular am not happy about. :p
A relevant comparison would be Craigslist who will use legal force to prevent you using data you scrape off the site.
Otherwise, it shouldn't matter.
http://www.evanmiller.org/deriving-the-reddit-formula.html
There is also the followup about ranking news items with upvotes:
http://www.evanmiller.org/ranking-news-items-with-upvotes.ht...
Makes me think that they are intentionally kicking up dust around the scale change, to draw attention away from the substantive changes to weighting/ranking.
https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/5goxk4/upcoming_ch...
https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/5gvd6b/score...
It will be their go to excuse for why content is censored off the front page now. It has been problematic to excuse away the censorship lately, so this is a nice catch all excuse they just made here.
As both the techcrunch post and the actual reddit post say, the rules around it were complicated and hard to reason about. They've basically refactored and come up with a simpler set of rules.
However, these specific changes have been planned for a while now, it was one of the principal topics of interest when spez came back. There is no "catch all excuse", it's been in the pipeline before people confused free speech and system abuse of a private website.
They have code targeting specific subreddits to actively prevent them from being on the front page. While not totally censoring those people, they are putting their fingers on the scale which many see as a form of censorship.
Source? The only thing they've done is prevent certain mod tools from being used a slingshot to the front page for specific subreddits. And this wasn't done out of hatred, it was done after consistent and continual abuse of those mod tools to antagonize the rest of the community.
How about /u/spez himself: https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/5frg1n/tifu_...
Quoting part of his post (feel free to Ctrl-F to find the context):
>> Posts stickied on r/the_donald will no longer appear in r/all.
It's not a global change to everybody. It's only for that one specific subreddit.
> And this wasn't done out of hatred, it was done have consistent and continual abuse of those mod tools to antagonize the rest of the community.
Oh really? Then why not apply it to every subreddit?
>It's not a global change to everybody. It's only for that one specific subreddit.
Again, I already pointed this out.
>Then why not apply it to every subreddit?
Once again, in my reply to you:
>consistent and continual abuse of those mod tools to antagonize the rest of the community.
Other subreddits use them for the designed purpose. For example sports related subreddits will use sticked posts for currently running games, etc. /r/The_Donald used mod stickies to rally the community behind one post on a near daily basis with the express purpose of getting it to the front page.
Notice that they can still sticky posts, it just won't show up on /r/all. The community moderators found a loophole in reddit's system and the admins stopped the abuse. Presumably, this was not done to other subreddits because they don't abuse the tool with the express purpose of antagonizing the rest of the community.
They're using it exactly as it was intended. Arguably, they're just better at using it.
The subreddit in question specifically and continually used the tool in a negative, unconstructive manner, which is obviously not what it is designed for. Other subreddits use the mod tool in various ways that don't have anything to do with the explicit purpose of stickied posts, which I pointed out, but notice I didn't label that as abuse.
I don't think that's true, I think you just don't like the content.
Notice that after the tool was limited, the frequency at which posts show up on the front page was severely decreased. The posts were not being upvoted because of the content, they were being upvoted specifically to get the thread to the front page and often with no constructive purpose.
The sticky change came in conjunction with limiting the number of posts it was possible to have on the front page, and a few others. Saying the change to sticky policy is what's keeping the_donald posts off the front page of /r/all would be incorrect.
Your timeline is backwards. They were not singled out for "censorship" before their abuse. That doesn't even make sense. Again, please notice the immediate effect of having the tool taken away from the mods. Hardly anything is organically upvoted from that subreddit anymore.
>Should they be nice to a community that consistently calls it the_dipshit
Why are you going to purposefully ignore why they have that reputation? This is like having a guy in the group that continually does annoying or obnoxious things, gets told off and then tells everyone else to "chill."
>the number of posts it was possible to have on the front page, and a few others.
Which was global.
>Saying the change to sticky policy is what's keeping the_donald posts off the front page of /r/all would be incorrect.
Except it is not. They do not reach top spots on /r/all anymore. We're talking about single posts, not the number of posts, but they don't reach as high as they used to.
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/5gvy1j/the_new_...
2. https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/5gwnwx/reddit_v...
3. https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/5gvazb/boom_tru...
4. https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/5gwe8n/posted_t...
And you can see the reasons for this expounded upon in the ancestor comments of this thread. There is a very clear cause and effect for these actions. Ignoring them is you being dishonest.
>They get brigaded and attacked just like any other major political sub
Of which there seems to be very little evidence for. On the other hand, the brigading and abuse other communities received have been well documented and brought to light both to the admins and the community at large.
>It's like having a guy in the group who thinks it's acceptable to push people around because they have a majority opinion
If you're going to insinuate that reddit is doing this because some sort of political bias, you are completely ignoring other subreddits that have remained completely untouched regardless of their political positions, despite sometimes even how questionable the subreddits themselves are, and are ignoring spez's previously stated political positions.
This claim lacks consistency at best and at worst continues to be willfully dishonest about the actions taken by the subreddit towards the community as a whole.
>They had several posts at the top of /r/all yesterday [1-4], but I guess they don't go as high.
Yes, they do not go as high and the frequency at which this happens has dramatically decreased. Indicating that previously front-paged threads were not organic.
That statement is false. Nobody is banned from that subreddit for being of a "certain mold". The rules for the subreddit are on the sidebar and they only ban users who speak ill of their candidate of choice.
The same is true on the /r/SandersForPresident and /r/HillaryClinton. If you went on either of those and insulted Sanders, Clinton, or their supporters, you'd get banned on there as well.
I'd argue the anti-Trump subreddits are demonstrably worse. They ban people who have never even posted in them because they've posted on /r/The_Donald.
>If you went on either of those and insulted Sanders, Clinton, or their supporters, you'd get banned on there as well.
Funny, I was not very kind towards Clinton. Still can post in /r/HillaryClinton.
>I'd argue the anti-Trump subreddits are demonstrably worse.
You can certainly argue that, the problem is having some kind of substantive evidence to base this claim on.
Perhaps a rogue moderator did this but AFAIK it's not the policy of the sub as a whole. I'd suggest messaging them (the moderator list) if you'd want to get unbanned.
> Funny, I was not very kind towards Clinton. Still can post in /r/HillaryClinton.
Then you must be an outlier. Forget insulting her personally, I know of people that were banned for being Democrats that disagreed with her specific policy positions. I'm not even arguing that's against any rule. Each subreddit is free to come up with there own rules for what content is acceptable.
What I take issue with is preemptive banning. At best it forces people to live a digital double life with multiple personas. If you're following the local rules then there's no reason they should be banning you for opinions you've expressed elsewhere.
> You can certainly argue that, the problem is having some kind of substantive evidence to base this claim on.
Create a dummy account, post a hello to /r/The_Donald and them see what happens. It's definitely real and goes well beyond the purely anti-Trump subreddits. You'll get banned from entirely unrelated non-political subreddits as well. The funny thing is you won't realize it until you go to them and try to reply to a post.
They just used stickies as their tool.
> Forming or joining a group that votes together, either on a specific post, a user's posts, posts from a domain, etc.
That perfectly describes what was going on with moderators leading the mob by stickying dozens of posts per day, directing them towards their brigading targets.
If you refuse to see the distinction between vote-manipulation and organic vote behavior, then I think we're done here.
If you refuse to see that I simply disagree with the fact their stickying constitutes vote-manipulation, and assume I'm arguing in bad faith because I don't hold the same viewpoint as you, then I think we're done here.
>Oh really? Then why not apply it to every subreddit?
Because every subreddit wasn't abusing the system? I thought that was pretty explicit in what you quoted.
The former is what I referenced, the latter is what I was asking a source for.
I'm comparing this to Stack Overflow, where you need 10 reputation to vote. This is a pretty trivial barrier, but it does mean that you need to put more effort into each sock puppet to be able to commit vote fraud. You also can't have "invisible" socks all that easily, you generally need to post something to get the upvotes for your socks, which results in more obvious patterns that users, moderators and automated systems can detect.
Fighting vote fraud when it is that easy to create new socks that can vote seems like a pretty hard problem to me, especially on the scale of Reddit.
There is another effect that probably doesn't apply to Reddit, but on Stack Overflow it can be pretty noticeable if you upvote crappy posts by your socks too much, and someone will investigate.
Some additional info about it here: https://reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/5goxk4/upcoming_change...
I'm thinking maybe the algorithm changes slightly alter some brigading from communities, but probably can't handle state-sponsored manipulation.
Is it me, or is it weird to see what are likely a names chosen when someone is adolescent or at least interacting in a non-professional capacity making their way into professional contexts, especially when they refer to another person, real or fictional (even if slightly changed)?
Are the corporate executives of the next generation going to go by the aliases the likes of BillGaytes and BarackOsama?
Or maybe it's me. I hate nothing more than the complaint that something is "unprofessional". It's a completely meaningless concept. If there's something actually wrong in how someone is acting, it's completely ok to call them out. Example:
"'BillGaytes' and 'BarackOsama' are insulting to Bill Gates, Barack Obama, and the gay community. It inflicts harm on people without justification, and I expect you to change these aliases"
Note how none of that applies to "KeyserSosa".
I actually wasn't focusing on the names being insulting, and wasn't meaning BillGaytes to have any gay commentary, I just thought of a famous name, and then an alternate spelling that sounded the same, and didn't think of that affiliation at all at the time (I noticed a few minutes later when re-reading it, and almost edited it to point out that it wasn't my intention). BarackOsama I thought of just because Osama sounds like Obama, and then it seemed like something someone might use because of the affiliation so seemed a more realistic choice, but I didn't really intend for the focus to be on the names having negative connotations to be part of my point.
Really, it's more that it feels weird to have someone go by someone else's name, or some other artist's creation, and that's only a little alleviated by an alternate spelling. It's not about being "professional", I think, but about it being public. It's like the person is laying some claim to that other person's identity or creation through the name, and while in a limited context that feels acceptable, it feels weird to me when it's more public, as in a news post, or expressed to millions (or billions!) of people through that person's prominance.
I'm using the word "weird" because I can't really pin down what's causing my feelings about this. That may point towards it being some misfiring emotional attachment to a concept that doesn't really have a rational explanation, or there may be a rational objection that I'm having trouble formulating but my gut is catching. I'm not sure, which is why I'm trying to explore the idea here. where I might get some input to solidify my thoughts.
They can influence and censor people they don't like. You see a lot of this going on over at /r/ethereum, where certain submissions receive high number of upvotes but little to no comment activity apart from obvious sock puppetry creating fake conversations. Comments pointing this out are quickly downvoted to oblivion or flagged.
The anxiety from Reddit is obviously clear. Their user base premium is losing it's value from an investors point of view. Mindless banters you see on Youtube are what makes up Reddit's audience with occassional anecdotal experiences that show up.
Pornhub has ton of users but are they valuable as Facebook users?
I feel like there's going to be a market correction in the quantity over quality type of social network websites who've ramped up userbase but have not extracted tangible value apart from delivering shaky metrics that advertisers are now beginning to raise questions.
It seems like the only ad platform that stood test of time is Adwords but as a small advertiser I'm turned off by the prospect of paying $1+ per click.
It seems to me that people who wanted to mass upvote/downvote a post would do so despite the vote fuzzing.
It's one thing to prevent opinions one finds unsavory from being visible. Whatever one's own opinion on such activities, we can all agree that it's within the realm of what's reasonably permissible for a company that runs a site where others can comment.
It's a quite different, and much more dangerous, thing to instead secretly modify comments expressing those opinions so that they say things other than the person who posted them actually wrote. In a purely legal sense, at least as far as I know, that's every bit as permissible as deleting such comments. In an ethical sense, they are nothing alike, and I don't think there is anything political in the statement that a company where someone has admitted engaging in such behavior, and not been immediately terminated as a direct result of it, merits extraordinary skepticism with regard to all its future doings.
He played a bad joke by swapping out his name for mods. Pretty tame stuff really. A stupid little regexp substituion prank of the kind programmers play all the time.
But yes, he did violate a trust. A sysadmin has a sacred duty and he violated it, but in a very mild way that is understandable and not a cause for future concern since he clearly realizes he made a big mistake.
I'm all for it since it seems like it would reduce trolling.
Source: at https://smsprivacy.org/ I run an online service offering completely anonymous phone numbers for ~£3/mo. And note that you only need 1 month in order to get the account validated. Most places check the phone number once at account creation time and then never again.