Consumers and Curators: Browsing and Voting Patterns on Reddit | Hacker News Reader

Consumers and Curators: Browsing and Voting Patterns on Reddit

arxiv.org

37 pointsnkurz8 comments

1. This paper asks the question "How often do users actually read the content of the post before they vote on it?" After recording the behavior of 300 Reddit users for a year, they claim that almost 3/4 of the votes for stories are based on the title of the story rather than the content.

2. The "Hacker News Guidelines" (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) state that one should not accuse others of not having read the article before commenting: "Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article".

3. The guidelines do not however say "Please read the article before commenting", nor do they say "Please don't upvote articles based solely on their title". Should they?

> The guidelines do not however say "Please read the article before commenting", nor do they say "Please don't upvote articles based solely on their title". Should they?

I see no potential for harm and the potential for positive results from one or both of those as long as "Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article" were to remain

Seems like it depends on the content, and whether or not I was previously aware of it. Sometimes it's a news story I already heard about, so I'd feel comfortable upvoting w/o reading.

It also seems dependent on the site. On HN I'm more likely to read articles that are posted, but not as much on Reddit.

Thing is, you can’t police it like any of the other guidelines. You can just remove threads of arguments over that, but I’m curious how often that would be.

Personally, though, based on recent world events I think those should be added.

IMO the voting arrows should be hidden prior to click event firing on the article's link.

I would say this is at least worth discussing.

tl;dr: tl;dr.

At first I flagged this because I thought it was just a low-effort joke, but then I realized it was actually concise and insightful. So I unflagged it and upvoted it. Guess I should have read it better the first time!

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