I got 10k post karma on Reddit with (and without) fast.ai
a8b.io
a8b.io
I guessed that the trailer would probably get added to the Star Wars YouTube page at around the same time it aired on TV, so I wrote a script to scrape the YouTube page every few seconds, and if a new video was added, submit the link to one of the big subreddits.
Sure enough, my hunch was correct, and my submission of the trailer on YouTube wound up being the first. The upvotes and comments poured in, skyrocketing the post briefly to the #1 link on Reddit's front page. This felt pretty cool and resulted in several thousand post karma. I didn't use the program after that, having satisfied my curiosity as to whether or not it would actually work. But it did make me think about just how easy it is to farm karma on Reddit, and how useless it is as a proxy for "trust" or "reputation" or anything other than what it is - fake internet points.
If the mods reupped it, then it'd work out really well for the original submitter. If karma mattered, I suppose it'd be worth trying a few times to see how it worked out.
More than fake internet points, it's a distilled popularity contest, and we know popular people isn't necessarily trustworthy. Reddit calling it karma gives it more credit than it deserves.
yeah, the intention was good, but that's not how it works, unfortunately.
Anyone who downvotes like that is just lazy, close minded and cowardly. It’s sad that it happens so often.
This frustrates me to no end. If someone can type out a long comment explaining their position, the least you can do is reply with why you disagree, in addition/instead of hitting the downvote.
I remember PhpBB and vBulletin forums having karma plug-ins back in 2005, this isn't something invented by reddit at all
I think you put in far more effort in writing that script, than the average karma-farmer puts in.
Far easier to just repost photos without attribution.
You posted a high quality post (being first) and assume if you wrote the script you also took time to write an accurate title.
While it is arbitrary and noise you beat out those you posted 30 seconds ahead of - the same hours a bunch of people posted home videos, self-promotion, or old clips and didn't get any karma.
It is imperfect but the karma system had some desired effect.
I have to say, do people really take karma, upvotes, credit, fake internet points etc. As a measure of trustworthiness? I know reddit pushes this idea but do people actually participating in communities with point systems see those with high karma points or whatever as trustworthy?
Personally, i've always assumed people with high amounts of karma or stars are just people who've spent a significant amount of their lives on a site and participated a lot.
Don't get me wrong, I get the little dopamine rush and enjoy getting points and stuff, but I look at the whole thing the same way as a high score board on a video game or something.
Now you made me curious about your opinion of karma on places like stack overflow.
I've never participated much in any of the stack overflow communities other than passively. I tried asking a question once that I hadn't seen on there but I got downvoted and told off so meh...I just stick to searching and passively reading mostly. I have thought of updating some older answers but they were usually locked and closed to discussion.
Thanks for sharing your perspective.
Karma thresholds are highly effective spam filters.
People still ask questions about it to this day as to why there's random members with this.
And that's the reason why a lot of sites sell high karma accounts, whether those were hijacked, or karma farmed farmed for that purpose. People can make quite a few bucks if they find an effective way to farm it.
As much as everyone claims the system is for rewarding on topic discussion, in reality it is used to award points to people who echo whatever is popular and to put wrong think at the bottom.
Example questions:
- Did they gain all their karma in one post, or was it gradual? Gradual karma is better because it implies that they're probably not a troll.
- Did their karma come from the current subreddit or a different one? Just because you have karma from a popular sub doesn't mean you're a good contributor to a niche sub.
- How frequently are they downvoted? Frequent negative karma in even-handed subreddits is a bad sign.
- Does the user have good reputation in related subreddits?
So it's usually not the number that matters, but the context around that number and how it came to be. That said, usually these things only matter when a user is misbehaving: if you're a mod you need to know whether they're having a bad day, or if they have a history of breaking rules and trolling.
The vast majority of people say GitHub stars and leave it at that. Occasionally they also mention checking how active the project is. Very, very rarely, someone will say they scan the code, maybe run the tests, check the open issues etc.
This is production code!
You never got to see how many people was bidding against you, and I always wondered how you could know it wasn't the website jacking up the bid.
I am reminded of that scam every time I see a karma/upvote system.
I understand the "anyone could have done that" or "they could have just waited 3 seconds longer" arguments... but you actually did it, and did it 3 seconds faster than anyone else, so they got a better "product" and you got some internet points. Not a bad deal, in my mind. It's almost a little heartwarming.
Why?
Ended up with thousands of points in karma for something as easy as copy pasting the URL on reddit as soon as it was available. Never cared about posting articles on reddit before or after those events, but I figured this was an easy way to make my score way high and keep it that way for the next few years.
What are real internet points
Going truly viral on Reddit/HN is still ultimately random as well, which is why reposting (within reasonable amounts) is allowed on both platforms.
As someone who works on social media automation/tooling for their day job (2018 rough overview of my work: https://tech.buzzfeed.com/how-were-building-superpowers-for-... ), I do agree that ML/AI can be helpful to aid human curation, but definitely not a magic end-all-be-all that growth hackers nowadays want it to be. Simple heuristics can be very powerful as well.
It's a direct counterexample to the other comments saying karma is meaningless and isn't or shouldn't be used as a proxy for trust. It might be misplaced trust in some cases, but it is trust nonetheless.
More importantly, it doesn't affect the submission ranking algorithm at all.
More seriously these posts got me interested in what features besides downvoting would be added at various karma levels which led me to your git page on the topic. Linked here for others interested:
True for posts, and true for comments if they get upvotes. Downvotes however make comments less valuable. I imagine some people see the gray/faded comments and just presume low value content, which may not be the case.
The points you got for a particular post of course matters, since it affects the visibility.
You may not even know this is being done to you because it uses a shadowban-esq mechanism where the comments remain visible to you.
1. Fly out to Anchorage, Alaska
2. Drive to Denali visitor center, (Denali State Park)
3. Take the Bus to Denali (~$50)
You are almost guaranteed to see a wild grizzlies along the way. The bus will stop so you can take a photo. You can even get off and go for a hike if you like. They will pick you up on the way back. (or whats left of you...) If you decide not to, thats okay too. You will have many near death experiences, as your school bus drives along a dirt road along steeped cliff mountain edges, for many miles. The bus takes you to heart of Denali, where you can see Mount Mckinley (Highest mountain in North America), and where temperatures can dip to minus 60 degrees in winter.
You are greatly underestimating that cost
The way to do it cheaply is to fly in late June/July and camp in Denali park. The weather is warm enough for camping and its fantastic. I actually feel camping is the best way to do it!
Assuming you already own camping gear. And can pack some food.
Here's how it can be done:
$100 - Camping in Denali Park: $45 (entrance fee) + $17/night x 3
$200 - $50/day * 4 days car rental
$50 - Fuel / Snacks ( 300 miles round trip from Anchorage)
$50 - Denali Bus Ticket
$50 - Firewood/Misc
_____
$450 - 4 days/3 nights.
Budget left for flight $550 .
Depending where you fly in from you could come in under 1k. Seattle round trip flight in June $400. NY/Alaska is $620 round trip. Which would push you over 1k. But if you convince a friend to go with you, you could split the car/camping costs.
You can also do wild camping for free, and if you're into trying fly fishing, I definitely recommend getting a fishing license.
Fishing License Costs: 1 day - $25 / 3 days - $45. A basic Fly fishing kit can be bought < $100.
1- Live close to Alaska.
I could try driving there, but the Bering strait might be an obstacle.
I can't be the only one who wants to see the full spreadsheet.
I had to shut that bot down, because eventually just reposting a random popular meme/image from the last 24 hours with a nonsensical title started becoming far too successful and it ended up getting 2,648,254 post karma, while often getting its own posts near the top of /r/all: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditSimMeta/comments/c5besk/th...
Faulty algorithms? algorithms working as intended? vote purchase? intentional spam?
Do you scrape, log, and track, and compare user comments, and profiles on reddit or any other site? What data do you collect?
Building a reddit post bot with fast.ai was an fun project, however a bit of manual effort beat out my months of web crawling and compute time.
Oh well... (63% of the 10k points were achieved manually)
He creates a classifier with 5 label,s and gets 50% accuracy on the cross-val (This may be ok, may be terrible, we don't know), but then only uses the labels for one of those classes. What's the precision/recall on that class?
Also, he's taken a multi-class classification approach to what is essentially a regression task. He's trying to predict the # of upvotes a post will get, and there are approaches that'll do that, but this isn't one of them.
It's fun to see NLP applied to these sort of problems, but this isn't a good example of how to do it well.
Maybe crawl the net to find some interesting news, yes, but most of all assign a score to all the news that come my way (RSS, aggregators, etc), and filter out the useless ones.
And while you are at it, apply this to e-mail too. Maybe with a small chance of letting some trough to avoid getting stuck in a local maxima, or locking someone out.
At least this would make it much easier to read the important news first, most of the time. Though important != interesting.
1. Why was this formed as classification instead of as regression? Seems much more like a regression problem (predict how many upvotes you will get given a reddit post)
2. Seems like it could have been effective with better pre-training. I'd love to see the author rerun the experiments with the likes of GPT-2 or other pre-trained models vectorizing the text first.
Otherwise you will probably have a none-size fits all algorithm.
Seems like an incremental decison tree problem with weights around karma and time of day.
I think if you'd gone into an investment space, you might have earned the score faster by virtue of earning other people money from your picks.
You also shoehorned AI into the story so you could generate some meaningless internet points with the impressionable youth on Hacker News, too?
How about you do something meaningful and ethical with AI instead. Then you might even earn an upvote from me.
I rephrased what they confessed about their deeds.
The deeds are, indeed, in my estimation, unethical.
I assumed that part is not controversial, as the cheated system in question is called the Karma system.
Surely it is not news to you that cheating karma is unethical?
It was instituted to foster trust and good behavior among visitors of Reddit.
The posting is about cheating that system.
I must be missing something here. Please explain.