Quickmeme banned from Reddit for alleged vote manipulation | Hacker News Reader

Quickmeme banned from Reddit for alleged vote manipulation

dailydot.com

121 pointsOTRAustin80 comments

It's worth noting that another Redditor and mod from /r/AdviceAnimals, /u/ManWithoutModem, independently discovered different evidence that the Quickmeme posts were being manipulated. [1]

No one believed him and he was demodded. He's not happy about it.

http://np.reddit.com/r/AdviceAnimals/comments/1gvnk4/quickme...

What is the 'np.reddit.com' subdomain used for? I had never seen it before, and it looks similar to the www subdomain.

‘NP’ stands for ‘No Participation’.

“Linking to np.reddit.com instead of reddit.com will cause the subreddit to display the No Particpation stylesheet. It’s a read-only mode where users linked through the NP domain cannot vote or comment. This works only if the subreddit has installed the NP CSS. If not, linking to the subreddit with the NP domain will cause to display without the subreddit’s custom CSS, and voting and commenting will still be possible. This way we can still watch drama as it develops, but if the subreddit wishes to preserve its own culture by discouraging popcorn pissers, they have that option.”

http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/14xivv/annou...

np.reddit.com is for "non-participation": Comments at the subdomain can't be upvoted or downvoted. It was implemented by several subreddits to prevent invasions which happen rather frequently on Reddit.

The vote blocking is implemented with client-side CSS, so it doesn't work if you're using RES or using a mobile client.

wow some people have way too much time on their hands. I could get a lot of stuff done in the time that guy took to write that.

Now r/adviceanimals users are clamouring for a quickmeme alternative, because the present meme sites (eg: livememe.com) suck. Opportunity for anyone that wants to clone quickmeme.com in the next ~6 hours.

It would be hard to reconcile the design sense of HNers and the...deliberately bad design of memes.

Believe me, I've tried long, long ago. http://i.imgur.com/KSrJg.png

Can't they just upload the quickmeme generated images to imgur?

I think quickmeme's (and its ilk) success (well, besides the part based on vote-manipulation) is a great example of how smoothing a couple of steps in an otherwise mundane and everyone-knows-how-to-do-it process can be a real product. Having to make an image via quickmeme, then copy-paste and click over to imgur, and then upload it to Reddit is a trivial set of steps...yet, those steps add up...and for many users, it's just a matter of time before the labor of the steps outweighs the impulse to post a meme...and then, the volume of memes will be dampened

(OTOH, if it takes more work to post a meme, then maybe only the good ones that people make the effort to post will be seen)

No, quickmeme doesn't actually generate the final images. Instead it layers a transparent PNG on top of the image.

That's not true. They DO layer a transparent PNG on the image, but that transparent PNG has no content whatsoever. It's there just to prevent people from hitting right click and "Save Target As."

w... WOW. REALLY?

I refuse to believe quickmeme became popular because reddit liked it. That is very very anti-user.

Edit: theeeey sure do!

http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3uwwk8/#by=ad

right click, view image, go here: http://static.quickmeme.com/media/social/qm.gif

delete that element and do it again, go here: http://i.qkme.me/3uwwk8.jpg

Never heard of spaceball.gif?

Yeah, I just Inspect Element and look for the real <img> tag.

Ironic that this is posted by a HN user with no comments, and only submissions from the daily dot.

Excellent, a few months ago clicking on a quickmeme (by accident normally when not logged in) link on android resulted in multiple redirects and an attempt to download an apk which was lovely.

After that I used RES to filter quickmeme on all my desktops.

I'm not so concerned with Quickmeme et. al, (because I don't follow default subreddits) but rather I'm concerned with voting rings against personal accounts. I had an account for a substantial time where I posted good, useful comments frequently (for which I was upvoted frequently). Once, maybe twice in response to other commenters I disagreed with them, like 0.1% of my time on the site. Afterwards I found myself downvoted to hell no matter what I did, how long I waited between writing comments (ie, 6 months). Everything (quality comments) would go rather quickly to a 0 or a -1/-2. I had to make a new account, there's no way around it.

Perhaps equally concerning is how cliquey the moderators of many of the reddits are. This might not be a problem if not for their apparent line of thinking that reddit should not be a democracy, but rather a collection of little monarchies where the mods ultimately decide the content.

There are certainly still parts of reddit that are "run by the community", but the group of mods with an anti-democratic bent has gained a great amount of influence site-wide.

One recent event where a long standing minimally moderated subreddit was overtaken by this group really brought the clique to light. Someone even made a graph or two about it:

http://imgur.com/WLG9wxr http://i.imgur.com/HI2jIFq.png

Many of these mods frequent the "meta" subreddits which are often accused of exactly the sort of vote manipulation you are descrbing. The response by these groups is always a cheeky "oh hey, it's not us, we don't encourage that!" Speculation is rampant regarding the truth since people outside of reddit itself have limited abilities to look at the data needed to determine what's going on.

Perhaps reddit is going the way of digg with power users running and gaming the site. There are lots of rules about users manipulating voting patterns, but none for moderators. Once in control, they can influence a subreddit however they see fit.

The short story is that many users still see reddit as a democracy when it is increasingly not.

One thing that virtually every Reddit power user (e.g., the type of person who would want to go around down-voting everything you comment) has is an extension called Reddit Enhancement Suite[1]. One of its features is the ability to tag usernames with custom messages. It's plausible that during your various disagreements, you were tagged by various users with something that indicated why they disliked you.

So if you continued to haunt the same places those people frequented, it wouldn't matter how long you waited to comment: as soon as you did, they'd see the tag, remember whatever it is they disliked about you, and down-vote.

That's all to say I think the problem you describe is less about coordinated vote rings against individuals and more about a community with individuals who hold grudges and have the tools available to enable them. I'm not sure it's systemic at Reddit, but just from what I've seen, people flying off the handle at the slightest provocation seems to happen far more frequently on Reddit than anywhere else.

[1]: http://redditenhancementsuite.com/

Hmm, I've heard of the RES but didn't know about the specifics. When I say one or two disagreements, I really mean 1-2, and small ones at that, all things considered. I just mentioned it cause it's the only thing I could think of that might explain the systematic downvoting. As far as the subreddit, I subscribe(d) to several quite different ones so that wouldn't explain why my comments in all of those would be downvoted.

Also, thought it'd be good to add, when I mentioned before that I was upvoted frequently, it took about a year to get to 1,000 points, so it's not like I was a power-user.

> As far as the subreddit, I subscribe(d) to several quite different ones so that wouldn't explain why my comments in all of those would be downvoted.

Your comment history across all subreddits is one click away.

To give you an example of how quickly it can escalate, I once saw a comment that was completely incorrect, of the form "Wow, it's interesting that X is caused by Y!" I left a simple comment, "X is caused by Z, not Y." and left it at that.

The original comment subsequently received a single down-vote, and not from me. Likely someone who saw their comment and saw that it was wrong.

The original commenter replied to my comment, "Thanks for the reply, but it the down-vote was totally uncalled for." A few minutes later, before I could even respond, they deleted their comment and then every one of my 100+ comments were down-voted. Most of my comments prior to that had zero down-votes at all.

That's just my anecdote, and it's still possible you were subjected to coordinated down-vote ring, but you said this was the result of an isolated incident of 1-2 small disagreements. It seems more plausible that you were just tagged by a vindictive Reddit user than something particularly sophisticated.

more likely they use soemthing like metareddit.com and a bot[1] to downvote

1: http://www.sadiqk.com/reddit-upvotedownvote-bot/ As an example

Most likely it's the kind of bot you've mentioned. It makes the most sense, more than "stick-up-the-butt" users combing my comments in the past and as they happen in order to downvote them.

I think this is one of the biggest concerns for Reddit going forward. Fighting bots can be approached systematically and with relatively decent results. Fighting coordinated groups with an agenda and voting brigades is a much harder beast.

The SRS "fempire" is probably the scariest case study in all of this.

Oh, that's funny. Shit Reddit Says is a sub-reddit that calls out offensive comments on Reddit. They've been called the PC Police and the like, and they appropriated "fempire" after people got sensitive about being called out for sexist comments. The rules say not to downvote the linked comments, but people think they do, or that they upvote stupidity just so they can highlight it. So research was done [1], and no evidence of that sort of misbehavior was found.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/prcpf/a_shor...

On the contrary, SRS is one of the most innovative uses of a subreddit since Reddit's inception. Think back to the days of forums, LiveJournals, mailing lists, IRC, etc. Whenever an issue of discrimination arose, it was always derailed one way or another. Between vocal opponents, concern trolls, and "explain to me how this offends you"-types, it was impossible for someone who experienced discrimination to find a safe space to legitimize their experience.

With SRS, instead of allowing any kind of discourse related to the validity of a claim, every participating member is required to just accept the claim as valid. There is no driving force to change Reddit, and there is no activism involved. It's simply a safe space for people who are offended to express themselves in an environment that won't be questioned, especially when Reddit is known for having a hive mentality.

No offense, the warm and fuzzies are great; but this is the anti-thesis of intelligent and productive discourse.

I wouldn't mind at all if they just wanted to create a safe place for these things to be voiced, but they threaten the integrity of the entire community with the current choice of actions.

Pretty much the only reason people have a problem with SRS is they don't want to have their sexism pointed out and/or challenged.

the owners of grumpy cat hired a "meme manager" to promote and sell their meme. I now hate all internet memes.

http://mashable.com/2012/04/17/meme-management/

You're really surprised that a concept that has gained worldwide popularity might actually warrant "brand curation"? I hope you hated memes before grumpy cat then.

I did but grumpy cat was marketed to make money virtually at its inception. I remember them selling merchandise at NYCC last year, that's two weeks after they posted it on reddit.

The commercialism and exploitation of this cat shortly after it's birth has really rubbed me the wrong way.

I think Reddit (and HN) should make votes and ip addresses transparent for external analysis. The spammers hide behind these.

They could also be more brutal with punishments, route every single link to the offending site through a page that says they were spamming so it's an inconvenience for people and a wall for search engines.

No, IP addresses are a private matter. The identities behind pseudonyms should never be exposed unless the affected person decides to do so.

Expose them as a hash with a hidden salt. Maintains user privacy while exposing a static data point that can be used for analysis.

ah, that might work, if users can't be tied to upvotes, just that one upvote can be tied to others. Still, if someone finds a way to associate a username to a hash, then there could be real life consequences for that.

I like the idea, but it's playing with fire.

It doesn't have to be a reversible hash, just assign a guid for each ip address.

There are probably subreddits where that information could be potentially harmful (eg upvotes in jailbait way back when) but that can be solved by not enabling it across the board, and it's not an issue here. Digg made their upvotes public from the start, and so do delicious, facebook, stumbleupon etc.

Isn't that what Reddit did to bootstrap its site?

Reddit astroturfed their own site with fake users. These guys are 1) astroturfing other people's sites, 2) practicing unethetical tactics by down-voting links to competing websites with automated bots.

The point is that they are equally dishonest.

Astroturfing your own site is a longstanding tradition in media. A long time ago in a career far, far away I wrote classified advertising software for desktop publishers, typically small outfits like trade magazines or penny-savers.

When launching a new feature like classifieds, it does you no good to put out a blank page. So absolutely every customer that didn't already have classified ads would astroturf with fake ads.

The ethics of their profession was to discard any mail-in replies unread. For example, one customer used my software for personals. They had a strict rule that any reply to one of the "fake" mailboxes was to be shredded immediately upon receipt, unopened. They didn't even want them laying around lest someone write down a name or return address.

One there are enough "real" ads, the fake ones are phased out. I can't really say whether it is right or wrong, but I can say it seems to be a standard practice predating the world wide web.

that's interesting, but they sure do seem the same. I'm thinking the only difference here is cultural. Like how we don't view reporting a price as $4.99 instead of $5 as unethical.

Here's a phrase I feel comfortable using: It's a deceptive practice.

hmm. I want to reserve judgment until I read about reddit astroturfing their own website. It reminds me of a golang presentation, where the speaker created an omegle clone, but to boot-strap it he used markov chain bots if no one connected in 5 seconds. http://vimeo.com/53221560 . I didn't think of that as a particularly immoral thing to do.

edit: Actually I'm not really sure what to search for here. Do you have an article going over the details?

Pretty sure that Reddit is out of its bootstrap phase.

What kind of idiot made the owner of quickmeme.com a moderator of the subreddit that contained presumably most of its posts?

Red dit bans the posting of personal info. They didn't know.

Hm, understandable, but then how did they learn it after the fact?

And as such, content submitted within these subreddits are regularly featured on Reddit's front page each day and capable of being clicked on by more than 1 billion people.

What an odd thing to say. That same hypothetical line of thinking could lead you to say that I'm capable of receiving a trillion dollars tomorrow, simply because I have a fedwire destination address and that much money could hypothetically be transferred to it. Neither has even a slight chance of actually happening.

But there will be nothing left! It will now be all fabricated Facebook posts and 4chan content that is intellectually low-brow enough for the Reddit hivemind to understand!

And nothing of value was lost.

> Gaming Reddit for traffic has become a regular frustration for the community, which boasts more than 22.9 million monthly visitors in the U.S. alone. This is particularly true within Reddit's default subreddits. All new Reddit users are automatically signed up as subscribers of the site's default subreddits, which include r/AdviceAnimals, r/Atheism, and r/Politics.

Hmmm...maybe this problem could be alleviated by not auto-subscribing new users to a meme-based forum? Of all the great subreddits, AdviceAnimals (albeit, which is pretty funny sometimes), seems like a silly one to acquaint new users to.

Have any of the bustups of voting rings been done algorithmically? That is, does reddit have a way to pick out cluster of reddit accounts that seem to behave like scripted bots? It seems all of the major domain bans (such as the Atlantic) were done through manual user suspicion and inquiry.

The top ten subreddits(excluding NSFW ones), based on the number of subscribers, are chosen to be the default ones.

New accounts do not increase the default subscription count, until they subscribe or unsubscribe to any other subreddit.

You can find some good comments on the matter here http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1dtvwz/i_belie...

Also excluding any subreddits which specifically ask not to be included. I cannot remember specific cases of this, though.

A while ago, r/askscience was briefly listed as a default subreddit, until the moderators (and probably users) asked for the subreddit to be delisted.

Not really sure what that has to do with anything. That’s just a policy that can be changed.

But what do I care about the total shithole reddit.

Algorithmic voting bans are extremely dangerous because a false positive could be devastating for both the parent site and the linked domain. Manual intervention for such an important policy decision is crucial.

Autobanning is in my opinion tricky because there's a risk of triggering an arms race between autodetection and obfuscation, and giving quick feedback to the cheaters could turn out to help them.

Why is anybody subscribed to something by default on Reddit is the biggest mystery to me.

Because the alternative default, a blank page, would be a really boring user experience.

Another alternative could be to show r/all by default and present it as a "un-sub from what you don't like" sort of option.

Or /r/all without the NSFW subreddits, which ends up being indistinguishable from the default.

That's not true. There are only around 20 default subreddits. r/all is everything.

Yeah, and nearly everything on the front page of /r/all comes from those 20 subreddits plus a few NSFW subreddits. The smaller subreddits probably don't even want front page exposure.

Who gives a shit?

This can only be seen as a good thing as Quickmeme tends to be an extremely heavy site with stuff that could be easily handled by simple image linking or, at worst, imgur.

Quickmeme, for the most part, was only regulated to /r/AdviceAnimals, which says a lot about the quality of /r/AdviceAnimals.

It won't be enforced I see many sites supposedly banned still posting everyday websites such as physorg and the Atlantic.

Weren't those bans lifted?

I don't know, communication isn't so great, I have no idea which sites are officially banned, which have bans lifted. There may be a spot on the reddit blog or somewhere else that I'm not aware of but really it shouldn't be my responsibility as a user to enforce it that's the job of admins and mods, that's why they exist.

It doesn't seem to matter though because I have seen banned websites post even when they are supposed to be banned, reddit doesn't seem to block the url it just mentions the website is spamming reddit and that seems to be all we're told.

There is an unofficial (?) subreddit that monitors of banned websites, look to the right at the sidebar for the link to the list http://www.reddit.com/r/BannedDomains/

The bans of The Atlantic and other large publishers has been lifted...it was said early on that the bans were just temporary:

http://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/v03qc/physor...

And speaking of temporary bans...I thought dailydot used to be blacklisted from HN? I'm glad to see that it wasn't a permaban.

It looks like dailydot has started running spam accounts - the OP and this one:

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=sexyalterego

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=OTRAustin

Something something pots and kettles and allegations and blackness.

I have always thought imgur, quickmeme and other meme site (forgot its name) are owned by Reddit owners or executives. It is impossible to get upvotes if you embedded image on your site/blog.

imgur.com is owned by Alan Schaaf, he's not associated with reddit. The reason images don't get traction if they're embedded on a website or blog is because they're not compatible with the reddit clients people use (mobile) and RES (reddit enhancement suite). Most people that use r/adviceanimals want instant gratification, if your image doesn't load in under a second nobody cares and will move on, it's why imgur is so popular: it's fast and consistent.

I believe conde nast owns reddit & imgur.

Conde Nast purchased reddit in 2006, then in 2011 (maybe 2012) it became "independent" again with the parent company of Conde Nast, Advance Publications, retaining an ownership stake of the newly formed reddit, inc. [1][2]

Imgur is a totally separate entity, the company was founded by Alan Schaaf using reddit as a place to "launch" it[3], they've never announced outside funding and there has never been any talk of reddit (or Advance Publications, or Conde Nast) having any ownership stake.[4]

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/14unl6/reddi...

[2] http://www.reddit.com/r/lounge/comments/1g73ec/whats_reddits... (screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/ZoQKmOh.png)

[3] http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_to...

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imgur

Schaaf first posted about Imgur on Digg, and when it didn't gain traction there he posted it on Reddit. It was disingenuous of him to call it a "Gift to Reddit" in that post.

In what way is imgur not a gift "to" reddit? It might not have been "exclusively for reddit", but I'm willing to be a huge sum of money that most top subreddits, including the first 4 pages of the frontpage are dominated by imgur links.

imgur was the first image host (before minus) that didn't suck, wasn't anti-user, freely allowed hotlinking and had a minimal page when they didn't hotlink.

It's almost never down and the links don't magically fail or expire after they get lots of traffic like many other hosts.

Most "sites/blogs" can't handle the traffic that reddit sends when content makes it to a popular page. Users have learned the hard way that imgur (and a few others) are the only reliable links. Personally, I almost never click any image that's not on imgur because they time out or displaying the image is just incidental to displaying ads.

The creator of imgur was a reddit user who made no attempt to hide it. It was initially done as a side project for the benefit of reddit users and then spiralled into something much bigger. It's this guy: http://www.reddit.com/user/MrGrim

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