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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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...

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.

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.

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.

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