Reclaim Reddit: Greasemonkey script to remove Ron Paul stories
reddit.com
reddit.com
I think it's quite possible that in 10 years most of us internet geeks will primarily remember Ron Paul as "that libertarian guy who was always upvoted on social news sites". Unless he wins ;-)
So Reddit should be representative of the tastes of someone who got 1,000 on the SAT, makes 29,000 a year, has 2.1 kids, and is morbidly obese?
That "small group leading" effect is what makes any-to-many media such a ferment of ideas. Suppose you used an algorithm that refused to raise articles with less than mainstream interest. You'd end up duplicating the banality of broadcast TV, which also relies on broad and shallow appeal. There's a reason the slang calls it the "lowest common denominator"!
There's no self-censoring on the net. People post and write just whatever they feel like.
As far as I know, no one thinks voting rings should be a component of "how social networks actually work." And in fact, reddit has software for neutralizing them. It's just not good enough.
Whether it's 500 RP supporters purposely joining reddit or 500 of the existing reddit users who happen to be rabid Paul supporters, it's a distinction without a difference. The rest of us have to put up with the behavior of reddit simply because it has the attribute "all it takes is 500 votes to get a story to the top of the frontpage"
For a long time I was convinced RP supporters were purposely gaming the system. I've changed my mind in the last few months, though, after meeting and talking to some of these folks. They just are really excited, that's all, and they're already reddit, or digg, or whatever users.
Another way to look at it is thus: while it's true that a small number of users constantly "run" large social sites, that's because only a small number of users give a hoot about ranking or rating articles. The rest are just apathetic. But for certain topics, like Ron Paul, or LISP, or Mac vs PC, or tax policy, or weasel juggling, a _new_ set of small users suddenly becomes very energized. The system works as long as everybody is fairly complacent. Once anything starts really motivating people, you get these swings out of whack. That's my view, for what it's worth. Perhaps "voting ring" is one way to characterize them, but I'm not sure it does justice to the situation that's really occurring.
What's interesting is that I've heard this from all sorts of people on reddit! Some of them were talking about Google, some of them were talking about XKCD, some of them were talking about Steve Yegge, and lots of them were talking about you. So a) you're the first person to be right about this phenomenon, b) you just missed it before, or c) this is just how people react when they find out that they're suddenly in a minority within their peer group.
I'm talking about acceleration here, not velocity.
Social sites are tyrannies of the vocal minorities (as is democracy, for that matter, but that's a longer rant). The whole idea of voting something up or down is a flawed _concept_. "Up" and "Down" have various and sundry meanings, and people are emotional animals, not rational ones. No amount of algorithm tweaking is going to make a bad concept into a good one.
Having said all of that, I felt like the game was rigged for RP too for a while. Now I've come to understand that social voting is a mob-like affair, and does not have the best interests of the reader in mind. If there was one thing I could fix in the world, that would be it. There's simply too much time being wasted by all kinds of smart people reading stuff that has no value to them. (whatever the topic) </rant>
Is that a conspiracy? I don't know. Is it ideologically biased? I think so.
I hope you realize that your idea of hacker opinion is likely slanted. It seems like you spend your time in either San Fransisco or Cambridge, two incredibly democratic locations. Of course you're going to hear people bash Bush incredibly passionately. Nobody likes Bush, not even in red states, so I can only imagine that's amplified where you are.
I can tell you that I sling code for a living and I'm very interested in the whole Ron Paul thing; I didn't hear about him from Digg or Reddit, I heard about him from the signs I see people holding every day on my way home from work so I looked him up on Google.
I think a lot more hackers lean libertarian than you give credit for.
That's a limited view. Some people recognize that voting rings happen, and are considering a way to fix them:
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/08/uberfac...
Of course they must be exchanging information somehow, but it doesn't look to me like anybody in particular is in charge.
However, if they were successful at doing what you describe wouldn't your prediction imply that most Ron Paul stories on Reddit would have a score greater than zero? A search for "Ron Paul" shows this to be false.
Is there some other objective measure that could be used?
I expect he will run as a Libertarian after he doesn't get the Republican nomination; he'll probably do much better than your average Libertarian candidate.
Frankly, I'm encouraged by any non-standard candidates who actually get noticed one way or the other.
When you're outside of a popularity bubble, you have pretty good odds of identifying it as such -- but that doesn't mean you can't be inside another popularity bubble, too.
(I don't actually think this is true. As far as I know, support for Spolsky, Paul, and Lisp is genuine, and its concentration at reddit is just a typical network effect. I don't see why this has to be any more complicated than "People who like Ron Paul news will read it at reddit and vote it up at reddit, attracting more people who like Ron Paul news")
It would be easy to astroturf reddit. And I don't think even Ron Paul suppporters would deny that the campaign most likely to do it would be that of an outsider candidate whose supporters were renowned for their effective use of the Internet.
But you know, I am done talking about this. Whenever I even mention Ron Paul I end up wasting hours in arguments isomorphic to arguments with trolls. I'm not claiming Ron Paul supporters are trolls, just that trying to reason with fanatics tend to produce the same sort of threads as trying to reason with trolls.
The discussion on this thread is precisely why politics is off limits on news.yc. In this case it crept in through a point about the design of news aggregators. But politics is like floating point contagion. If you make a point that's even partly about politics, that's the part everyone will focus on, and the discussion becomes a political one.
Perhaps I'm misreading, but many of your comments come off as essentially dismissing the Ron Paul phenomenon as the work of a handful of zealots. It's not surprising that his supporters disagree with that notion, as it implies that their efforts and views are not legitimate.
BTW, here is a video of Ron Paul with a bunch of hackers. The room was completely packed and overflowing into a second room (connected by video). Of course they aren't all RP supporters, but a large fraction are. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCM_wQy4YVg
A good reply is one that you can reply to by taking the discussion further, instead of having to re-explain what you said in the previous comment. The distinctive thing about conversations with both trolls and zealots is that you're always having to begin comments with "no, what I said was..."
"Don't see purpose where there isn't.
Or better still, the positive version:
See randomness."
This doesn't seem to be a discussion of politics. It sounds more like psychology to me: you're very surprised that reddit is behaving in a way that you wouldn't have predicted, and so you're creating an extra phenomenon to explain it, instead of revising your original theory. It's a little pre-Copernican.
John.