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Comment by selmnoo | Hacker News Reader

One thing I'm interested in knowing is whether Reddit manipulates the votes on its own submissions. See, for example, r/blog: http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/new/

Every submission made there went to the frontpage. What are the chances? I mean, it's hard to believe that mainstream Redditors at this point are so interested in Reddit news that they keep sending every Reddit announcement to the top. What's more likely, to me at least, is that Reddit is either leveraging its knowledge of how things work to get to the top in a surefire way, or it's plain messing with the upvote numbers. I would love to see data on these submissions, if possible. Of course, there's good reason for them to actually do this -- they need to advertise the Reddit marketplace stuff and so on, it's how they make money.

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I've been out of the loop for a few years, but no the votes aren't manipulated.

But the normalisation algorithm https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/lib/norma... does prefer to get one at least of each subreddit. This means that if /r/blog has a post it will probably be placed on the front page immediately. That action gets it a lot of votes just because it's very visible.

> I've been out of the loop for a few years, but no the votes aren't manipulated.

AHA! Let's just cancel out the double negative ("no" and "n't") and look what we uncover, in this former reddit admin's very own words: "the votes are manipulated"

Umm, that isn't a double negative.

That's not how english works. That's not a double negative.

Now let's cancel out the double negative ("not", and "not") in what you said:

> That's how english works. That's a double negative.

Exactly!

Or...

> That's a double positive.

Indeed!

For those who don't know, raldi is a former reddit admin as well.

Can you explain why /r/blog is treated differently in multireddits?

Back when there were only 25 default subreddits and multireddits had just been launched, I tried to create a default multireddit. If I just included the top 25, the rankings would match the logged out view perfectly. But if I added /r/blog and /r/announcements they would appear in different places. I think they usually ended up at a slightly lower rank, but they also stuck around in the top 50 much longer, with week old posts often being inserted into the middle of the rankings.

I don't think it is. AFIAK that's all of the normalisation code right there. IIRC, the front page inherits from MultiReddit internally.

But if your front page is 25 links long (the default) and has 25 subreddits, I imagine adding 2 more means that you need to show 27 subreddits in 25 links, so you hit some edge-case there where things need to be laid out again.

The way this probably works is that we pick 25 subreddits at random (and cache that random choice for a while), some of which may have no qualifying submissions. So you may end up with 2 /r/funny posts, even though you had 27 subreddits for 25 links.

Or at least that's how it used to work. I know this bit has changed but I don't know what the new way is

>I've been out of the loop for a few years, but no the votes aren't manipulated.

Could you then explain the, pretty much on the dot, massive score changes every 2 hours? That was even more noticeable when the downvotes were shown - although they were 'fake' the final score, which is according to the FAQ correct, was changed.

I noticed this when I created a simple graphing script, you can see example graph of what I'm talking about here: https://github.com/Nikola-K/reddit-thread-graph#example

You can see that on any popular thread until the score is "normalized" around 3k points.

If accurate, I'd guess that it's the cache lifetime for which of the default subreddits to show on the front page

> it's hard to believe that mainstream Redditors at this point are so interested in Reddit news that they keep sending every Reddit announcement to the top.

"Mainstream Redditors" don't decide what is on the homepage because they don't vote. Only about 20% of redditors vote, and only about 20% of voters comment [1].

If you still find it hard to believe, just read the 900+ comments written in less than a day on their most recent post, which announced nothing and was just about how it's nice to be nice to people.

[1] http://www.quora.com/reddit-website/What-percent-of-Redditor...

Only about 20% of redditors vote, and only about 20% of voters comment [1].

That doesn't really ring true. If you make a post with a question in the title, you'll often get 5+ answers before a single person votes. Even downvotes.

Maybe it's more accurate to say "Of those people who don't hang out in the new submissions queue, only about 20% of the voters comment."

But, really, Reddit could do anything it wants internally, and we'd have no idea. Only they have access to the stats. They already compress the votes so that it only looks like there are ~10,000 votes maximum, when in fact hundreds of thousands of people have probably voted on certain posts.

> They already compress the votes so that it only looks like there are ~10,000 votes maximum, when in fact hundreds of thousands of people have probably voted on certain posts

Again I'm out of the loop by several years here. But to my knowledge, no that's not true. There are just fewer voters than you think there are.

It's possible, but it seems unlikely.

https://www.reddit.com/comments/z1c9z Obama's AMA. According to the sidebar, (upvotes - downvotes) = 14,700, with upvotes/(upvotes+downvotes) = 94%. Reddit recently changed their algorithms so that the 94% figure is very accurate. That means 14,700/0.94 ~= 15,600 people voted, according to the sidebar.

Here are Reddit's traffic stats for the Obama AMA: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/z3msa/traffic_stats_f...

The AMA brought in an extra two million uniques over two days. Also, it was one of the most legendary and historic events thus far on the internet, because it was the first time a sitting US president directly engaged with the public on a social media website.

Reddit has millions of subscribers. They can't really obfuscate the subscriber counts, because the subscriber count for each subreddit is visible every day. If it suddenly slowed down, people would notice. And the info needs to be available to moderators in order to manage their subreddit. Therefore, when /r/funny says it has 7 million subscribers, we can be reasonably certain there are at least 7 million Reddit accounts, many of which are active.

So, assuming there are only about a million active Redditors (there are probably more), and that a large number of those Redditors visit http://www.reddit.com/r/all on a regular basis, and considering that the Obama AMA was one of the most significant events in Reddit history (and indeed all internet history), and considering that over three million people viewed the AMA, it seems hard to believe that only 15,000 people voted on it.

It's possible. Statistics are one of the most counter-intuitive fields. Behaviors emerge at scale which aren't seen in the initial stages. Maybe it's possible people saw that 5,000 people had already upvoted the AMA, and so were less likely to upvote it themselves. But given the nature of politics and the significant historical status of the event, could it be true that the fate of the AMA was influenced by just a few thousand people?

Another observation: Reddit has had steady upward growth, but I remember that as of a few years ago the upvote counts were regularly reaching 3k. That number hasn't gone up too much in the meantime: https://www.reddit.com/r/all/

... but Reddit's traffic seems to have doubled since the start of 2013: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=reddit

If the number of voters could be calculated as a simple percentage of total active Reddit accounts, and Reddit's traffic has doubled, then why haven't the vote counts in /r/all also doubled?

That said, I'm not entirely convinced of my position. Reality is weird, and I'm often wrong. All I'm saying is that if it's true that only 15,000 people voted on Obama's AMA, and that a submission on /r/all regularly receives only ~5k votes out of a million active redditors who see it, then I'm surprised.

EDIT: The more I think about it, the more I think I'm mistaken. If it were true that Reddit compresses the vote counters for submissions, then they'd also have to do it for comments, because otherwise the top comment would regularly display a count that's way higher than the submission. They'd also have to compress the added comment karma, etc. This is where it moves from "plausible" to "the simplest explanation is that very few people vote."

Huh. Interesting.

I like the way you ask yourself critical questions and adjust!

I feel like people vote only partly on whether they think something is good or bad; they also (or maybe mostly) vote based on whether they think something has a higher or lower score than they think it deserves. So as a post or comment's score rises, people will stop upvoting when they feel it's got enough.

> If the number of voters could be calculated as a simple percentage of total active Reddit accounts, and Reddit's traffic has doubled, then why haven't the vote counts in /r/all also doubled?

The people who are joining reddit now are more lurkers than participants, so as the site grows, the percent of people who participate (vote and comment) gets smaller.

I think we can mostly blame (or thank, depending on your view of the average contributor) mobile devices for that. They make it much easier to consume reddit, but much harder to contribute.

Personally, it makes me sad.

Just to nitpick, accounts != people. Reddit in particular seems to attract throw away accounts and a large number of posts seem to start with "Throwaway". But otherwise, yes!

Also you don't need an e-mail address to register, and some people don't care about karma, so some people like me just create a new account whenever my saved login info is lost for any reason. Not necessarily using throwaway accounts in the traditional sense, but not overly concerned about maintaining a single account either. I've probably made 6-7 Reddit accounts over a few years [and 2 HN accounts over a longer time frame].

The follow is CWACkery: Complete, Wild-Ass Conjecture... kery.

Are you familiar with the 90/9/1 rule of thumb? That for any site with user-generated content (message boards, social networks, etc.), only 10% of people contribute to the discussion and only 10% of those people start new conversations?

At first, I read your comment about "20% of 20%" and thought "wow, that would be 80/16/4, that's incredible".

But this adds voting into the middle of the equation. So perhaps the 80/20 rule continues, and we can estimate that 20% of voters comment, and 20% of commenters post original content. That would make it more like 80 (reading only)/16 (voting)/3.2 (commenting)/0.8 (posting original content). Which might be considered (with rounding) 80/19/1. The original content contribution is roughly the same, but the voting system seems to increasing the middle-ground of engagement.

Double sign-ups by adding a voting feature?

http://www.nngroup.com/articles/participation-inequality/ if you're looking for an article on it.

1500 people hitting up arrow because the poster is an admin is believable to me given Reddit's size.

The score does not correlate directly w/ number of upvotes

It is close enough, especially for content that is not likely to be down voted.

It's not a r = 1 correlation, but it's definitely strongly correlated.

This seems likely to me as the same thing seems to occur when a moderator on a small subreddit makes a post (even without making it stickied). Users seem to take it upon themselves to upvote out of reverence.

I've always assumed there was no doubt Reddit moved their own posts up to the top in some unmeritocratic, undemocratic way... it serves the same function of sticky threads on phpbb (and other) forums. The massive amount of votes on these posts would happen after being moved to the top as a form of self fulfilling prophecy... people are interested in what Reddit (the org) is doing to improve Reddit (the site).

My guess here is that r/blog (and r/announcements?) is special in that every redditor is subscribed to it. I think I remember some small choas around us all being auto-subscribed to a subreddit we didn't care about (potentially). So it caused a small storm, but ~100% of redditors subscribe to it, which is untrue of probably every other subreddit

Every new reddit user is subscribed to all of the default subreddits and has to manually unsubscribe to get any of them off their front page.

They're just like other default subreddits, which is to say that you can unsubscribe from them. I only resubscribed recently because I started working at reddit and figured I should know what's going on in my own company.

Some discussion at https://www.reddit.com/r/BestOfReports/comments/2g62rg/dont_... ( which, btw, has a pretty funny screenshot of off-topic "reports" that a Reddit blog post got) says that it is possible to unsubscribe from /r/blog and /r/announcements, but it is not the default.

Reddit does intend to have the /r/blog posts on the front page, but they don't necessarily need to rig the votes.

As mentioned in the article, the algorithm for selecting which posts appear on the homepage seems to allocate slots for each subreddit. If one subreddit has more people voting than another subreddit, they can both appear alongside each other, rather than the larger one always filling the homepage.

Since the only posts made to /r/blog are infrequent, they will always get the slot for the subreddit and will likely always appear on the front page or second page even with few votes. Then, because they are visible to many users, they can attract more votes.

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