Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

#1

Post by gk1 » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 4:37 PM UTC

Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters
techcrunch.com

Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

#2

Post by polysaturate » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 4:57 PM UTC

Does it really thwart cheaters actions or just stop them from having a clear indication of their efforts?

Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

#3

Post by weed_smoke » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 5:00 PM UTC

They should overhaul their censorship algorithm and boot out /u/spez.

Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

#4

Post by SerLava » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 5:02 PM UTC

polysaturate wrote: post #2

Does it really thwart cheaters actions or just stop them from having a clear indication of their efforts?

That's sort of the same thing. If cheaters could instantly tell their bot accounts' votes are being ignored, they could simply make new accounts immediately.

Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

#5

Post by drops » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 5:03 PM UTC

Upboat algorithms should be the least of their worries right now.

Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

#6

Post by minimaxir » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 5:04 PM UTC

This is mostly another fix of bad design that was added in Reddit's early years, but people have started to notice the aggressive vote fuzzing as it was calibrated for a much smaller userbase.

At the least, this will break statistical analysis of Reddit data for awhile since the public datasets will not have their scores updated, which I in particular am not happy about. :p

Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

#7

Post by EJTH » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 5:06 PM UTC

I wonder how they are pulling this off. I guess it takes stuff like account age into consideration. But I fear it is more based on what sub it originates from, context of the post etc.

It will be their go to excuse for why content is censored off the front page now. It has been problematic to excuse away the censorship lately, so this is a nice catch all excuse they just made here.

Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

#8

Post by landr0id » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 5:06 PM UTC

polysaturate wrote: post #2

Does it really thwart cheaters actions or just stop them from having a clear indication of their efforts?

This change isn't to thwart cheaters... not sure where the article got that. It's a side affect of legacy code that was used to thwart cheaters that hasn't worked very well since Reddit has grown.

Some additional info about it here: https://reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/5goxk4/upcoming_change...

Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

#9

Post by pselbert » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 5:09 PM UTC

Evan Miller did some very interesting analysis of the historical Reddit hot formula. It doesn't address cheating, but it does identify the details of the algorithm and some inherent faults.

http://www.evanmiller.org/deriving-the-reddit-formula.html

There is also the followup about ranking news items with upvotes:

http://www.evanmiller.org/ranking-news-items-with-upvotes.ht...

Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

#10

Post by mark242 » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 5:14 PM UTC

I still don't understand why, after having grown to a sufficient size, Reddit doesn't just enforce two-factor at account creation time. Tie a user to a phone number at the very least.