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.
novelty accounts are a part of the culture
Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters
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Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters
#22I 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.
sounds like a surefire way to get rid of most of their user base.
Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters
#23Seems like just more censorship geared at shutting down people who support Trump. Timing is suspicious... they need to stop trying to have it both ways. Either ban Trump or get over it.
or do what they want as it's their website
Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters
#24I 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.
They don't even require an e-mail address. A great thing about reddit if you ask me.
Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters
#25I 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.
They didn't "just make" anything. They've had vote fuzzing, shadow banning and more from early days.
As both the techcrunch post and the actual reddit post say, the rules around it were complicated and hard to reason about. They've basically refactored and come up with a simpler set of rules.
Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters
#26Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters
#27Seems like just more censorship geared at shutting down people who support Trump. Timing is suspicious... they need to stop trying to have it both ways. Either ban Trump or get over it.
or do what they want as it's their website
bad argument. we dont let bakers discrimate against gay people. being a private business, doesnt mean you can do whatever you want.
Edit: I agree with the posters below me. My point is a private business doesnt mean I can do whatever I want. There are still social rules and laws that need to be considered.
Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters
#28I 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.
Because having anonymity on public forums is important.
These days it seems like an illusion with respect to government oversight, and having a username is a simple way to anonymize yourself against your peers.
I'm all for it since it seems like it would reduce trolling.
Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters
#29I 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.
Tying a user to a phone number does nothing but invade the privacy of most users, and slightly increase the costs for those who value their privacy. Source: at https://smsprivacy.org/ I run an online service offering completely anonymous phone numbers for ~£3/mo. And note that you only need 1 month in order to get the account validated. Most places check the phone number once at account creation time and then never a…
It also has the effect of increasing the price of running 1000 bots to £3000/mo.
Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters
#30It's pretty clear to me that Reddit has always lacked a solid experienced science-driven data person. Someone who can pinpoint an issue, formulate the issue into a product-driven concrete problem, come up with hypotheses on how to fix the problem, then use their vast wealth of data and users to test and/or implement them.
It's not just the ad hoc unintuitive "solution" they came up with to mask votes (which most people agreed was a user-antagonist step in the wrong direction). It's a lot of things: their inept response to spam/vote brigading/other abuse; their lack of personalized content discovery (state of the art from 10-15 years ago would probably suffice). I could go on, as a product-driven data scientist who has been on reddit since the early days, I'm constantly struck by how little they do with the amazing data they have.