Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters • Hacker News Board

Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

#91

Post by criley2 » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 6:10 PM UTC

rokosbasilisk wrote: post #71

jedberg wrote: post #38

Since I can't really say more than this: there's a lot of misinformation and misunderstanding in these comments. Don't believe everything you read on the internet and don't believe the conspiracy theories that this has anything to do with censorship or surpressing political (or any other) discourse. It's really just making the math less complicated.

Trust is a fragile thing. Spez broke it repeatedly, even Ellen Pao said she would have fired him for editing user comments. Cant say I blame people for being paranoid.

The people who's "trust" was broken are paranoid conspiracy-mongers who are provably nasty actors who use any opportunity to spread anti-establishment vitriol.

Their paranoia is not justified, not to the extent of the conspiracy that they so routinely engage in.

Just this week a man brought a rifle into a restaurant a fired a shot because of the conspiracy and vitriol of that side of reddit.

Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

#92

Post by ovulator » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 6:10 PM UTC

djsumdog wrote: post #63

clamprecht wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Redditor of 11 years here. I don't want another filter bubble that only shows me what it thinks I want to read (like Facebook). I want to see what other people are seeing, and not just like-minded people either. For that I can find subreddits and subscribe to them.

But it's already like that. They removed the API that allowed RES to show you individual up/down votes per-post. They've banned tons of subs for varying levels of controversy. They removed their warranty canary. Their CEO was caught changing comments and they weren't asked to resign; got away with just an apology? I realize that Voat is a cesspool, but anonymity -- real anonymity -- tends to let you see peoples' real…

In regards to the warrant canary, well, that is kind of how that works.

Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

#93

Post by erikpukinskis » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 6:10 PM UTC

djsumdog wrote: post #63

clamprecht wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Redditor of 11 years here. I don't want another filter bubble that only shows me what it thinks I want to read (like Facebook). I want to see what other people are seeing, and not just like-minded people either. For that I can find subreddits and subscribe to them.

But it's already like that. They removed the API that allowed RES to show you individual up/down votes per-post. They've banned tons of subs for varying levels of controversy. They removed their warranty canary. Their CEO was caught changing comments and they weren't asked to resign; got away with just an apology? I realize that Voat is a cesspool, but anonymity -- real anonymity -- tends to let you see peoples' real…

> anonymity -- real anonymity -- tends to let you see peoples' real dark opinions

No, it lets you see a narrow slice of people's real, dark opinions. There are a whole host of opinions you'll never see on Voat because the user base is antagonistic to the basic ideas which underpin them, so there's no point in trying to express them on that platform. For example, the notion that men are psychologically torturing women just by enacting common male body movement patterns in the workplace would never see the light of day on Voat. That's dark. It's my real opinion.

There's no such thing as a "bastion of free speech". One person's safe space is another person's hell of antagonism.

Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

#94

Post by pmarreck » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 6:10 PM UTC

djsumdog wrote: post #63

clamprecht wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Redditor of 11 years here. I don't want another filter bubble that only shows me what it thinks I want to read (like Facebook). I want to see what other people are seeing, and not just like-minded people either. For that I can find subreddits and subscribe to them.

But it's already like that. They removed the API that allowed RES to show you individual up/down votes per-post. They've banned tons of subs for varying levels of controversy. They removed their warranty canary. Their CEO was caught changing comments and they weren't asked to resign; got away with just an apology? I realize that Voat is a cesspool, but anonymity -- real anonymity -- tends to let you see peoples' real…

Serious question- Do you think there's room for a new discussion site which embraced all these lessons that other discussion sites seem to perpetually be ignoring (perhaps due to simple entrenchment)?

Because I have oft floated the idea of starting just such a site.

Anyway, I somehow (as an avid Reddit user) missed the news that they lost their warrant canary (probably because I unsubbed from almost all the default subs due to low signal/noise ratio): https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/4ct1kz/reddit_de...

But in googling it, I did notice an interesting site related to warrant canaries: https://canarywatch.org/ EDIT: crap, no longer being updated: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/05/canary-watch-one-year-...

Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

#95

Post by rmc » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 6:11 PM UTC

clamprecht wrote: post #49

rm999 wrote: post #30

It'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 peop…

Redditor of 11 years here. I don't want another filter bubble that only shows me what it thinks I want to read (like Facebook). I want to see what other people are seeing, and not just like-minded people either. For that I can find subreddits and subscribe to them.

But surely you want some kind of filter bubble? Otherwise half (?) your webpages/content would be in Chinese, right? So surely you want an "English-language" filter bubble?

Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

#96

Post by minimaxir » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 6:12 PM UTC

coreyp_1 wrote: post #80

djsumdog wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's already like that. They removed the API that allowed RES to show you individual up/down votes per-post. They've banned tons of subs for varying levels of controversy. They removed their warranty canary. Their CEO was caught changing comments and they weren't asked to resign; got away with just an apology? I realize that Voat is a cesspool, but anonymity -- real anonymity -- tends to let you see peoples' real…

I'm afraid that our research group was the reason that Reddit removed access to the vote count. Not that it has stopped us from doing research on reddit... We submitted another paper a week or so ago, and will be releasing or dataset upon publication.

That's unlikely.

For clarification, only the breakdown of up/downs was hidden, not the overall score, and it was hidden because when people saw posts with tons of downvotes, it invited more downvotes.

Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

#97

Post by Noseshine » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 6:12 PM UTC

JeffL wrote: post #83

visarga wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I were in this position I would empower people to filter out cheap content, fluff, memes and keep the in depth discussions and articles. Each user could choose the filtering level.

It would be interesting if instead of just up and down arrows, you could tag posts as "insightful", "funny", or "inspiring". Too often, the up votes are used for things that are funny, and throwaway one liners and memes dominate all the popular subreddits. I would love to support by insightful and get discussions similar to HN.

Uhm.. I have a very low Slashdot ID number, so I saw that site develop from its start (19 years ago). Back then it was what HN is now. They have those things. It has become unreadable and unusable (has been for years now) - the most idiotic and trite one-sentence statement is tagged "insightful" if it the visiting crowds like it (which happens a lot). Go and see for yourself, if you dare: https://slashdot.org/

Example - and I clicked exactly once on a headline and selected the very first comment tagged "Insightful", so I made no attempt to find an example that fits my narrative:

  Win 10 is good OS that would be quickly adopted if/when MS
  decided to remove or make optional bolted-on telemetry
  malware. Such "feature" is simply not acceptable on a non-free 
  product.

That's it, that's the entire statement. I have to add, for those who don't know the site, only a few people have mod points at any given time (you get 5 or 15, distributed randomly after an internal algorithm giving the active users more and more often), so they are precious. Less than 10% of articles are tagged at all for an average topic, so one would expect the ones marked "Insightful" or "Interesting" to actually be just that.

If you now think "They need meta-moderation, moderation of the moderators! This should improve quality!" - well, I'm sorry to tell you they've had just that for ages...

So simply implementing any mechanism in software is not sufficient. There is no magic algorithm or method, thus far anything someone tried eventually deteriorated. I must say reddit is actually doing surprisingly well, mostly because they managed to have "sites with in the site" with their individually managed subreddits.

Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

#98

Post by themoat » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 6:13 PM UTC

komali2 wrote: post #70

djsumdog wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's already like that. They removed the API that allowed RES to show you individual up/down votes per-post. They've banned tons of subs for varying levels of controversy. They removed their warranty canary. Their CEO was caught changing comments and they weren't asked to resign; got away with just an apology? I realize that Voat is a cesspool, but anonymity -- real anonymity -- tends to let you see peoples' real…

I like Hackernews because I actually learn things here and have genuinely interesting conversations with relatively polite people, but we only seem to talk about tech stuff. Cryptography, web dev, programming, etc. Nobody here wants to talk about like, motorcycles or raising pet rats or other things I'm interested in outside of technology, so it can't replace reddit for me.

Yeah that's kind of where I'm at with Reddit as well. It's not a place where I can browse anymore. I just can't bring myself to wade through /r/all, but there are certain subreddits where they just really have the community size that can't be found outside reddit.

Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

#99

Post by rokosbasilisk » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 6:14 PM UTC

criley2 wrote: post #91

rokosbasilisk wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trust is a fragile thing. Spez broke it repeatedly, even Ellen Pao said she would have fired him for editing user comments. Cant say I blame people for being paranoid.

The people who's "trust" was broken are paranoid conspiracy-mongers who are provably nasty actors who use any opportunity to spread anti-establishment vitriol. Their paranoia is not justified, not to the extent of the conspiracy that they so routinely engage in. Just this week a man brought a rifle into a restaurant a fired a shot because of the conspiracy and vitriol of that side of reddit.

Well thats just not true, the community managers and ellen pao understood the repercussions of it.

It destroys the legitimacy of all parts of the site and enflames conspiracies even more.

People are not stupid, my first thought was how many times did he do this without getting caught.

Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

#100

Post by HCIdivision17 » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 6:14 PM UTC

komali2 wrote: post #70

djsumdog wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's already like that. They removed the API that allowed RES to show you individual up/down votes per-post. They've banned tons of subs for varying levels of controversy. They removed their warranty canary. Their CEO was caught changing comments and they weren't asked to resign; got away with just an apology? I realize that Voat is a cesspool, but anonymity -- real anonymity -- tends to let you see peoples' real…

I like Hackernews because I actually learn things here and have genuinely interesting conversations with relatively polite people, but we only seem to talk about tech stuff. Cryptography, web dev, programming, etc. Nobody here wants to talk about like, motorcycles or raising pet rats or other things I'm interested in outside of technology, so it can't replace reddit for me.

And not even all tech! I've actually started spending more time on Reddit because it's more interesting in general. When a post percolates up here about motorcycles or manufacturing or some cool analytics on an obscure topic, I have a great time. But they're not common, and there's always some StackOverflow-style "this doesn't belong on HackerNews". (But they also seem to pull people out of the woodwork like gangbusters - HN loves the occasional off-topic interesting post! But not constantly :)

Which is fine, I guess. That's why we have things like Reddit! Perhaps it's a variant of the Unix Way: have sites that provide a specific style of service, either in content management or filtering or whatnot. And appreciate them for that!