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Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

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Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

#141

Post by jerf »

pmarreck wrote: post #94
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…

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 s…

"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)?"

There's a ton of discussion sites. It's not "reddit or HN or nothing"; it's a question of which of the bajillion forums, blogs, link aggregators, email lists, or other things you're interested in joining. There's room for all kinds of more of them, too. There's so many choices it's more a discovery problem than an availability problem.

However, if you go into it with the hopes of being the next thing that is the size of Reddit, statistically, you're going to be disappointed.

It isn't even clear to me that this is a very good goal, either. Running a site the size of Reddit is an enormous, enormous hassle. The controversies currently associated with it at the moment are merely specific instantiations of the general fact that you can count on being vilified by a good 20%+ of the community once you reach that size, that every change will be met with a huge outpouring of hatred straight into your contact box, and so on. Goodness help the poor person trying to start The Next Reddit (TM) with the naive idea that it is a good idea to be very available to the community... all that does is add to the inevitable flames some fresh flames when you have to reneg on that promise too. Unless you've got a solid plan to monetize enough to make it worthwhile, fast enough for it to be worthwhile, while still somehow organically growing without that getting in the way, I'd suggest shooting for starting a community for $X, for some value of $X of interest to you, rather than trying to be The Next Reddit (TM).

Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

#142

Post by justinlaster »

rfrank wrote: post #126
justinlaster wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I literally just addressed both of those points. Sticked posts are mod tools. They didn't do anything else. You literally pointed out exactly what I did. >It's not a global change to everybody. It's only for that one specific subreddit. Again, I already pointed this out. >Then why not apply it to every subreddit? Once again, in my reply to you: >consistent and continual abuse of those mod tools to antagonize the rest…

So not using a tool in the way that the designer intends constitutes abuse now? An interesting perspective for a community with hacker in the name.

That is a completely disingenuous take on what was stated.

The subreddit in question specifically and continually used the tool in a negative, unconstructive manner, which is obviously not what it is designed for. Other subreddits use the mod tool in various ways that don't have anything to do with the explicit purpose of stickied posts, which I pointed out, but notice I didn't label that as abuse.

Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

#143

Post by epistasis »

talmand wrote: post #135
epistasis wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it was downvitre because it's inaccurate spin that is irrelevant to the conversation

How is referring the actual fact the CEO admitted to such actions inaccurate spin?

It wasn't about Trump at all, thus the spin, and introducing unnecessary politics.

>It wasn't trump supporter comments, it was comments that said exactly "fuck spez." Misrepresenting it as "trump supporters" gives it a decidedly different, post-truth spin.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13124802

Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

#144

Post by MollyR »

ue_ wrote: post #127
erikpukinskis wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>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 I don't know how it is on Voat, but on 8chan I'm a frequent user and poster of /leftypol/, titled "Leftist Politically Incorrect", which is basically the flip-side to the infamous /pol/ boards of {8,4}chan. On ther…

Aren't the chans not about your real beliefs, but simply trolling to get reactions ?

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/09/11/terrorist-t...

This guy got articles published as radical feminist as well beyond being a fake isis terrorist, fake white nationalist, fake jewish lawyer.

Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

#145

Post by zbuttram »

amitdeshwar wrote: post #117
erikpukinskis wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Can you elaborate on what you mean by "men are psychologically torturing women just by enacting common male body movement patterns in the workplace" ?

Yeah, I'm also interested. That statement is like those local news promos people like to make fun of, "it's killing millions of Americans and you could be eating it for dinner, find out on tonight's news at 10!"

Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

#146

Post by JohnTHaller »

talmand wrote: post #72
toxican wrote: post #59

It doesn't help that the CEO admitted to editing Trump supporter comments. I mean I couldn't care less about those people, but that is censorship and suppression and I can't blame people for viewing anything reddit does from now on with a bit of skepticism. But obviously it's not that bad because they've still chosen to make reddit their home.

Why the downvotes? The CEO did admit to committing such anti-user actions.

Because spez didn't alter 'Trump supporter comments'. That's a common misrepresentation from Trump supporters. spez edited reddit comments hostile towards him. Specifically, he changed comments that said "fuck spez" to "fuck r/The_Donald".

Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

#147

Post by vosper »

minimaxir wrote: post #41
notatoad wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Complaints like this are the reason companies are reluctant to release public datasets. They don't have any obligation to release data, but they do. It's a gift. If they have to consider "how will this change affect the consumers of our public data releases?" every time they make a change, they're going to stop releasing public datasets.

For clarity, the Reddit datasets are not released by Reddit itself, but scraped through the API. (More context/examples of what I do with the data: http://minimaxir.com/2015/10/reddit-bigquery/ )

Does this mean you (or I if I want to do some analytics on Reddit data) will need to completely rescrape the site after scores are recomputed?

Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

#148

Post by kbenson »

amitdeshwar wrote: post #117
erikpukinskis wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Can you elaborate on what you mean by "men are psychologically torturing women just by enacting common male body movement patterns in the workplace" ?

I'm wondering too. The only thing that comes immediately to mind is adjusting your pants in the crotch area, which, well, sometimes it's uncomfortable without there being any sort of excitement, and it's just a matter of comfort. Like pulling your underwear out of your but.

If that's an example of what's being referred to, it's really, really unfortunate, because it's a matter of one party acting totally innocently (most of the time), and the other party being conditioned to take it in a non-innocent way. That said, I could be totally off-base.

Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

#149

Post by mejari »

agumonkey wrote: post #138
mejari wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you can accomplish the same thing by creating new more moderated subs. That's why we have /r/AskHistorians in addition to /r/history. If the sub isn't specific enough the solution shouldn't be to falsly and silently fragment the sub's users via user-side filtering, it's to explicitly split off a different community that behaves the way you want. In that way there is no "non too specific sub". If you participate i…

Sure, but things are wavey and blurry, you can't always foresee if a dedicated sub should be created, sometimes it's in waves.

True, but if your users are filtering out parts of the conversation you'll never reach a point where it's obvious there should be another community created, you'll just have multiple communities talking past each other.

Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

#150

Post by fabian2k »

One aspect I don't understand is why Reddit allows new accounts to vote from the beginning. You don't even need to verify an email address, you can just start voting (unless they're doing something sneaky and ignore those votes).

I'm comparing this to Stack Overflow, where you need 10 reputation to vote. This is a pretty trivial barrier, but it does mean that you need to put more effort into each sock puppet to be able to commit vote fraud. You also can't have "invisible" socks all that easily, you generally need to post something to get the upvotes for your socks, which results in more obvious patterns that users, moderators and automated systems can detect.

Fighting vote fraud when it is that easy to create new socks that can vote seems like a pretty hard problem to me, especially on the scale of Reddit.

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