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Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

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191–200 of 258 posts

Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

#191
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.

I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with your observations of news filter bubbling... BUT... I just thought of the analogy of music filter bubbling. Only a couple years ago when there was a big push for awhile for music streaming there was plenty of debate to observe along the lines of some people seemed rather horrified at the stress of having to select their own musical playlist where others were ready to go nuclear because they wanted to rock out to Pantera and some human or algo DJ insists on flooding them with Taylor Swift.

I don't even care which argument won in the marketplace for "music filter bubble" or even "news filter bubble" but it is interesting that very strong, perhaps equally strong, arguments exist for both.

Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No story is that perfect. You aren't that perfect. I'm not perfect no. But the story isn't a lie. It's funny to me that you don't believe I was on to surveillance before the Snowden Documents and on to Iraq war propaganda before the UK Iraq War inquiery/report. > And writing this long of a post to try and convince me that conspiracies like Hillary Clinton engaging in a pedohpile sex ring are true because you believ…

> I had just been accused of being a provably nasty actor and conspiracy monger. No you hadn't. I was referring to /r/the_donald, the nasty trump trolls of /pol/, and the pizzagate conspiracy. You imagined that I targeted you, because you did not understand my post. Fueled by that misunderstand, yes, you engaged in a lame tale of self-fellation. You clearly cannot evaluate it as such, so I leave you with the hope tha…

I see.

I understand now that you did not intend your post in any way to be discussing people writ large who have lost trust in public information dissemination, and were only talking about a very specific generalization of very specific people - who today remain extremely vague and could not be enumerated.

I understand that you do not mean to say anything about people whose trust in public information dissemination has been broken. Instead, you were aggravated against a certain group of people on a certain specific issue and your universal quantifiers were meant to be existential quantifiers. Your discussion was intended to restrict all possible solutions and state powers to one specific issue and one specific community - presumably for a very short time.

I hope you come to a similar understanding of my post. In this case it was intended not as a narrow discussion but a broad one about what powers and capabilities are and are not legitimate for state police to have in the functioning of civil society, and remiss over the current widespread use of propaganda and censorship and the arguments from those concerned about specific issues to justify widespread powers to implement much stronger and wider reaching propaganda and censorship.

We appear to be in full agreement about this: censorship and propaganda as it is widely practiced in America is horrible and the people who have had their trust broken because of this are in the right. Unfortunately, the vacuum of credible information has led some to believe rumors. And that's a shame.

I disagree with you that we should call the victims of credible-information-vacuum mean names and think of them as provably nasty conspiracy mongers. I think that's blaming the victim.

I propose we solve the credibility crisis with US media by reducing the powers of state police to censor and manipulate it. In doing so, and in encouraging real dissenting investigative journalism, there will be institutions that provide real, honest, hard-worked and informative context on complex issues - capable of predicting and explaining ongoing times.

In this setting, the maximal number of people will be attracted by the quality of information from US media outlets, now unshackled from propaganda laws, national security constraints, war embedding procedures, and quid pro quo access.

The predictive quality of this information will draw down from the mass of confused people attracted to communities you dislike, because they will find that the successful media distribution companies are not biased, politicized, or spun for state policing purposes.

This sounds like a win-win and I'm glad we could come to that mutual understanding.

Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The edited comments were on r/the_donald, and he changed them to point to r/the_donald moderators. You have to be doing some serious mental gymnastics to think that it wasn't against "those Trump supporters". And here's the thing: it doesn't matter. An admin of a site (the CEO even!) edited users' comments without permission, notification, or apparent consequence. This can lead to users distrusting the site.

...and there's a chat log floating around after the fallout of the top mods and Spez discussing what to do about /r/the_donald. Saying he didn't edit "Trump supporters" comments on a sub that bans you outright for not being pro-Trump is asinine.

Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

#194
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The admins and a sizable portion, if not the majority, of reddit think it's true. It's also odd that you seem to forget that the content in question was specifically and continually addressed to the rest of the community in an often aggressive manner. Hardly any active and constructive discussion, political or otherwise, took place on those threads. Indeed it's hard for that to ever happen when your mods immediately…

Yes, and that's why they make rules that only impact the_donald, which in turn encourages the_donald to lash out. Because they are being singled out for censorship. I think you've got a pretty selective memory of sticked threads in the_donald, but whatever. Should they be nice to a community that consistently calls it the_dipshit, etc, and whose administrators continually make changes to limit the reach of their voic…

You can stop being dishonest at anytime now.

Your timeline is backwards. They were not singled out for "censorship" before their abuse. That doesn't even make sense. Again, please notice the immediate effect of having the tool taken away from the mods. Hardly anything is organically upvoted from that subreddit anymore.

>Should they be nice to a community that consistently calls it the_dipshit

Why are you going to purposefully ignore why they have that reputation? This is like having a guy in the group that continually does annoying or obnoxious things, gets told off and then tells everyone else to "chill."

>the number of posts it was possible to have on the front page, and a few others.

Which was global.

>Saying the change to sticky policy is what's keeping the_donald posts off the front page of /r/all would be incorrect.

Except it is not. They do not reach top spots on /r/all anymore. We're talking about single posts, not the number of posts, but they don't reach as high as they used to.

Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

#195

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…

"Google requires real profiles for YouTube comments now"

And consequently, Youtube comments now solely consist of civil dialogue and scholarly critiques of videos.

Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

#196

My trust is broken. Am I a provably nasty actor who ... etc? My trust has been broken repeatedly, by things like the Snowden documents (and the media coverup of its contents) and Iraq War propaganda (with media participation), and yes by gamed use of scoring algorithms and selective/politicized moderation of social media. My trust was particularly broken when Facebook censored (literally did not allow me to post) Sno…

We detached this flagged subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13124666 and marked it off-topic.

Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does your research entail? Sounds tantalizing

http://dsg.nd.edu/soc.html I'm in the same lab, but I don't work on the Reddit projects currently (although I am on the most recently submitted paper, which, due to it not being accepted yet, is not on the website, either).

oh wow. this is like data porn for me. (I was a Psych major at Cornell, and am a programmer now.)

Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

#198
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.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13124374 and marked it off-topic.

Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

#199
post #196

My trust is broken. Am I a provably nasty actor who ... etc? My trust has been broken repeatedly, by things like the Snowden documents (and the media coverup of its contents) and Iraq War propaganda (with media participation), and yes by gamed use of scoring algorithms and selective/politicized moderation of social media. My trust was particularly broken when Facebook censored (literally did not allow me to post) Sno…

We detached this flagged subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13124666 and marked it off-topic.

[deleted]

Re: Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters

#200

> Admin KeyserSosa Is it me, or is it weird to see what are likely a names chosen when someone is adolescent or at least interacting in a non-professional capacity making their way into professional contexts, especially when they refer to another person, real or fictional (even if slightly changed)? Are the corporate executives of the next generation going to go by the aliases the likes of BillGaytes and BarackOsama?

It's mostly you.

Or maybe it's me. I hate nothing more than the complaint that something is "unprofessional". It's a completely meaningless concept. If there's something actually wrong in how someone is acting, it's completely ok to call them out. Example:

"'BillGaytes' and 'BarackOsama' are insulting to Bill Gates, Barack Obama, and the gay community. It inflicts harm on people without justification, and I expect you to change these aliases"

Note how none of that applies to "KeyserSosa".

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