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The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy

toddwschneider.com

1–10 of 151 posts

Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy

#3
Dumb question but what is the reddit front page? Isn't it customized for everyone depending on what you're subscribed to? Or are there a ton of users that never log in?

It seems like you wouldn't get much value out of reddit if you just view the front page without logging in?

Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy

#4
One thing I'm interested in knowing is whether Reddit manipulates the votes on its own submissions. See, for example, r/blog: http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/new/

Every submission made there went to the frontpage. What are the chances? I mean, it's hard to believe that mainstream Redditors at this point are so interested in Reddit news that they keep sending every Reddit announcement to the top. What's more likely, to me at least, is that Reddit is either leveraging its knowledge of how things work to get to the top in a surefire way, or it's plain messing with the upvote numbers. I would love to see data on these submissions, if possible. Of course, there's good reason for them to actually do this -- they need to advertise the Reddit marketplace stuff and so on, it's how they make money.

Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy

#5
post #3

Dumb question but what is the reddit front page? Isn't it customized for everyone depending on what you're subscribed to? Or are there a ton of users that never log in? It seems like you wouldn't get much value out of reddit if you just view the front page without logging in?

Reddit has a default frontpage for people who don't have accounts. I lurked for years and was just fine without actually creating an account. :)

Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy

#6
>Much to my surprise, I found out that reddit's front pages are not a pure "meritocracy" based on votes, but that rankings depend heavily on subreddits.

Is this really a surprise? If just went by upvotes alone, a sub with 1M subscribers will always dominate a sub with 500k. You need to factor in the that context.

Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy

#7
I left reddit years ago (and found HN) because although I agree with mostly liberal views it became too much of an echo-chamber for liberal views the frontpage is the extreme example of that.

There are many great sub-reddits of course but it's not a place for politicial discussions (in fact I am still looking for a good place to have political discussions)

Edit: Why does my personal experience get downvoted?

Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy

#8
post #4

One thing I'm interested in knowing is whether Reddit manipulates the votes on its own submissions. See, for example, r/blog: http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/new/ Every submission made there went to the frontpage. What are the chances? I mean, it's hard to believe that mainstream Redditors at this point are so interested in Reddit news that they keep sending every Reddit announcement to the top. What's more likely, to m…

My guess here is that r/blog (and r/announcements?) is special in that every redditor is subscribed to it. I think I remember some small choas around us all being auto-subscribed to a subreddit we didn't care about (potentially). So it caused a small storm, but ~100% of redditors subscribe to it, which is untrue of probably every other subreddit

Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy

#9
post #3

Dumb question but what is the reddit front page? Isn't it customized for everyone depending on what you're subscribed to? Or are there a ton of users that never log in? It seems like you wouldn't get much value out of reddit if you just view the front page without logging in?

Todd was using the default front page, which consists of these subreddits: http://www.reddit.com/r/defaults/comments/24zz8z/list_of_def...

Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy

#10
post #5
post #3

Dumb question but what is the reddit front page? Isn't it customized for everyone depending on what you're subscribed to? Or are there a ton of users that never log in? It seems like you wouldn't get much value out of reddit if you just view the front page without logging in?

Reddit has a default frontpage for people who don't have accounts. I lurked for years and was just fine without actually creating an account. :)

Isn't the default page mostly cat pictures and jokes? I tried viewing it logged out one time and I couldn't figure out who would like that?
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