Sounds like there are 50 subs that get spots 1-50, sorted mainly by vote count.
The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy
61–70 of 151 posts
Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy
#62Reddit is internet power - I cant recall a day in the last 5 years when I haven't checke reddit. When people ask me what websites do I read I can't recall any other than reddit. So funny. And I grew up with slashdot. People dont even know what slashdot is anymore. Reddit is the internet explorer button for me.
Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy
#63I 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?
I don't really buy that... the only liberal views I can think of that are popular in the aggregate on reddit are about the war on drugs and sometimes socialized medicine. In general, reddit is pretty hostile towards women, skeptical of feminism, overtly racist, and pro-military. I guess I would characterize it more as libertarianism strongly centered on the perspectives of middle class, white men. Edit: I guess "I do…
I'm not sure how being skeptical of feminism is an inherently non-liberal view. I'd say it depends on whether the feminism in question is oriented around civil rights, or around some form of critical gender theory. "Feminism" alone is not descriptive enough to make any judgment over.
Pro-military? How? I haven't visited it in a while, but a common sentiment on AskReddit was a total disillusionment with the chauvinistic "support the troops" mentality and a belief that military service does not make one righteous in of itself.
Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy
#64One 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…
I've been out of the loop for a few years, but no the votes aren't manipulated.
But the normalisation algorithm https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/lib/norma... does prefer to get one at least of each subreddit. This means that if /r/blog has a post it will probably be placed on the front page immediately. That action gets it a lot of votes just because it's very visible.
Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. "Mainstream Redditors" don't decide what is on the homepage because they don't vote. Only about 20% of redditors vote, and only about 20% of voters comment [1]. If you still find it hard to believe, just read the 900+ comments written in less than a day on their…
Only about 20% of redditors vote, and only about 20% of voters comment [1]. That doesn't really ring true. If you make a post with a question in the title, you'll often get 5+ answers before a single person votes. Even downvotes. Maybe it's more accurate to say "Of those people who don't hang out in the new submissions queue, only about 20% of the voters comment." But, really, Reddit could do anything it wants intern…
> They already compress the votes so that it only looks like there are ~10,000 votes maximum, when in fact hundreds of thousands of people have probably voted on certain posts
Again I'm out of the loop by several years here. But to my knowledge, no that's not true. There are just fewer voters than you think there are.
Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy
#66This is a gorgeous post and I shiver at the thought of how much work went into this! Thoughtful, detailed and chock full of great visualizations of the data. I'd be interested in a similar analysis of HN, as I'm interested in the editorial intent thus revealed. On tangential note, though, I was a bit surprised by the hypothesis. 'Meritocracy' to begin with is a dubious fiction, but especially so when mapped on to the…
It appears he just meant to say "democratic".
Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy
#67Nice job. I guess the practical takeaway is, if you don't want to look at funny pictures and animal GIFs, start on page 2.
Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy
#68I 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?
It's odd the Ron Paul was popular on Reddit for a while though. How do you explain that?
Reddit loves 4chan memes.
Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy
#69Very cool. Although, maybe another possible explanation is that people get "tired" at reading a whole page and skip to the next page, resulting in a top of the page bias.
Also, love the use of R. R is beautiful.
Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Theoretically, I think it can exist. However it would take a fair bit of luck for the core group that grows up around it being diverse in their opinions but also open minded. Unfortunately most people these days are more interested in their initial opinion being right than in having real discourse that everyone can learn and grow from.
Political conversations that don't devolve into idiocy and hatred are the exception, and not the rule, in any forum or group I've ever encountered. I think if your theory involves mass-exclusion/banning you could possibly end up with a place like this. But the conversation would actually lose an important voice at that point. The angry people are (often) angry for a reason, they're just usually pretty bad at making t…
Some of the most civil (and then again, some of the least civil) political discussions I've ever seen on the internet happen on places like Facebook, where people are friends, and where almost everyone uses his/her real name. I think those two factors are very important: 1) real identities, 2) some form of reciprocal relationship among all parties to the conversation.
If you look at a political debate from a game-theoretical standpoint, a debate among friends is a multi-stage game. You don't want to go nuclear right off the bat, because when the dust clears, you'll still want to be friends with your opponent. There's a continuity to the relationship. There will be a second, third, fourth,...,500th "round" to the "game."
I'm not sure if this situation is any more likely to yield productive discussions. But on average, it yields more civil, less abrasive discussions. On the downside, it can often result in echo-chamber conversations that never really get interesting.
Conversely, the worst and least civil debates I've seen have occurred on long-standing message boards or communities, wherein the members are anonymous, but they're known for their handles. These members have "known" each other for years in some cases, but they don't really know each other, and they have few qualms about unleashing the flames. Especially when they feel their reputations or credibility within the community are at stake. These users have created identities for themselves, and paradoxically, they'll often defend those proxy identities more ferociously than they'll defend their real identities.
Tl;dr: when people assume group or tribal identities, you get worse flame wars and less substance. When people assume individual identities, you get fewer flame wars, and possibly more substance.