The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy • Hacker News Board

Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy

#101

Post by jedberg » Thu, Nov 06, 2014, 6:48 PM UTC

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #78

ketralnis wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's possible, but it seems unlikely. https://www.reddit.com/comments/z1c9z Obama's AMA. According to the sidebar, (upvotes - downvotes) = 14,700, with upvotes/(upvotes+downvotes) = 94%. Reddit recently changed their algorithms so that the 94% figure is very accurate. That means 14,700/0.94 ~= 15,600 people voted, according to the sidebar. Here are Reddit's traffic stats for the Obama AMA: https://www.reddit.com/r/IA…

> If the number of voters could be calculated as a simple percentage of total active Reddit accounts, and Reddit's traffic has doubled, then why haven't the vote counts in /r/all also doubled?

The people who are joining reddit now are more lurkers than participants, so as the site grows, the percent of people who participate (vote and comment) gets smaller.

Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy

#102

Post by jedmeyers » Thu, Nov 06, 2014, 6:49 PM UTC

minimaxir wrote: post #53

phillmv wrote: post #34

This 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…

A note about the graphics: all the charts were made with R/ggplot2. Not only ggplot2, but basic ggplot2: the charts in the blog post can be made with about 5 lines of code maximum each. You can customize ggplot2 for even more beautiful charts, such as the ones used in my analysis of HN comments: http://minimaxir.com/2014/10/hn-comments-about-comments/ Note that reproducing this analysis for the HN front page is harde…

By the way, there is an awesome course track on Data Science from Johns Hopkins on Coursera right now, which includes introduction to R.

https://www.coursera.org/specialization/jhudatascience/1?utm...

Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy

#103

Post by buckbova » Thu, Nov 06, 2014, 6:58 PM UTC

tedks wrote: post #94

hiou wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like as describe Reddit and HN to be voter nominated, not voter selected. Votes nominate stories, but then the algorithm decides which ones to pick from that pile.

And for HN, the "algorithm" is the subjective judgment of the moderation staff, as witnessed by countless articles on the misogyny in tech (as an example) getting axed from the front page.

Or maybe those subjective articles on misogyny in tech are flagged by users like me.

Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy

#104

Post by raldi » Thu, Nov 06, 2014, 7:03 PM UTC

ketralnis wrote: post #64

selmnoo wrote: 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…

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.

> I've been out of the loop for a few years, but no the votes aren't manipulated.

AHA! Let's just cancel out the double negative ("no" and "n't") and look what we uncover, in this former reddit admin's very own words: "the votes are manipulated"

Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy

#105

Post by vitamen » Thu, Nov 06, 2014, 7:03 PM UTC

lostlogin wrote: post #84

ketralnis wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Just to nitpick, accounts != people. Reddit in particular seems to attract throw away accounts and a large number of posts seem to start with "Throwaway". But otherwise, yes!

Also you don't need an e-mail address to register, and some people don't care about karma, so some people like me just create a new account whenever my saved login info is lost for any reason. Not necessarily using throwaway accounts in the traditional sense, but not overly concerned about maintaining a single account either. I've probably made 6-7 Reddit accounts over a few years [and 2 HN accounts over a longer time frame].

Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy

#106

Post by xiongchiamiov » Thu, Nov 06, 2014, 7:08 PM UTC

moron4hire wrote: post #74

rkuykendall-com wrote: post #36

Earlier 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…

The follow is CWACkery: Complete, Wild-Ass Conjecture... kery. Are you familiar with the 90/9/1 rule of thumb? That for any site with user-generated content (message boards, social networks, etc.), only 10% of people contribute to the discussion and only 10% of those people start new conversations? At first, I read your comment about "20% of 20%" and thought "wow, that would be 80/16/4, that's incredible". But this a…

http://www.nngroup.com/articles/participation-inequality/ if you're looking for an article on it.

Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy

#107

Post by fenomas » Thu, Nov 06, 2014, 7:09 PM UTC

IANAQ* , but could not the effects shown in this article occur from content-neutral rules, combined with some clustering in the popularity of various subreddits?

For example, assume there is a rule that a given subreddit can have no more than N posts in the top 50 at a given time. It seems like this alone would explain the clustering shown in the article. Super-popular subreddits like /r/funny would rarely have posts on page 2, simply because they usually already have N posts on page 1. Thus they drop off sharply in likelihood to appear in the 40s, then shoot back up after #50 when the limiting stops.

Meanwhile clusters 2 and 3 appear to be the subreddits which rarely and often (respectively) reach the top 50, but only due to the limiting rule. Cluster 2 is the least popular in the unlimited spots past #50, so it makes sense that it usually reaches the lowest of the limited spots, while cluster 3 (apparently medium in overall popularity) takes the middle region.

Naturally I'm just squinting at it, but it looks like the article's findings could easily occur without Reddit treating some subreddits differently from others (as I take the author to imply it might, given the title). Am I missing something?

* I am not a quant :P

Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy

#108

Post by devindotcom » Thu, Nov 06, 2014, 7:09 PM UTC

One thing that immediately jumped to my head when I saw the falloff towards 50 and then the jump right after 50 was simply visual prominence. I would guess that people naturally pay more attention to posts that appear at the top of the page, whether it's page 1, 2, or 3. There's also a blip of attention at the very bottom, since that post is also visually and conceptually distinct - everyone looks directly at it because it's the last one, so it gets more eyeballs and potentially quite a few people giving it a charity vote to "save" it from dropping to the next page. Meanwhile people scan more quickly over posts in the middle, perhaps (as I do) merely skimming over a couple words and the score, to see whether it merits moving my eyes over the whole line (because my time is that valuable).

Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy

#109

Post by paulhauggis » Thu, Nov 06, 2014, 7:10 PM UTC

thenmar wrote: post #47

ThomPete wrote: post #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?

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 disagree. Pretty much any news article or situation is sided with the left on Reddit. Its even difficult to have an open and honest discussion here on HN, because anything that goes against the mainstream view (which tends to be liberal) is downvoted and silenced.

Its getting to the point where the only way to defend against such tactics is to play just as dirty.

Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy

#110

Post by xiongchiamiov » Thu, Nov 06, 2014, 7:10 PM UTC

cryptoz wrote: post #8

selmnoo wrote: 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

They're just like other default subreddits, which is to say that you can unsubscribe from them. I only resubscribed recently because I started working at reddit and figured I should know what's going on in my own company.