Very 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.
The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy
111–120 of 151 posts
Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy
#112IANAQ* , 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…
quant |kwänt| noun informal a quantitative analyst.
ORIGIN 1970s: abbreviation.
Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy
#113On HN how is it that posts with 7 points make it the front page but others do not?
Whether it stays there is another story.
Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy
#114This 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…
I'd be interested in a similar analysis of HN, as I'm interested in the editorial intent thus revealed. HN no longer functions entirely off of the "reddit algorithm." I know that it's now curated to some extent. "Merit" just seems like a big value judgement over such a noisy channel. I think the takeaway from such investigations -- and all of human history -- is that the system will be gamed . To survive, systems mus…
HN was a curated site before, too. We just explain it more now.
Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy
#115Earlier 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.
Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
#117The balance trying to be achieved can most simply be described as known good content vs. discovery. I wouldn't call it uneven it's more like; this is interesting vs we might think you'll find this interesting but we're taking a gamble because it has low visibility. I'm betting subreddits can move from cluster to cluster over time as well fairly frequently. Maybe an interesting thing to try to track over the next month or 2?
Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy
#118This 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…
Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy
#119Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
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"