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The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy

toddwschneider.com

111–120 of 151 posts

Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy

#111
post #69

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.

R is awful. It's full of decisions made by people who seem to not have much programming experience, in that they seem good at the time but cause major issues later on. See, for instance, http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2012/06/08/r-the-master-troll... , http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2008/12/use-equals-or-ar... , http://shape-of-code.coding-guidelines.com/2012/02/29/parsin... , and the necessity of http://tim-smith.us/arrgh/ (I wrote up some stuff about the *apply functions, but not yet in a form suitable for the guide: https://github.com/tdsmith/aRrgh/issues/18 ) .

Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy

#112

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…

For those curious,

quant |kwänt| noun informal a quantitative analyst.

ORIGIN 1970s: abbreviation.

Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy

#113
post #82

On HN how is it that posts with 7 points make it the front page but others do not?

Posts with 7 points that get those points quickly (within a half hour of being posted) will hit the front page due to the time portion of the algorithm.

Whether it stays there is another story.

Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy

#114
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…

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…

> it's now curated to some extent

HN was a curated site before, too. We just explain it more now.

Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy

#115
post #94
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.

The biggest factor there by far is user flags.

Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy

#116
post #104

Earlier 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"

Umm, that isn't a double negative.

Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy

#117
Beautiful post very interesting data.

The 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

#118
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…

Thanks! I love those chunky graphs, definitely going to play around with ggplot2 a bit.

Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy

#119
Just a though: It looks like things toward the bottom of a page drop off in popularity. Perhaps users are more engaged when looking at the top of the page, clicking all the links, and perhaps less engaged towards the bottom, skipping remaining links and just going to the next page. I imagine this would only be seen by users who use the actual page rather than RES.

Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy

#120
post #104

Earlier 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"

That's not how english works. That's not a double negative.
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