Deriving the Reddit Formula
evanmiller.org
Deriving the Reddit Formula
1–10 of 20 posts
Re: Deriving the Reddit Formula
#2The biggest problem is that reddit's voting system is still pretty easy to game
Re: Deriving the Reddit Formula
#3Don't forget the group of users who can move stories around adding or removing votes from them at will. I'm sure there's been a lot of "Put this on the front page please" favors done for friends.
Re: Deriving the Reddit Formula
#4Do the conclusions change if we assume that the goal is not to optimize for value to the user, but for value to the company? Specifically, it seems that using the vote difference rather than the vote ratio would help controversial stories rank high. Controversial stories in turn are great at driving lots of discussion, which means lots of visits and revisits to the comment section.
(Compare to the apparent HN policy of discouraging controversy, both by the large effect of flagging and through the flamewar detector).
Re: Deriving the Reddit Formula
#5Note: The author of this piece wrote the original analysis (http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating....) that directly led to my advocating for reddit's "best" comment sort, including to xkcd's Randall Munroe, who managed to finally convince the rest of Team Reddit to make the change (http://www.redditblog.com/2009/10/reddits-new-comment-sortin...).
So when the author says, "I realize that proposing any change to how Reddit works is one of the Internet's most dangerous games," he should be informed that it's actually a game he's won before.
Re: Deriving the Reddit Formula
#6I think this type of formula assumes a uniform list of links? Whereas I'd expect a discontinuity at the end of the front page. I wonder what it would look like if it took that into account, maybe the q term could incorporate the page number somehow.
Re: Deriving the Reddit Formula
#7Do the conclusions change if we assume that the goal is not to optimize for value to the user, but for value to the company? Specifically, it seems that using the vote difference rather than the vote ratio would help controversial stories rank high. Controversial stories in turn are great at driving lots of discussion, which means lots of visits and revisits to the comment section. (Compare to the apparent HN policy…
Possibly short term, but if you build a site around the kinds of people who like flame wars, your advertisers may notice they're getting very little traction from your site. Page views go up, but uniques go down.
Re: Deriving the Reddit Formula
#8What algo does HN use?
Re: Deriving the Reddit Formula
#9What algo does HN use?
Re: Deriving the Reddit Formula
#10>This resolves one of the original mysteries — why the current time doesn't appear in Reddit's formula.
The current time did appear in the very early Reddit's formula but they figured it was computationally much faster to inflate the scores for new stories than to have to go through the database reducing the scores for loads of old stories.