121–130 of 151 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
> That's how english works. That's a double negative.
Exactly!
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…
- They tried too hard to do a Tuft* - but it's actually way too flashy.
- Basically the issue is that it's not generic enough. Whenever you see a ggplot2 plot it's always screaming at you "I WAS MADE IN ggplot2!!" Just KISS...
- The grey background is completely unusable if you want to print out your charts!
- The default pastel colors (ie. PowerPoint 2012) are always a disaster for readability. In meetings people constantly can't tell them apart and they are definitely not colorblind friendly.
It' a shame b/c each script I write ends up having to have an obnoxiously long theme declaration to make it look "normal"
* I think most people miss the Tuft's point. He presents a way about thinking about data presentation. Instead people just look at it and think "oooo! That looks pretty. Let me copy what he did". The guy has his own personal style - it's definitely nice, but the point isn't to copy it.
EDIT: For those thinking about learning ggplot2.. maybe wait off for a bit. It seems like it'll be deprecated soon and replaces with ggvis.
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.
Back when there were only 25 default subreddits and multireddits had just been launched, I tried to create a default multireddit. If I just included the top 25, the rankings would match the logged out view perfectly. But if I added /r/blog and /r/announcements they would appear in different places. I think they usually ended up at a slightly lower rank, but they also stuck around in the top 50 much longer, with week old posts often being inserted into the middle of the rankings.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I really enjoy using ggplot2, but the basic "theme" is terrible. - They tried too hard to do a Tuft* - but it's actually way too flashy. - Basically the issue is that it's not generic enough. Whenever you see a ggplot2 plot it's always screaming at you "I WAS MADE IN ggplot2!!" Just KISS... - The grey background is completely unusable if you want to print out your charts! - The default pastel colors (ie. PowerPoint 2…
I would recommend using theme_bw(), which helps solve some of the problem with the gray background.
EDIT: This is ggvis: http://blog.rstudio.org/2014/06/23/introducing-ggvis/
This is news to me, so I'll look into it to see how it differs from ggplot2.
EDIT 2: It seems more like that the difference is that ggvis is more for interactive charts, but then it requires a dependency on Shiny, which is not optimal for blog posts.
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"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really enjoy using ggplot2, but the basic "theme" is terrible. - They tried too hard to do a Tuft* - but it's actually way too flashy. - Basically the issue is that it's not generic enough. Whenever you see a ggplot2 plot it's always screaming at you "I WAS MADE IN ggplot2!!" Just KISS... - The grey background is completely unusable if you want to print out your charts! - The default pastel colors (ie. PowerPoint 2…
NB: Here is a paper the derivation of the ggplot styles: http://vita.had.co.nz/papers/layered-grammar.pdf I would recommend using theme_bw(), which helps solve some of the problem with the gray background. EDIT: This is ggvis: http://blog.rstudio.org/2014/06/23/introducing-ggvis/ This is news to me, so I'll look into it to see how it differs from ggplot2. EDIT 2: It seems more like that the difference is that ggvis i…
I'm definitely not an R guru or "in" on the latest news, but it seems that Hadley Wickham (who probably single handedly is the reason R is still relevant) now works for the RStudio guys and he's reworking his tools. plyr is now dplyr and gpplot2 is now ggvis. And there also another tool called tinyr. My understanding is that they're still in development, but they'll ultimately provide an "integrated" ecosystem for processing data.frames (with hooks into the RStudio IDE)
He talks about it at the beginning of this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wki0BqlztCo
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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.
Personally, it makes me sad.
This post is interesting, but he should have just read the code: https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/lib/norma... This is an effect of the normalization algorithm, which biases towards trying to have a post from as may different subreddits as possible on the front page. Edit: At least we're consistent! Ketralnis said the same thing about an hour ago. :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8568021
>r/funny posts simply never appear on the bottom half of page one or most of page two
Note the "never" part....not just rarely...never. Well within this 1.2 million point dataset anyway.
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.
Can you explain why /r/blog is treated differently in multireddits? Back when there were only 25 default subreddits and multireddits had just been launched, I tried to create a default multireddit. If I just included the top 25, the rankings would match the logged out view perfectly. But if I added /r/blog and /r/announcements they would appear in different places. I think they usually ended up at a slightly lower ra…
But if your front page is 25 links long (the default) and has 25 subreddits, I imagine adding 2 more means that you need to show 27 subreddits in 25 links, so you hit some edge-case there where things need to be laid out again.
The way this probably works is that we pick 25 subreddits at random (and cache that random choice for a while), some of which may have no qualifying submissions. So you may end up with 2 /r/funny posts, even though you had 27 subreddits for 25 links.
Or at least that's how it used to work. I know this bit has changed but I don't know what the new way is
This post is interesting, but he should have just read the code: https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/lib/norma... This is an effect of the normalization algorithm, which biases towards trying to have a post from as may different subreddits as possible on the front page. Edit: At least we're consistent! Ketralnis said the same thing about an hour ago. :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8568021
Thats an awful lot of funny looking graphs to blame on a "normalization algo". e.g. >r/funny posts simply never appear on the bottom half of page one or most of page two Note the "never" part....not just rarely...never. Well within this 1.2 million point dataset anyway.
So the alpha-funny link makes it, and the beta-funny link has to sit on page 3, suppressed, unable to take its rightful spot... until suddenly alpha-funny is too old, and is kicked off the front page, at which point beta-funny immediately ascends to take its place.