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I got 10k post karma on Reddit with (and without) fast.ai

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Re: I got 10k post karma on Reddit with (and without) fast.ai

#81

Post by popinman322 »

Gunax wrote: post #78
grawprog wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But it did make me think about just how easy it is to farm karma on Reddit, and how useless it is as a proxy for "trust" or "reputation" or anything other than what it is - fake internet points. I have to say, do people really take karma, upvotes, credit, fake internet points etc. As a measure of trustworthiness? I know reddit pushes this idea but do people actually participating in communities with point systems se…

You get karma for posting pithy and non-controversial (pessimists might say groupthink agreeable) comments or posts. As much as everyone claims the system is for rewarding on topic discussion, in reality it is used to award points to people who echo whatever is popular and to put wrong think at the bottom.

You can convey unpopular opinions on Reddit without getting downvoted. It just takes good wording and replying to the right post-- essentially what's required in real life: timing and tactfulness.

Re: I got 10k post karma on Reddit with (and without) fast.ai

#82

Post by ameerkat »

ggm wrote: post #66

Did the end of the article say he only showed he WOULD get 10k, not actually did?

Yes, what I was trying to articulate at the end was that the bot which finds urls to post only generated 3.7k karma after 1.5 months. Given additional time there's nothing stopping it from generating up to the 10k. I actually achieved the 10k with some additional manual posts rather than extend the bot or run it for additional time.

Re: I got 10k post karma on Reddit with (and without) fast.ai

#83

Post by ameerkat »

fefe23 wrote: post #69

So basically you used unethical trickery to cheat yourself 10k meaningless internet points? You also shoehorned AI into the story so you could generate some meaningless internet points with the impressionable youth on Hacker News, too? How about you do something meaningful and ethical with AI instead. Then you might even earn an upvote from me.

The intention was not to write a bot which uses unethical trickery, but one that was a productive poster. I include the posts to reddit the bot made in the article. I understand how you may be disillusioned by this article, and I concur that there are many more meaningful things I would like to apply AI to than a contest between friends.

Re: I got 10k post karma on Reddit with (and without) fast.ai

#84

Post by jungletime »

xondono wrote: post #80
jungletime wrote: post #29

As someone that got a photo of a grizzly in the wild. It was surprisingly easy. Here's how you can do it too. For probably under 1k. 1. Fly out to Anchorage, Alaska 2. Drive to Denali visitor center, (Denali State Park) 3. Take the Bus to Denali (~$50) You are almost guaranteed to see a wild grizzlies along the way. The bus will stop so you can take a photo. You can even get off and go for a hike if you like. They wi…

> For probably under 1k. 1. Fly out to Anchorage, Alaska You are greatly underestimating that cost

I drove by car and camped along the way. Definitely don't stay in hotels in Alaska, if you're not rich. Its crazy expensive (like $400/night for Holiday Inn)

The way to do it cheaply is to fly in late June/July and camp in Denali park. The weather is warm enough for camping and its fantastic. I actually feel camping is the best way to do it!

Assuming you already own camping gear. And can pack some food.

Here's how it can be done:

$100 - Camping in Denali Park: $45 (entrance fee) + $17/night x 3

$200 - $50/day * 4 days car rental

$50 - Fuel / Snacks ( 300 miles round trip from Anchorage)

$50 - Denali Bus Ticket

$50 - Firewood/Misc

_____

$450 - 4 days/3 nights.

Budget left for flight $550 .

Depending where you fly in from you could come in under 1k. Seattle round trip flight in June $400. NY/Alaska is $620 round trip. Which would push you over 1k. But if you convince a friend to go with you, you could split the car/camping costs.

You can also do wild camping for free, and if you're into trying fly fishing, I definitely recommend getting a fishing license.

Fishing License Costs: 1 day - $25 / 3 days - $45. A basic Fly fishing kit can be bought < $100.

Re: I got 10k post karma on Reddit with (and without) fast.ai

#85

Post by fefe23 »

dang wrote: post #72
fefe23 wrote: post #69

So basically you used unethical trickery to cheat yourself 10k meaningless internet points? You also shoehorned AI into the story so you could generate some meaningless internet points with the impressionable youth on Hacker News, too? How about you do something meaningful and ethical with AI instead. Then you might even earn an upvote from me.

Aw, please don't flame people this here. It's not sporting and not in the intended spirit of the site. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You may be confused about the meaning of "flame". I did not flame anybody. Flaming is an insult directed against a person.

I rephrased what they confessed about their deeds.

The deeds are, indeed, in my estimation, unethical.

I assumed that part is not controversial, as the cheated system in question is called the Karma system.

Surely it is not news to you that cheating karma is unethical?

It was instituted to foster trust and good behavior among visitors of Reddit.

The posting is about cheating that system.

I must be missing something here. Please explain.

Re: I got 10k post karma on Reddit with (and without) fast.ai

#86

Post by MayeulC »

Hmm, I'm actually interested in that kind of ML application, for filtering news I'd be interested in, fine-tuned to my preference.

Maybe crawl the net to find some interesting news, yes, but most of all assign a score to all the news that come my way (RSS, aggregators, etc), and filter out the useless ones.

And while you are at it, apply this to e-mail too. Maybe with a small chance of letting some trough to avoid getting stuck in a local maxima, or locking someone out.

At least this would make it much easier to read the important news first, most of the time. Though important != interesting.

Re: I got 10k post karma on Reddit with (and without) fast.ai

#87

Post by sporkologist »

criddell wrote: post #77
sporkologist wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are HN karma points fake too? I hope not

> I hope not Why?

I appreciate karma points as a measure of how much my thoughts resonate with others, or don't... They are real enough for me.

Re: I got 10k post karma on Reddit with (and without) fast.ai

#88

Post by nullc »

fireattack wrote: post #68
pugworthy wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...doesn't really mean anything and doesn't make your posts more valuable.. True for posts, and true for comments if they get upvotes. Downvotes however make comments less valuable. I imagine some people see the gray/faded comments and just presume low value content, which may not be the case.

I think he meant that your karma on your account won't affect your posts. (And I agree.. you can even see the karma of the poster without clicking into his username.) The points you got for a particular post of course matters, since it affects the visibility.

Many subreddits have automod set to hide (or hold for moderation) posts/comments from posters with below some threshold karma.

You may not even know this is being done to you because it uses a shadowban-esq mechanism where the comments remain visible to you.

Re: I got 10k post karma on Reddit with (and without) fast.ai

#89

Post by sdeaf »

_ps6d wrote: post #65

One of the bots in /r/SubredditSimulator was the "top today" bot, which would just take the top 500 posts from /r/all in the last 24 hours, pick one of the links at random, and repost it with a gibberish title made from a markov chain of those 500 posts' titles. With such a small set of input, the titles almost never made any sense at all. I had to shut that bot down, because eventually just reposting a random popula…

What do you assume the source and cause of the upvotes were? Browsing /r/all it is easy to attribute the post and comments as pre-programmed.

Faulty algorithms? algorithms working as intended? vote purchase? intentional spam?

Do you scrape, log, and track, and compare user comments, and profiles on reddit or any other site? What data do you collect?

Re: I got 10k post karma on Reddit with (and without) fast.ai

#90

Post by carbonatedmilk »

I don't understand why the author took the approach he did.

He creates a classifier with 5 label,s and gets 50% accuracy on the cross-val (This may be ok, may be terrible, we don't know), but then only uses the labels for one of those classes. What's the precision/recall on that class?

Also, he's taken a multi-class classification approach to what is essentially a regression task. He's trying to predict the # of upvotes a post will get, and there are approaches that'll do that, but this isn't one of them.

It's fun to see NLP applied to these sort of problems, but this isn't a good example of how to do it well.

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