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The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy

toddwschneider.com

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Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy

#81

Post by mtbcoder »

johnasb wrote: post #62

Reddit is internet power - I cant recall a day in the last 5 years when I haven't checke reddit. When people ask me what websites do I read I can't recall any other than reddit. So funny. And I grew up with slashdot. People dont even know what slashdot is anymore. Reddit is the internet explorer button for me.

A while back ago I would have agreed with you (also having spent a lot of time on Slashdot), but the quality of posts these days on the front pages keep from returning on a regular basis. Yes, I know that with Reddit you need to unsubscribe from the defaults and things like that and there are quality sub-reddits out there. But from my perspective, the front page used to contain enough good content that one could causally scan through and find something interesting without the haggle of signing up, maintaining subscriptions, searching for relevant content and things like that.

At the end of the day, I'm just there to browse and not jump through a bunch of hoops just to filter out junk that only appeals to the under 18 crowd.

Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy

#83

Post by shalmanese »

cryptoz wrote: post #8
selmnoo wrote: post #4

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…

My guess here is that r/blog (and r/announcements?) is special in that every redditor is subscribed to it. I think I remember some small choas around us all being auto-subscribed to a subreddit we didn't care about (potentially). So it caused a small storm, but ~100% of redditors subscribe to it, which is untrue of probably every other subreddit

Every new reddit user is subscribed to all of the default subreddits and has to manually unsubscribe to get any of them off their front page.

Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy

#84

Post by lostlogin »

ketralnis wrote: post #65
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only about 20% of redditors vote, and only about 20% of voters comment [1]. That doesn't really ring true. If you make a post with a question in the title, you'll often get 5+ answers before a single person votes. Even downvotes. Maybe it's more accurate to say "Of those people who don't hang out in the new submissions queue, only about 20% of the voters comment." But, really, Reddit could do anything it wants intern…

> They already compress the votes so that it only looks like there are ~10,000 votes maximum, when in fact hundreds of thousands of people have probably voted on certain posts Again I'm out of the loop by several years here. But to my knowledge, no that's not true. There are just fewer voters than you think there are.

Just to nitpick, accounts != people. Reddit in particular seems to attract throw away accounts and a large number of posts seem to start with "Throwaway". But otherwise, yes!

Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy

#85

Post by mikecb »

minimaxir wrote: post #53
phillmv wrote: 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…

My favorite example of ggplots ease and customizability comes from xkcd style graphs:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12675147/how-can-we-make-...

Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy

#86

Post by stcredzero »

phillmv wrote: 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 must be robust in the face of corruption and manipulation.

Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy

#87

Post by freshflowers »

No shit Sherlock. It's no secret that the front page is heavily weighted. It's also subject to personalization, so basically no two redditors have the same front page.

The default front page is just the landing page for newcomers to get a first impression and a starting point for personalization.

An analysis of and comparison with /r/all would have been way more interesting.

Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy

#88

Post by 001sky »

gus_massa wrote: post #60
phillmv wrote: 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 deep analysis was published in http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really... (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6799854 (920 points, 345 days ago, 190 comments)). AFAIK there are no filters to bind the maximal post of a domain in the front page, but some domains have automatic penalties.

that (referenced) analysis is out of date

Re: The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy

#89

Post by hiou »

phillmv wrote: 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 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.
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