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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

#3
A couple of years back, it was announced that the trailer for one of the new Star Wars movies would debut during halftime of Monday Night Football. There's always a rush to post stuff like links to new movie trailers "first" on Reddit, so as to get the most fake internet points.

I guessed that the trailer would probably get added to the Star Wars YouTube page at around the same time it aired on TV, so I wrote a script to scrape the YouTube page every few seconds, and if a new video was added, submit the link to one of the big subreddits.

Sure enough, my hunch was correct, and my submission of the trailer on YouTube wound up being the first. The upvotes and comments poured in, skyrocketing the post briefly to the #1 link on Reddit's front page. This felt pretty cool and resulted in several thousand post karma. I didn't use the program after that, having satisfied my curiosity as to whether or not it would actually work. 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.

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

#4
The real story here is that domain expertise can lead to superior outcomes. The hybrid curation pipeline still worked, but it was a low risk and low reward solution that would eventually reach the goal. In general, there's a lot of unanswered questions regarding how to optimize in the risk reward ML space.

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

#6
post #3

A couple of years back, it was announced that the trailer for one of the new Star Wars movies would debut during halftime of Monday Night Football. There's always a rush to post stuff like links to new movie trailers "first" on Reddit, so as to get the most fake internet points. I guessed that the trailer would probably get added to the Star Wars YouTube page at around the same time it aired on TV, so I wrote a scrip…

I'm sure you could do similar with certain blogs and posting to HN. EG PG's blog, anything written by Patio11 etc.

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

#7
post #3

A couple of years back, it was announced that the trailer for one of the new Star Wars movies would debut during halftime of Monday Night Football. There's always a rush to post stuff like links to new movie trailers "first" on Reddit, so as to get the most fake internet points. I guessed that the trailer would probably get added to the Star Wars YouTube page at around the same time it aired on TV, so I wrote a scrip…

> 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.

More than fake internet points, it's a distilled popularity contest, and we know popular people isn't necessarily trustworthy. Reddit calling it karma gives it more credit than it deserves.

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

#9
post #3

A couple of years back, it was announced that the trailer for one of the new Star Wars movies would debut during halftime of Monday Night Football. There's always a rush to post stuff like links to new movie trailers "first" on Reddit, so as to get the most fake internet points. I guessed that the trailer would probably get added to the Star Wars YouTube page at around the same time it aired on TV, so I wrote a scrip…

Reddit etc are basically games.

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

#10
post #3

A couple of years back, it was announced that the trailer for one of the new Star Wars movies would debut during halftime of Monday Night Football. There's always a rush to post stuff like links to new movie trailers "first" on Reddit, so as to get the most fake internet points. I guessed that the trailer would probably get added to the Star Wars YouTube page at around the same time it aired on TV, so I wrote a scrip…

I only trust posts on Reddit from usernames that are > 5y old and have less than 3000 karma (unfortunately, this means I wouldn't trust my own account(s) lol). Similar to how 4 star and 2 star reviews on Amazon are infinitely more informational to understand the real pros and cons.
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