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"We want to better communicate the scale of Reddit to our users." If that's true why did they hide vote numbers on comments and posts? It used to say "xxx upvo

• jonknee 9y ago
  It's to deter bots. The numbers weren't previously accurate, they were fuzzed (also to deter bots). https://www.reddit.com/wiki/faq#wiki_how_is_a_submission.27s_score_determined.3F https://www.reddit.com/wiki/faq#wiki_how_is_a_submission.27s...
  • ma2rten 9y ago
    I don't quite see the connection. How exactly does this deter bots?
    • Klathmon 9y ago
      It's difficult to see if their votes are counting, allowing Reddit to silently-ignore their votes without them knowing.
      • jliptzin 9y ago
        Can't you just delay updating the count by some random number of minutes/hours?
        • nowarninglabel 9y ago
          That be easy to test though if you were bot was effective or not, just post to unpopular subreddits, make bot votes on those submissions, then check back the next day. If votes not counted, then your bot is being ignored and you'd move on to changing your IP address or building your next bot or such.
          • deleted 9y ago
            [deleted]
          • problems 9y ago
            There's no reason this exact same method won't work given their current practice though.
    • ryanlol 9y ago
      It's a poor method of deterring bots written by people with very little experience writing such bots. Botting reddit is really easy, you'll just want lots of IPs so something like luminati. Reddit is definitely not a paragon of anti-bot engineering, I think most of those skills exist in adtech.
      • nebabyte 9y ago
        Yup. Attribution's king in adtech.
• stevenh 9y ago
  Suppose there's a comment with 12 upvotes and 207 downvotes. Now suppose you're reddit and you want to make this comment seem more popular than it actually is. You could slowly remove the downvotes, but attentive people refreshing the page will see the number shrinking and become suspicious, because real users never suddenly do a mass retraction of their votes. You could slowly add a bunch of upvotes, but then people will wonder why this comment with a consistent 12/207 popularity ratio for the past hour suddenly overcame it and became the most popular comment in the thread. People will suspect a coordinated raid took place. Both approaches raise too much suspicion. The safest approach is to turn off the ability to view the separate upvote/downvote values altogether and use a simple easing function to artificially increase the comment's total score over time. When no one can see the upvote/downvote ratio or the volume of vote activity over time, they lose the ability to judge whether manipulation is taking place. You need an excuse for the change, so don't forget to also come up with a spurious narrative about how it was supposedly done to fight bots.
  • joshuamorton 9y ago
    Except that vote fuzzing was always a thing, so when you'd see 1000 upvotes and 100 downvotes, that could be off by an enormous amount (I think a reddit admin said by a factor of 5x or 10x in extreme cases, ie. frontpage posts).
• awalton 9y ago
  ...because it's almost certainly a lie. It's because they want to better communicate the scale of Reddit to their customers - the companies on the other side of the links who they are driving content to. It's way easier to say "Hey, we're giving you XYZ traffic, give us ABC dollars," when you have the figures in front of you rather than just upvote/downvote numbers.