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There are some subreddits where they are hidden for a period of time (not sure how long, but it's quite a while). I wonder if anyone has analyzed those?

• minimaxir 9y ago
  A formal statistical experiment was done in /r/politics about the impact of hiding vote counts temporarily but it did not find statistical evidence that it made an impact on discourse: https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/mitmedialab/CivilServant-Analysis/blob/master/reports/stylesheet_experiment_results.11.2017.html https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/mitmediala...
  • thaumaturgy 9y ago
    Low-effort comment, but: I really appreciate your content, both here and on Reddit. It's refreshing to see anyone doing any of this sort of analysis, and it takes a lot of effort to do it, and you do it really well and at a rate that's mind-boggling.
    • minimaxir 9y ago
      Thanks! I do have other cool things planned with the Reddit data pipeline too, so stay tuned! ;) (for clarification, the linked statistical analysis isn't mine)
  • cookiecaper 9y ago
    /r/politics is aggressively left-wing, so much so that I'd doubt anyone interested in real discourse is trying anymore. I'd think an experiment like that would need to be done on a clean subreddit that isn't bringing in any baggage, or a pre-existing ideology-based ban list, to test its validity.
  • sli 9y ago
    Was /r/politics given a vote-hiding feature that other subreddits didn't have? Votes and downvote buttons are typically hidden with custom CSS that users can disable, which would completely invalidate these results. Votes can be hidden for real for a short time, but cannot be disabled completely.
• Lionsion 9y ago
  > There are some subreddits where they are hidden for a period of time (not sure how long, but it's quite a while) I think there's a subreddit-level setting for that, but the max is only something like a couple of days.
  • linker3000 9y ago
    0-1440 mins Just checked - Reddit mod /r/askelectronics
• stochastic_monk 9y ago
  r/politics said it didn’t make much difference, but they left it that way anyhow. The feedback based ranking implicitly supports echo chambering, but there’s not much of a way around that.
  • dspillett 9y ago
    > but they left it that way anyhow If it makes little difference either way, perhaps they left it on to quiet those who would keep suggesting they try it even though they already have.
  • paulmd 9y ago
    > The feedback based ranking implicitly supports echo chambering, but there’s not much of a way around that. Traditional topic-based forums are better, because you can't suppress unpopular-but-correct opinions by downvoting. Even if you don't care about Fake Internet Points (and the reason they exist is because we do, gamification works), if you state something that goes against the prevailing hivemind your opinion will literally be hidden unless users go out of their way to find them. (and yes, I browse HN with showdead=yes for the same reason)
    • bhandziuk 9y ago
      what does showdead do?
      • paulmd 9y ago
        Shows posts that have been flagged from mods, users, or shadowbanning and hidden from the normal display.
    • CompanionCuuube 9y ago
      Same here. I read all of the gray comments, because it means the comment was something unpopular enough to downvote.