4 ms·

That was an excellent piece. I've done a similar thing on a much smaller scale (fighting for karma within niche subreddits), complete with the careful analysis

by czr 7y ago

That was an excellent piece. I've done a similar thing on a much smaller scale (fighting for karma within niche subreddits), complete with the careful analysis of which content sources do best, which times of day are ideal, what kind of titles and themes cater most to the userbase... I ended up writing plenty of automation as well, to help me filter through the vast quantity of potential submissions and find those which would guarantee a top spot. Reddit is a nice confluence of several things that humans find addicting - semi-random rewards, detailed metrics, quick feedback, novel stimuli, all magnifying the power of underlying signal (social approval). None of that is specific to reddit, of course–every social website eventually becomes that same game, or dies. Unlike the OP, though, I didn't find it unhealthy. Compared to, say, video games, or TV, chasing karma was a much better hamster wheel to run on; it motivated the sort of careful analysis, planning, and diligence that I could eventually apply to real problems. My hope is that reddit (and reddit-like attention machines) push more strongly in this direction; the ideal feedback loop isn't one that spurs no addiction at all, but rather one for which addiction has net positive consequences.

pojzon 7y ago
Doesnt it all come down to finding the biggest echo chamber within a thread and posting something following the narrative ? Reddit is pretty much the definition of echo chamber on majority of subs. Tho i understand why from psychological point of view.
- czr 7y ago
  I think it depends on the subreddit and topic. For cases where most people already have a strongly-held opinion (say, when discussing any culture-war topics on a one-sided sub), sure, giving a witty or rousing restatement of the predominant opinion is a cheap way to score points. For cases where strong pre-existing opinions are rare, a high-quality turns-out style refutation of the existing narrative can do just as well as an affirmation would. Not everything on reddit is culture war, though. there are plenty of peaceful subs out there where there's no narrative to echo.
  - brownbat 7y ago
    > a high-quality turns-out style refutation of the existing narrative... Ok, well played.
- chomp 7y ago
  I don't want to sidetrack y'all's discussion but any user base curated social media platform is going to be an echo chamber, HN included. It's not a unique feature of just Reddit.
  - newen 7y ago
    Don't think so. 4chan encourages contrarian opinions because posters care about replies, not upvotes or likes. Pretty much the only reason you post on 4chan is to reply to people and get replies from people, i.e. the discussion itself. While, agreed that voting style sites like HN and Reddit encourages echo chambers by having a points system and making highly voted comments more visible. There might be some middle ground between these.
    - burger_moon 7y ago
      > Pretty much the only reason you post on 4chan is to reply to people and get replies from people Just because there's no points, doesn't mean people don't get satisfaction from people replying to them, or having your thread stay at the top with lots of discussion. Replying to threads bumps them to the top right? So having a thread high on the page is a similar signal as point rankings right?
      - whymauri 7y ago
        Yeah, but the difference here is that exposure can also come from negative and contrarian attention. So the dominant strategy for staying at the top of a board is sometimes to be as controversial as possible. Basically, trolling. From a meta perspective, I guess trolling-for-the-sake-of-trolling can be part of the 'echo chamber.' However, at a surface level it remains antipodal to the idea of 'following a narrative.'
        Fleetingreef 7y ago
        >So the dominant strategy for staying at the top of a board is sometimes to be as controversial as possible. Basically, trolling. In my experience this varies wildly, both from board-to-board and between imageboard sites in general. One aspect is moderation. The MO of 4chan moderation is to enforce US Law and a bare minimum of conduct in such a manner that it is not noticeable to most posters. If you use a browser extension which allows you to monitor deleted posts/threads, such as 4chanX, and have it monitor a thread where a poster is intentionally trying to incite controversy in a manner which is not conducive to the topic or board theme, they will generally get silently deleted. On their end, they may get warned, banned, or no notification at all, but the deletion is primarily effective because it deprives them of their exposure (also, ban evasion is trivial, while keeping one's flamebait up is not). Another aspect is the culture of each board, which varies wildly on 4chan. For example, posting political and social flamebait on one of the slower, niche boards will just as likely result in people silently reporting the bait and not replying, or only reply to call out the post as flamebait (which is less ideal, but generally ends the conversation chain). If the content is deleted in a consistent and timely manner, the posters can establish norms, and can more effectively handle borderline flamebait without devolving into a flamewar. Meanwhile, on faster boards, the larger number of trolls and people willing to take the bait, along with the ephemerality from faster pace of thread birth and death, results both in moderation being unable to keep up, and a need for more moderation, usually in the form of "janitors" (board specific moderators with limited powers). The more janitors, the more erratic the enforcement of rules tends to be, especially for Global Rules 3 and 6. So there tends to be greater animosity between moderation and posters on faster boards. The extreme examples would be /b/, /r9k/, and /pol/, the latter two informally serving as an outlet for (a)social and political posts which have proven to be irresistible to discuss while simultaneously being rancorous enough to derail almost any thread. So to sum it up, trolling is more effective on the fastest and most vitriolic boards, and less effective on the rest. IMHO, the best "proper" ways to increase your exposure is to either post original content (with mixed success on a good day), actively engage others in conversation that is at least tangentially related, and if on a more image-oriented board, provide on-topic content to bump the thread.

by czr 7y ago

pojzon 7y ago

Doesnt it all come down to finding the biggest echo chamber within a thread and posting something following the narrative ? Reddit is pretty much the definition of echo chamber on majority of subs. Tho i understand why from psychological point of view.

czr 7y ago
I think it depends on the subreddit and topic. For cases where most people already have a strongly-held opinion (say, when discussing any culture-war topics on a one-sided sub), sure, giving a witty or rousing restatement of the predominant opinion is a cheap way to score points. For cases where strong pre-existing opinions are rare, a high-quality turns-out style refutation of the existing narrative can do just as well as an affirmation would. Not everything on reddit is culture war, though. there are plenty of peaceful subs out there where there's no narrative to echo.
- brownbat 7y ago
  > a high-quality turns-out style refutation of the existing narrative... Ok, well played.
chomp 7y ago
I don't want to sidetrack y'all's discussion but any user base curated social media platform is going to be an echo chamber, HN included. It's not a unique feature of just Reddit.
- newen 7y ago
  Don't think so. 4chan encourages contrarian opinions because posters care about replies, not upvotes or likes. Pretty much the only reason you post on 4chan is to reply to people and get replies from people, i.e. the discussion itself. While, agreed that voting style sites like HN and Reddit encourages echo chambers by having a points system and making highly voted comments more visible. There might be some middle ground between these.
  - burger_moon 7y ago
    > Pretty much the only reason you post on 4chan is to reply to people and get replies from people Just because there's no points, doesn't mean people don't get satisfaction from people replying to them, or having your thread stay at the top with lots of discussion. Replying to threads bumps them to the top right? So having a thread high on the page is a similar signal as point rankings right?
    - whymauri 7y ago
      Yeah, but the difference here is that exposure can also come from negative and contrarian attention. So the dominant strategy for staying at the top of a board is sometimes to be as controversial as possible. Basically, trolling. From a meta perspective, I guess trolling-for-the-sake-of-trolling can be part of the 'echo chamber.' However, at a surface level it remains antipodal to the idea of 'following a narrative.'
      - Fleetingreef 7y ago
        >So the dominant strategy for staying at the top of a board is sometimes to be as controversial as possible. Basically, trolling. In my experience this varies wildly, both from board-to-board and between imageboard sites in general. One aspect is moderation. The MO of 4chan moderation is to enforce US Law and a bare minimum of conduct in such a manner that it is not noticeable to most posters. If you use a browser extension which allows you to monitor deleted posts/threads, such as 4chanX, and have it monitor a thread where a poster is intentionally trying to incite controversy in a manner which is not conducive to the topic or board theme, they will generally get silently deleted. On their end, they may get warned, banned, or no notification at all, but the deletion is primarily effective because it deprives them of their exposure (also, ban evasion is trivial, while keeping one's flamebait up is not). Another aspect is the culture of each board, which varies wildly on 4chan. For example, posting political and social flamebait on one of the slower, niche boards will just as likely result in people silently reporting the bait and not replying, or only reply to call out the post as flamebait (which is less ideal, but generally ends the conversation chain). If the content is deleted in a consistent and timely manner, the posters can establish norms, and can more effectively handle borderline flamebait without devolving into a flamewar. Meanwhile, on faster boards, the larger number of trolls and people willing to take the bait, along with the ephemerality from faster pace of thread birth and death, results both in moderation being unable to keep up, and a need for more moderation, usually in the form of "janitors" (board specific moderators with limited powers). The more janitors, the more erratic the enforcement of rules tends to be, especially for Global Rules 3 and 6. So there tends to be greater animosity between moderation and posters on faster boards. The extreme examples would be /b/, /r9k/, and /pol/, the latter two informally serving as an outlet for (a)social and political posts which have proven to be irresistible to discuss while simultaneously being rancorous enough to derail almost any thread. So to sum it up, trolling is more effective on the fastest and most vitriolic boards, and less effective on the rest. IMHO, the best "proper" ways to increase your exposure is to either post original content (with mixed success on a good day), actively engage others in conversation that is at least tangentially related, and if on a more image-oriented board, provide on-topic content to bump the thread.