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The subreddit's culture for years has been based on aggressively upvoting everything posted there. This started back when it was small and the community tried t

by nilkn 7y ago

The subreddit's culture for years has been based on aggressively upvoting everything posted there. This started back when it was small and the community tried to get pro-Trump posts on the front page of Reddit, which invariably caused a lot of drama. So I don't think this means anything.

altcognito 7y ago
Yes, I agree, their culture is contrary to the basic functioning of an online forum.
- nilkn 7y ago
  Your position seems to have backtracked from concern over bots to... disliking lots of upvotes within a community. Forgive me if I think you're being disingenuous with this latest statement.
  - altcognito 7y ago
    Reflexively upvoting everything that comes into a sub is a bad cultural value. It may even break reddits' usage policy. I'm not backtracking, you're the one who brought up that reflexively upvoting might be indistinguishable from botlike behavior. It's a feature (cultural value), not a bug.
bduerst 7y ago
The fact that the activity has been happening for years doesn't invalidate that it could be bot related. Also the fact that reddit admins had to change their site algorithms to remove it from aggregated results, because posts were being gamed to the front page, implies that the behavior was not normal human traffic.
- nilkn 7y ago
  > Also the fact that reddit admins had to change their site algorithms to remove it from aggregated results, because posts were being gamed to the front page, implies that the behavior was not normal human traffic. It implies it's unusual traffic, but it does not imply it's inhuman traffic -- doubly so because the difference has already been explained in a way that doesn't require invoking bots. Somewhat amusingly, after r/the_donald discovered it could push pro-Trump memes onto r/all by making every post on the subreddit about upvoting content, some other subreddits managed to pull off the same stunt in protest.

by nilkn 7y ago

altcognito 7y ago

Yes, I agree, their culture is contrary to the basic functioning of an online forum.

nilkn 7y ago
Your position seems to have backtracked from concern over bots to... disliking lots of upvotes within a community. Forgive me if I think you're being disingenuous with this latest statement.
- altcognito 7y ago
  Reflexively upvoting everything that comes into a sub is a bad cultural value. It may even break reddits' usage policy. I'm not backtracking, you're the one who brought up that reflexively upvoting might be indistinguishable from botlike behavior. It's a feature (cultural value), not a bug.

bduerst 7y ago

The fact that the activity has been happening for years doesn't invalidate that it could be bot related. Also the fact that reddit admins had to change their site algorithms to remove it from aggregated results, because posts were being gamed to the front page, implies that the behavior was not normal human traffic.

nilkn 7y ago
> Also the fact that reddit admins had to change their site algorithms to remove it from aggregated results, because posts were being gamed to the front page, implies that the behavior was not normal human traffic. It implies it's unusual traffic, but it does not imply it's inhuman traffic -- doubly so because the difference has already been explained in a way that doesn't require invoking bots. Somewhat amusingly, after r/the_donald discovered it could push pro-Trump memes onto r/all by making every post on the subreddit about upvoting content, some other subreddits managed to pull off the same stunt in protest.