8 ms·

PG cites Ron Paul proliferation on Reddit as "evidence of design flaw in version 1 of social news"

26 points by brett 19y ago

brett 19y ago
So the obvious question becomes: How does version 2 of social news prevent this? How does/will news.yc deal with it? For the sake of argument (though it may be true anyways), what if we assume the Ron Paul voting is totally organic? What if over time a critical mass of existing reddit community members decided it was important to knee-jerk upvote any Ron Paul story without reading each story? So you have a block of legitimate users using the site for something other than the expressed goal of the site (social news), presumably to the detriment of the rest of the user base.
- pg 19y ago
  I mentioned one way of dealing with lame submissions when we switched news.yc to Hacker News: have human editors who mark good and bad submissions, and weight people's future votes depending on which they predict. That would probably be enough. There are other possible solutions. For example, the reddit guys tried to solve the problem of all the political crap on the frontpage by creating a subreddit for it. But of course this is what happened: http://reddit.com/info/2n2tu/comments/c2n5ls http://reddit.com/info/2n2tu/comments/c2n5ls There are also mechanical solutions along the lines of the type used to defeat SEO. I.e. if a group of the same people always upvote the same stories, count their votes less. If people vote on something without reading it first, count their votes less. Etc.
  - brett 19y ago
    The editorial solution is interesting. It's just a way to scale out the tastes of a group of editors beyond the articles they can look at themselves. If it works well then eventually the only users who would stick around would be people with similar taste to the editors. The subreddit did not work because they did it backwards. You don't ask users you don't want to move somewhere else. You leave the bad users where they are and move yourself to a new site. Sounds familiar.
  - rms 19y ago
    How can you tell when people upvote a story without reading it?
    - brett 19y ago
      At the very least reddit can tell when people upvote without clicking through as they hijack the link and then redirect to it.
      - rms 19y ago
        That's a start. It's easy to game, but implementing a filter like that won't make the results any worse.
  - gwenhwyfaer 19y ago
    > There are other possible solutions. For example, the reddit guys tried to solve the problem of all the political crap on the frontpage by creating a subreddit for it. That would probably have worked better if people were forced to choose a subreddit for their submissions, and stories from all subreddits got aggregated onto the main reddit page - and logged in users could choose not to see links from certain subreddits. (That's an aspect of slashdot that does work quite well.)
- kingkongrevenge 19y ago
  The idea of a popular and high quality "social news" site is fundamentally broken. Either you want a mass market or you want quality content. The mass market has an IQ of 100 and will not choose content that generally appeals to people here puzzling over "social news". Any fix that gets rid of the stuff morons like will cost you the mass market. The metafilter people already went through all this. They started to achieve mass market popularity and quality started to go to shit. They cut off new membership and let attrition get rid of some people. Then they were happy again with their small community. If you introduce an editorial role, well guess what, it's not "social news" anymore. Slashdot and Fark are far from new and web2.0. This problem is nothing new. Look at reddit's sister company, Wired. Wired went from great in the 90s to mostly moronic and consumerist now. It's also a lot more popular now.
paul 19y ago
I'm not convinced. What if the upvoting really is representative of a large number of the users? I don't upvote that often on reddit, but probably half of the time (at most once per day) it is for a Ron Paul link (and it's always something that I read and liked). RP may be marginal at the national level, but that doesn't imply that he's marginal at all other levels as well. And of course, "...great new things often come from the margins, and yet the people who discover them are looked down on by everyone, including themselves. ... But the best thing of all is when people call what you're doing inappropriate. I've been hearing this word all my life and I only recently realized that it is, in fact, the sound of the homing beacon. "Inappropriate" is the null criticism. It's merely the adjective form of "I don't like it." So that, I think, should be the highest goal for the marginal. Be inappropriate. When you hear people saying that, you're golden. And they, incidentally, are busted."
- paul 19y ago
  That said, news sites probably need some kind of clustering in order to ensure that there is a diversity of topics on the front page. Google news and Techmeme both do something like this, of course. There's no reason reddit couldn't.
- brett 19y ago
  > I'm not convinced. What if the upvoting really is representative of a large number of the users? My bet is that up voting is definitely representative of a large number of the users, but that many are voting out of support for Ron Paul instead of because they read and liked the linked article. You could argue this not necessarily a problem. I guess it becomes one if it hijacks the focus of the site for the remainder (or majority?) of users.
- pg 19y ago
  Judging by the kneejerk pattern of the voting on the comment thread, it's largely zealots.
  - davidw 19y ago
    paul> I'm not convinced. What if the upvoting really is representative of a large number of the users? pg> What if the upvoting really is representative of a large number of the users? What if most of the users on reddit are, at this point, zealots, due to the effects of crowding out more moderate users?
deleted 19y ago
[deleted]
tocomment 19y ago
I'm not sure If I'm a counter example to this or not. I never voted on any stories on reddit. So that would make me part of the non-voting majority. But recently I felt the urge to upvote all Ron Paul stories to help his campaign.
- pg 19y ago
  > recently I felt the urge to upvote all Ron Paul stories to help his campaign. This is exactly what I mean about a design flaw. It only takes a hundred people who do this, on a site with hundreds of thousands of readers.
  - rms 19y ago
    We've got a hundred people here. Maybe we should start a voting cabal to upvote all of our startups.
    - pg 19y ago
      Don't make my life difficult. I have other stuff I need to work on. Don't make me spend hours babysitting news.yc and implementing countermeasures against abuse.
      - rms 19y ago
        Oh, no, startups do very well here without any gaming. We all really like talking about our startups and discussing other people's startups. I like this site to much to game it anyways. I'm talking about gaming reddit.
        wyday 19y ago
        Don't piss in our own pool, piss in our neighbor's?
        rms 19y ago
        Piss is a little harsh. It's just economics. Marketing is hard. I like taking shortcuts.
Alex3917 19y ago
The problem with social news isn't the zealots. It's that people vote for stories they think would be good for other people to read instead of for stories they find interesting themselves. That's why Reddit ends up having the personality of John Kerry. (And yes, I realize that this view is not mutually exclusive with the original pg comment.)
- pg 19y ago
  That's what I mean by zealots.
  - falsestprophet 19y ago
    To be fair, you never seemed terribly upset about the Paul Graham zealots.
    - pg 19y ago
      It seems to be a different kind of upvoting. When I write something new it generally shows up on both reddit and del.icio.us/popular. Stuff about Ron Paul only shows up on reddit. What that implies is that people are upvoting it because they want other people to read it, rather than because they found it interesting themselves. The reddit guys actually worried about this problem from the very beginning. That was why initially there was such an emphasis on voting as a way of training filters: if you voted for dumb stuff, you'd be punished by having to read dumb stuff. But the filter-training message never got through, perhaps because the filtering worked so badly for so long.
      - SwellJoe 19y ago
        "Stuff about Ron Paul only shows up on reddit." And Technorati.
        nostrademons 19y ago
        And FaceBook.
jsmcgd 19y ago
I don't think too much should be read into the recent activity on Reddit. Ron Paul has actively promoted his campaign on the internet and has been a large proponent of internet freedoms. So users' behaviour on reddit probably isn't representative of the average American but actually quite representative of the average Internet user. In other words reddit's ranking system hasn't been abused in this sense.
nickb 19y ago
Maybe Ron Paul proliferation is due to the man's ideas and his honesty?! And his popularity on reddit and other sites is due to the fact that he resonates well with what people think? Maybe people are sick of candidates that lie to you all the time. You know... just stating the obvious.
- pg 19y ago
  You don't seem to grasp that we're talking about a completely orthogonal issue. Ron Paul could be the best presidential candidate in history. The problem I'm talking about is simply a structural one: because such a small proportion of visitors on social news sites vote, 100 of his vocal supporters can dictate the stories for a site with 100,000 users. Man is politics a tar baby. I wish I'd never made that comment on reddit. Nothing personal (I mean this more about the reddit commenters than you), but it's a topic that brings out the dumbest in everyone.
  - yamada 19y ago
    Does it ever get lonely up there on your pedestal? Why don't 100 guliani supporters do likewise? Why does he raise so much money from peanut online contributions while others with deep corporate connections can barely keep up? Whatever the design issues with reddit or what-have-you, let's say there are 100 amateur supporters who do manipulate things - that's 100 more than care to dedicate their free time to do so for all other candidates combined. That says just as much about the kind of enthusiasm he generates as it does any design shortcomings which could just as easily be exploited by opponents. For crying out loud it can't just be one guy with the name "Paul" that has all the spotlight all the time - stop being a fifth column and let him get his fair share.
  - mnemonicsloth 19y ago
    No, I think the real problem is that talking about politics brings out the worst in people who disagree with you (because you make them feel angry), and the only the mildly unsavory in people who don't (because you make them feel smug). How many people responded to What You Can't Say with some form of "Yes for thee, but not for me"? Telling people an important part of their opinion-forming mechanism -- their facts, or their fact-finding, or their ability to tell "probative" from "normative" -- is just as special case that gives everyone an equal opportunity to show his ass. I actually spent some time thinking about how you could do better than what's out there now -- provide a way to enforce good rhetorical behavior; set some rules about evidence; and especially, make prominence based on credibility or evidentiary support. But in the end, I don't think many forum users would really prefer the hard work of keeping their opinions in line with all the available facts to the satisfaction of beating a disembodied un-person in a non-argument. And also, there are a lot of factors working against you: http://www.singinst.org/Biases.pdf http://www.singinst.org/Biases.pdf http://overcomingbias.com http://overcomingbias.com
budu3 19y ago
Or maybe reddit is working just fine and the front page reflecting the views of the majority of reddit users. They like Ron Paul, lolcats and xkcd.
mynameishere 19y ago
People have given millions of dollars to Ron Paul. That's an ungame-able vote. If Paul is getting 1-2 percent of real support among voters, then there should be no shortage of Guiliani and McCain and Romney fans to quickly downmod any stories they don't like. But evidently, Paul is the only Republican candidate with fans on reddit. If there's a "flaw" that's the only one. By the way, LBJ was much, much worse than Bush.
guest 19y ago
Why not just show what each story each user voted for?
forgotmylastone 19y ago
The proliferation of Paul Graham stories on reddit were evidence of a design flaw in version 1 of social news. Such a small proportion of people who visit news sites vote that a group of zealots can easily overtake a site like this. Spammers are comparatively easy to guard against; they don't care enough to create 100 sockpuppet accounts, and in any case the guys at reddit wouldn't have any qualms about killing spams that seemed to be merely for profit. This is a tougher problem. You could say all the anti-C++ stories were already evidence of this problem. But a large proportion of programmers, even C++ users, disapprove of C++, and an even larger proportion of the kind of people who would use a social news site. The Lisp zealots are another matter. This is more like spam; it's not just people who hate C++ so much that they reflexively upvote stories that sound critical of him; it's a deliberate attempt to market something online. Incidentally, I'm not saying this because I have some kind of ulterior motives. I think C++ is the worst language of my lifetime. And I am not anti-Paul Graham. I know nothing about him except that every article he writes makes it onto reddit--no one writes that much gold.
- vlad 19y ago
  Why bring slashdotlogic to News.YC?
- Neoryder 19y ago
  Its not that PG writes so much gold. I think he sees the world through his own views and everything follows. So when he writes about anything i feel he's just writing how he views the world. He always gets upvoted because there are lots of people who like how he examines the world. He doesn't write that much gold but how he views the world has been judged golden by a many reddit readers. Some people agree some people don't.
- pg 19y ago
  This was answered 5 hours before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=52322 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=52322
  - forgotmylastone 19y ago
    Lisp stuff practically only ever shows up on reddit; it is way overrepresented there compared to Slashdot et. al.. And it is a similar sort of thing--people want others to run into Lisp, while not actually finding the articles interesting. I'll give it to you on your essays though, they do pop up all over (however, I will say that although I avoid Digg, Ron Paul can be found all over the place over there).
neuro 19y ago
we should have fixed it back in the day -- those paul graham essays being skyrocketed by zealots on reddit, including myself, was a leading indicator.
davidw 19y ago
If Ron Paul is the worst thing you found on reddit lately, you haven't been paying enough attention. The site has more or less been 'owned' by the batshit crazy fringes: http://reddit.com/info/2n64e/comments/c2n7nd http://reddit.com/info/2n64e/comments/c2n7nd
jgrahamc 19y ago
I agree with PG on this. I'm trying to fix this problem with Wildfire: http://www.jgc.org/blog/2007/09/problems-with-social-news.html http://www.jgc.org/blog/2007/09/problems-with-social-news.ht... John.
mattmaroon 19y ago
Also from PG in that comment thread: "I know there isn't widespread support for him because I rarely see references to him anywhere except sites like this." The best measure of any election is without a doubt the gambling market. They've proven far more accurate than any poll. My favorite is http://www.intrade.com http://www.intrade.com where Ron Paul is tracking at around 4% to win the Republican nod.
- rms 19y ago
  Seems way too high to me. I don't know how the different bets in a prediction market work, is there a way to make money when Ron Paul goes down?
  - mattmaroon 19y ago
    Yes, you'd sell Ron Paul shares right now. If you think he's way too high you should. I don't like your EV there though.
Katterine 18y ago
There is an alternative to reddit and digg, see how you like it: http://pyrabang.com/?ref=mentormatt8 http://pyrabang.com/?ref=mentormatt8 Activation Code mentormatt8 will possibly get you a whole month membership!

26 points by brett 19y ago

brett 19y ago

So the obvious question becomes: How does version 2 of social news prevent this? How does/will news.yc deal with it? For the sake of argument (though it may be true anyways), what if we assume the Ron Paul voting is totally organic? What if over time a critical mass of existing reddit community members decided it was important to knee-jerk upvote any Ron Paul story without reading each story? So you have a block of legitimate users using the site for something other than the expressed goal of the site (social news), presumably to the detriment of the rest of the user base.

pg 19y ago
I mentioned one way of dealing with lame submissions when we switched news.yc to Hacker News: have human editors who mark good and bad submissions, and weight people's future votes depending on which they predict. That would probably be enough. There are other possible solutions. For example, the reddit guys tried to solve the problem of all the political crap on the frontpage by creating a subreddit for it. But of course this is what happened: http://reddit.com/info/2n2tu/comments/c2n5ls http://reddit.com/info/2n2tu/comments/c2n5ls There are also mechanical solutions along the lines of the type used to defeat SEO. I.e. if a group of the same people always upvote the same stories, count their votes less. If people vote on something without reading it first, count their votes less. Etc.
- brett 19y ago
  The editorial solution is interesting. It's just a way to scale out the tastes of a group of editors beyond the articles they can look at themselves. If it works well then eventually the only users who would stick around would be people with similar taste to the editors. The subreddit did not work because they did it backwards. You don't ask users you don't want to move somewhere else. You leave the bad users where they are and move yourself to a new site. Sounds familiar.
- rms 19y ago
  How can you tell when people upvote a story without reading it?
  - brett 19y ago
    At the very least reddit can tell when people upvote without clicking through as they hijack the link and then redirect to it.
    - rms 19y ago
      That's a start. It's easy to game, but implementing a filter like that won't make the results any worse.
- gwenhwyfaer 19y ago
  > There are other possible solutions. For example, the reddit guys tried to solve the problem of all the political crap on the frontpage by creating a subreddit for it. That would probably have worked better if people were forced to choose a subreddit for their submissions, and stories from all subreddits got aggregated onto the main reddit page - and logged in users could choose not to see links from certain subreddits. (That's an aspect of slashdot that does work quite well.)
kingkongrevenge 19y ago
The idea of a popular and high quality "social news" site is fundamentally broken. Either you want a mass market or you want quality content. The mass market has an IQ of 100 and will not choose content that generally appeals to people here puzzling over "social news". Any fix that gets rid of the stuff morons like will cost you the mass market. The metafilter people already went through all this. They started to achieve mass market popularity and quality started to go to shit. They cut off new membership and let attrition get rid of some people. Then they were happy again with their small community. If you introduce an editorial role, well guess what, it's not "social news" anymore. Slashdot and Fark are far from new and web2.0. This problem is nothing new. Look at reddit's sister company, Wired. Wired went from great in the 90s to mostly moronic and consumerist now. It's also a lot more popular now.

paul 19y ago

I'm not convinced. What if the upvoting really is representative of a large number of the users? I don't upvote that often on reddit, but probably half of the time (at most once per day) it is for a Ron Paul link (and it's always something that I read and liked). RP may be marginal at the national level, but that doesn't imply that he's marginal at all other levels as well. And of course, "...great new things often come from the margins, and yet the people who discover them are looked down on by everyone, including themselves. ... But the best thing of all is when people call what you're doing inappropriate. I've been hearing this word all my life and I only recently realized that it is, in fact, the sound of the homing beacon. "Inappropriate" is the null criticism. It's merely the adjective form of "I don't like it." So that, I think, should be the highest goal for the marginal. Be inappropriate. When you hear people saying that, you're golden. And they, incidentally, are busted."

paul 19y ago
That said, news sites probably need some kind of clustering in order to ensure that there is a diversity of topics on the front page. Google news and Techmeme both do something like this, of course. There's no reason reddit couldn't.
brett 19y ago
> I'm not convinced. What if the upvoting really is representative of a large number of the users? My bet is that up voting is definitely representative of a large number of the users, but that many are voting out of support for Ron Paul instead of because they read and liked the linked article. You could argue this not necessarily a problem. I guess it becomes one if it hijacks the focus of the site for the remainder (or majority?) of users.
pg 19y ago
Judging by the kneejerk pattern of the voting on the comment thread, it's largely zealots.
- davidw 19y ago
  paul> I'm not convinced. What if the upvoting really is representative of a large number of the users? pg> What if the upvoting really is representative of a large number of the users? What if most of the users on reddit are, at this point, zealots, due to the effects of crowding out more moderate users?

deleted 19y ago

[deleted]

tocomment 19y ago

I'm not sure If I'm a counter example to this or not. I never voted on any stories on reddit. So that would make me part of the non-voting majority. But recently I felt the urge to upvote all Ron Paul stories to help his campaign.

pg 19y ago
> recently I felt the urge to upvote all Ron Paul stories to help his campaign. This is exactly what I mean about a design flaw. It only takes a hundred people who do this, on a site with hundreds of thousands of readers.
- rms 19y ago
  We've got a hundred people here. Maybe we should start a voting cabal to upvote all of our startups.
  - pg 19y ago
    Don't make my life difficult. I have other stuff I need to work on. Don't make me spend hours babysitting news.yc and implementing countermeasures against abuse.
    - rms 19y ago
      Oh, no, startups do very well here without any gaming. We all really like talking about our startups and discussing other people's startups. I like this site to much to game it anyways. I'm talking about gaming reddit.
      - wyday 19y ago
        Don't piss in our own pool, piss in our neighbor's?
        rms 19y ago
        Piss is a little harsh. It's just economics. Marketing is hard. I like taking shortcuts.

Alex3917 19y ago

The problem with social news isn't the zealots. It's that people vote for stories they think would be good for other people to read instead of for stories they find interesting themselves. That's why Reddit ends up having the personality of John Kerry. (And yes, I realize that this view is not mutually exclusive with the original pg comment.)

pg 19y ago
That's what I mean by zealots.
- falsestprophet 19y ago
  To be fair, you never seemed terribly upset about the Paul Graham zealots.
  - pg 19y ago
    It seems to be a different kind of upvoting. When I write something new it generally shows up on both reddit and del.icio.us/popular. Stuff about Ron Paul only shows up on reddit. What that implies is that people are upvoting it because they want other people to read it, rather than because they found it interesting themselves. The reddit guys actually worried about this problem from the very beginning. That was why initially there was such an emphasis on voting as a way of training filters: if you voted for dumb stuff, you'd be punished by having to read dumb stuff. But the filter-training message never got through, perhaps because the filtering worked so badly for so long.
    - SwellJoe 19y ago
      "Stuff about Ron Paul only shows up on reddit." And Technorati.
      - nostrademons 19y ago
        And FaceBook.

jsmcgd 19y ago

I don't think too much should be read into the recent activity on Reddit. Ron Paul has actively promoted his campaign on the internet and has been a large proponent of internet freedoms. So users' behaviour on reddit probably isn't representative of the average American but actually quite representative of the average Internet user. In other words reddit's ranking system hasn't been abused in this sense.

nickb 19y ago

Maybe Ron Paul proliferation is due to the man's ideas and his honesty?! And his popularity on reddit and other sites is due to the fact that he resonates well with what people think? Maybe people are sick of candidates that lie to you all the time. You know... just stating the obvious.

pg 19y ago
You don't seem to grasp that we're talking about a completely orthogonal issue. Ron Paul could be the best presidential candidate in history. The problem I'm talking about is simply a structural one: because such a small proportion of visitors on social news sites vote, 100 of his vocal supporters can dictate the stories for a site with 100,000 users. Man is politics a tar baby. I wish I'd never made that comment on reddit. Nothing personal (I mean this more about the reddit commenters than you), but it's a topic that brings out the dumbest in everyone.
- yamada 19y ago
  Does it ever get lonely up there on your pedestal? Why don't 100 guliani supporters do likewise? Why does he raise so much money from peanut online contributions while others with deep corporate connections can barely keep up? Whatever the design issues with reddit or what-have-you, let's say there are 100 amateur supporters who do manipulate things - that's 100 more than care to dedicate their free time to do so for all other candidates combined. That says just as much about the kind of enthusiasm he generates as it does any design shortcomings which could just as easily be exploited by opponents. For crying out loud it can't just be one guy with the name "Paul" that has all the spotlight all the time - stop being a fifth column and let him get his fair share.
- mnemonicsloth 19y ago
  No, I think the real problem is that talking about politics brings out the worst in people who disagree with you (because you make them feel angry), and the only the mildly unsavory in people who don't (because you make them feel smug). How many people responded to What You Can't Say with some form of "Yes for thee, but not for me"? Telling people an important part of their opinion-forming mechanism -- their facts, or their fact-finding, or their ability to tell "probative" from "normative" -- is just as special case that gives everyone an equal opportunity to show his ass. I actually spent some time thinking about how you could do better than what's out there now -- provide a way to enforce good rhetorical behavior; set some rules about evidence; and especially, make prominence based on credibility or evidentiary support. But in the end, I don't think many forum users would really prefer the hard work of keeping their opinions in line with all the available facts to the satisfaction of beating a disembodied un-person in a non-argument. And also, there are a lot of factors working against you: http://www.singinst.org/Biases.pdf http://www.singinst.org/Biases.pdf http://overcomingbias.com http://overcomingbias.com

budu3 19y ago

Or maybe reddit is working just fine and the front page reflecting the views of the majority of reddit users. They like Ron Paul, lolcats and xkcd.

mynameishere 19y ago

People have given millions of dollars to Ron Paul. That's an ungame-able vote. If Paul is getting 1-2 percent of real support among voters, then there should be no shortage of Guiliani and McCain and Romney fans to quickly downmod any stories they don't like. But evidently, Paul is the only Republican candidate with fans on reddit. If there's a "flaw" that's the only one. By the way, LBJ was much, much worse than Bush.

guest 19y ago

Why not just show what each story each user voted for?

forgotmylastone 19y ago

The proliferation of Paul Graham stories on reddit were evidence of a design flaw in version 1 of social news. Such a small proportion of people who visit news sites vote that a group of zealots can easily overtake a site like this. Spammers are comparatively easy to guard against; they don't care enough to create 100 sockpuppet accounts, and in any case the guys at reddit wouldn't have any qualms about killing spams that seemed to be merely for profit. This is a tougher problem. You could say all the anti-C++ stories were already evidence of this problem. But a large proportion of programmers, even C++ users, disapprove of C++, and an even larger proportion of the kind of people who would use a social news site. The Lisp zealots are another matter. This is more like spam; it's not just people who hate C++ so much that they reflexively upvote stories that sound critical of him; it's a deliberate attempt to market something online. Incidentally, I'm not saying this because I have some kind of ulterior motives. I think C++ is the worst language of my lifetime. And I am not anti-Paul Graham. I know nothing about him except that every article he writes makes it onto reddit--no one writes that much gold.

vlad 19y ago
Why bring slashdotlogic to News.YC?
Neoryder 19y ago
Its not that PG writes so much gold. I think he sees the world through his own views and everything follows. So when he writes about anything i feel he's just writing how he views the world. He always gets upvoted because there are lots of people who like how he examines the world. He doesn't write that much gold but how he views the world has been judged golden by a many reddit readers. Some people agree some people don't.
pg 19y ago
This was answered 5 hours before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=52322 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=52322
- forgotmylastone 19y ago
  Lisp stuff practically only ever shows up on reddit; it is way overrepresented there compared to Slashdot et. al.. And it is a similar sort of thing--people want others to run into Lisp, while not actually finding the articles interesting. I'll give it to you on your essays though, they do pop up all over (however, I will say that although I avoid Digg, Ron Paul can be found all over the place over there).

neuro 19y ago

we should have fixed it back in the day -- those paul graham essays being skyrocketed by zealots on reddit, including myself, was a leading indicator.

davidw 19y ago

If Ron Paul is the worst thing you found on reddit lately, you haven't been paying enough attention. The site has more or less been 'owned' by the batshit crazy fringes: http://reddit.com/info/2n64e/comments/c2n7nd http://reddit.com/info/2n64e/comments/c2n7nd

jgrahamc 19y ago

I agree with PG on this. I'm trying to fix this problem with Wildfire: http://www.jgc.org/blog/2007/09/problems-with-social-news.html http://www.jgc.org/blog/2007/09/problems-with-social-news.ht... John.

mattmaroon 19y ago

Also from PG in that comment thread: "I know there isn't widespread support for him because I rarely see references to him anywhere except sites like this." The best measure of any election is without a doubt the gambling market. They've proven far more accurate than any poll. My favorite is http://www.intrade.com http://www.intrade.com where Ron Paul is tracking at around 4% to win the Republican nod.

rms 19y ago
Seems way too high to me. I don't know how the different bets in a prediction market work, is there a way to make money when Ron Paul goes down?
- mattmaroon 19y ago
  Yes, you'd sell Ron Paul shares right now. If you think he's way too high you should. I don't like your EV there though.

Katterine 18y ago

There is an alternative to reddit and digg, see how you like it: http://pyrabang.com/?ref=mentormatt8 http://pyrabang.com/?ref=mentormatt8 Activation Code mentormatt8 will possibly get you a whole month membership!