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So the gist of this is: "I found a recent post in a fairly inactive subreddit and downvoted it, bringing its total vote score negative. Sure enough, that post
by recuter 13y ago
So the gist of this is:
"I found a recent post in a fairly inactive subreddit and downvoted it, bringing its total vote score negative. Sure enough, that post not only dropped off the first page (a first page which contained month-old submissions), but it was effectively banished from the “Hot” ranking entirely. I felt bad and removed my downvote, but that post never really recovered...
While testing, I noticed a number of odd phenomena surounding Reddit’s vote scores. Scores would often fluctuate each time I refreshed the page, even on old posts in low-activity subreddits. I suspect they have something more going on, perhaps at the infrastructure level – a load balancer, perhaps, or caching issues."
This is partially due to vote fuzzing. More to the point, votes go into a queue and the removal of the downvote might not cancel out the previous action for some time.
As a result, this suggested flaw will supposedly let somebody successfully snipe puffins from the new page of a small sized birdwatching subreddit before they ever get a fair shake. I think if somebody would attempt this sort of manipulation further they would find it an ineffective strategy, there have been (probably constantly are) attempts to game Reddit before and this seems like an excellent honeypot.
Beyond the narrow set of circumstances during a very small time window the flaw disappears, yet if you try to abuse this you'll stick out like a sore thumb.
The true horror expressed in the OP is that the ordering of posts in the purgatory is not strictly logical - the post ranked 10042 should really be ranked 10041. Gasp. Twitch.
This is a very lovable brand of OCD to my eyes. :)
- Sous-Vir 13y agoI think you'd be surprised on how much on a knife edge the whole process works. It's perfectly plausible that something that ends up on the front page gets only a handful of upvotes in the first twenty minutes, or half an hour. Moreover, once an article has been submitted, you're not supposed to resubmit it, and many moderators will remove duplicates. I'm actually involved in moderating a fairly large subreddit, and we have periodic waves of neo-Nazi posters gaming the subreddit, and they are surprisingly effective at altering the general mood. You can also see some genuinely shocking opinions as top posts on r/worldnews. These are subreddits with hundreds of thousands of daily visitors. If reddit is operating a system which can easily be gamed, it matters a lot. In this case, with enough proxy accounts, and a modicum of programming experience, you could anonymously supress stories you don't like, with some ease. Do you not think that matters?
- recuter 13y agoYou're essentially describing the equivalent of online fascism, neo-Nazi down voting brigades sound suspiciously close to Meatspace Greece at Present. Any system that mimics democracy, even with active moderators, will succumb to a large enough minority of trouble makers. If they really are a marginalized group that does not represent a significant percentage of the community - even with all the tricks and manual puppet accounts and all the real world parallels - they will remain marginalized. If things turn dark that easily one sadly suspects it has more to do with the flaw in the algorithm of the people rather than the system. As for programmatically doing what you claim, that hasn't been demonstrated. I'm pretty sure spammers have even more incentive and resources and yet the volume of spam is manageable still.
- jacques_chester 13y agoIt just shows the old principle that small, organised groups can impose preferences on a disorganised majority. It's a predictable phenomenon in collective decision-making systems. If I understand the economists correctly, it can't really be "solved".
- youngian 13y agoAuthor here. > It's perfectly plausible that something that ends up on the front page gets only a handful of upvotes in the first twenty minutes, or half an hour. For example: this post.
- brownbat 13y ago> [this will let] somebody snipe puffins The bigger danger is that it makes the whole community subconsciously downvote happy, because sometimes it's more effective to tune the site to what you want by downvoting things you don't like than by upvoting things you like. If people are downvoting everything that doesn't fit their expectations, it creates a lot of cultural inertia. (Eh, that's the worst impact I can come up with, and it's probably still not too big a deal.)