6 ms·

I'm glad you found that thread and got to the top with it, I hate trying to dive into ongoing conversations and try to change peoples' minds when the hivemind h

I'm glad you found that thread and got to the top with it, I hate trying to dive into ongoing conversations and try to change peoples' minds when the hivemind has already made its decision. This comes up every 6 months or so, always with some sensational title like this. It feels a little weird quoting myself, but I also said: > The thing is, the two most important pages are the front page (or a subreddit's own hot page) and the new page. The new page is sorted by date ignoring hotness, and if something has a negative score it's not going to show up on the front/hot page anyway. The two other main opportunities to get popular (rising and the organic box) don't really use hotness either. > So when it comes down to it, what happens below 0 is pretty moot. Smoothness around the real life dates and scores on the site is more important than smoothness around 0, where we don't really have listings that will display it anyway. In summary, there don't exist listings in which the discontinuities at 0 really matter

jychang 13y ago
But there is! It's called "Not-that-active subreddits". A post at -1 from yesterday, in a subreddit with only 1 post a day, is completely deserving of being on the front page of that sub (top 30) posts. If all negative ones are banished from the top... that's very bad.
- e28eta 13y ago
  From what I've read, I'm in favor of merging the PR. That said, maybe they aren't particularly concerned about subreddits with minimal activity, because by definition not many people use them.
  - dllthomas 13y ago
    By definition, not many people use any particular minimal-activity subreddit. There are a lot of subreddits. It's certainly possible many people use at least one minimal-activity subreddit.
Camillo 13y ago
That's begging the question. Posts with negative scores are completely banned from the front/hot page because of this bug/feature/discontinuity. You can't justify it with itself. What you can say is that you want posts to disappear from the hot page as soon as they go to -1, in which case I'll say that it's more than a little weird for the first voter to hold so much power.
- waylandsmithers 13y ago
  Maybe some civil disobedience will get their attention. What about a script that automatically downvotes every new post?
  - aroch 13y ago
    That's a good way to get banned
    - flexd 13y ago
      A lot of accounts + a lot of different IPs would get around that.
      - jedberg 13y ago
        No, it wouldn't. Do you really think you're the first person to try and game the system like that? You know who else tries that? Spammers who think that down voting every submission but their own actually works.
        flexd 13y ago
        I am not, and I have no plans to do that. But for the particular problem, it would be a solution, provided Reddit did not have any mechanics in place to prevent that exact thing. And it would be stupid to assume you do not. I have no interest in doing anything like it, I browse Reddit a lot. PS: Totally unrelated to this, but please look into the API returning a ton of HTTP 503/504 gateway timeouts. It's been happening to me across several servers in different regions of the world.
sampo 13y ago
> In summary, there don't exist listings in which the discontinuities at 0 really matter This is not true. I am active in a small (local area) subreddit, and there sometimes a post totally disappears from the "hot" listing. Not only from page 1, but it cannot be found on pages 2 or 3 either. When there is a recent post with 4 upvotes at the top of the hot list, a recent post with -1 votes still would deserve to rank higher than a week old post with a small positive vote score, don't you think? I was really wondering, do the mods remove posts that quickly get 2 downvotes. But this bug explains my observations.
Lazare 13y ago
> [The bug is okay because] if something has a negative score it's not going to show up on the front/hot page anyway. I...what? This is just wrong. If it were not for the bug, then many posts with a negative score would show up on hot pages. Due to the bug, many posts which would otherwise show up do not. The bug is changing how things are working, and it is doing so in a way which has clear impacts on hot pages. > In summary, there don't exist listings in which the discontinuities at 0 really matter To the extent this is true, it is true only because there is a bug in the code that hides posts with negative points from the hot pages. What you are saying is that it doesn't matter if posts with negative points are shown on hot, because posts with negative points are not shown on hot. ...I hesitate to even ask this, but, well: Do you actually understand the bug, and the impact it has on how posts are sorted? Because your attempts at explaining it make no sense. The reason negative posts don't show up on the front page is because of this bug. That's why the bug has some (slight) importance; it is not the reason why the bug has no impact. It does have an impact.
- Semaphor 13y ago
  > If it were not for the bug, then many posts with a negative score would show up on hot pages. I think you misunderstood. What I got from this, is that articles under 0 MUST NOT show up on the Hot page. Now that could probably have been implemented as a filter, but I don't think it's a bug doing it in this weirder way.
  - Lazare 13y ago
    Well, here's the thing. ketralnis said: > The new page is sorted by date ignoring hotness, and if something has a negative score it's not going to show up on the front/hot page anyway. The key word there is "anyway". We're discussing the code that makes them not show up on the hot pages, so the word "anyway" makes no sense. If your theory were true, I would expect him to say: "This code is important because if something has a negative score then we don't want it to show up on the hot page", but he doesn't; rather he treats negative articles not showing up as law of nature. Paraphrasing, he says "This code is unimportant because it doesn't do anything, because article wouldn't have shown up anyway" But it does do something, and they would have shown up. My theory is that the confusion comes from him saying "front/hot" page. Everything he said is true about the front page, and the front and hot pages use the same algorithm. But the same algorithm applied to different data yields very different results, and everything he said is blatantly false when discussing the hot page of small, low-traffic subreddits. In short, I think he's trying to say "hey, negative articles won't show up on the default front page no matter what, so what are you talking about?". And the response is "yes, but it has a huge impact everywhere". (Notably: The hot page of small subreddits, as well as some customized front pages and multireddits.) You can't conflate front/hot the way he does, because the bug is ONLY shown when _hot() is called on a low-traffic source.
klmr 13y ago
> This comes up every 6 months or so And it has never occurred to the reddit developers to document the behaviour in the code base? Regardless of whether there’s a bug in the implementation, that is one poorly-written piece of code.
ma2rten 13y ago
This makes we wonder, did you A/B test your ranking algorithm?
Pxtl 13y ago
The problem occurs on low-traffic subs. The front-page of a low-traffic sub will often have the 1s listed right on the front - new stuff ready for upvoting. All it takes is one downvote to kick those things off the front. These low-traffic subs don't have enough users to have their own Knights of New constantly patrolling the /new view, so the Hot page is pretty much it. Basically, it becomes a job of a moderator to constantly check /new to rescue anything that suffered a downvote infanticide.
ufmace 13y ago
The best justification anyone can come up with for not fixing the bug is an excuse that it probably isn't that important? Huh? Even if it only affects 1% of users, why not fix it? It's only 2 characters, and there have apparently been pull requests for ready-made fixes already. Why not just fix it, make Reddit a tiny bit better, and not have people complaining about it every 6 months or whatever.
samclearman 13y ago
How does it make any sense to multiple the date by the sign of the score? It's true that it only matters when the score is negative, and so it doesn't really affect much in practice, but the code is clearly a typo.

jychang 13y ago

But there is! It's called "Not-that-active subreddits". A post at -1 from yesterday, in a subreddit with only 1 post a day, is completely deserving of being on the front page of that sub (top 30) posts. If all negative ones are banished from the top... that's very bad.

e28eta 13y ago
From what I've read, I'm in favor of merging the PR. That said, maybe they aren't particularly concerned about subreddits with minimal activity, because by definition not many people use them.
- dllthomas 13y ago
  By definition, not many people use any particular minimal-activity subreddit. There are a lot of subreddits. It's certainly possible many people use at least one minimal-activity subreddit.

Camillo 13y ago

That's begging the question. Posts with negative scores are completely banned from the front/hot page because of this bug/feature/discontinuity. You can't justify it with itself. What you can say is that you want posts to disappear from the hot page as soon as they go to -1, in which case I'll say that it's more than a little weird for the first voter to hold so much power.

waylandsmithers 13y ago
Maybe some civil disobedience will get their attention. What about a script that automatically downvotes every new post?
- aroch 13y ago
  That's a good way to get banned
  - flexd 13y ago
    A lot of accounts + a lot of different IPs would get around that.
    - jedberg 13y ago
      No, it wouldn't. Do you really think you're the first person to try and game the system like that? You know who else tries that? Spammers who think that down voting every submission but their own actually works.
      - flexd 13y ago
        I am not, and I have no plans to do that. But for the particular problem, it would be a solution, provided Reddit did not have any mechanics in place to prevent that exact thing. And it would be stupid to assume you do not. I have no interest in doing anything like it, I browse Reddit a lot. PS: Totally unrelated to this, but please look into the API returning a ton of HTTP 503/504 gateway timeouts. It's been happening to me across several servers in different regions of the world.

sampo 13y ago

> In summary, there don't exist listings in which the discontinuities at 0 really matter This is not true. I am active in a small (local area) subreddit, and there sometimes a post totally disappears from the "hot" listing. Not only from page 1, but it cannot be found on pages 2 or 3 either. When there is a recent post with 4 upvotes at the top of the hot list, a recent post with -1 votes still would deserve to rank higher than a week old post with a small positive vote score, don't you think? I was really wondering, do the mods remove posts that quickly get 2 downvotes. But this bug explains my observations.

Lazare 13y ago

> [The bug is okay because] if something has a negative score it's not going to show up on the front/hot page anyway. I...what? This is just wrong. If it were not for the bug, then many posts with a negative score would show up on hot pages. Due to the bug, many posts which would otherwise show up do not. The bug is changing how things are working, and it is doing so in a way which has clear impacts on hot pages. > In summary, there don't exist listings in which the discontinuities at 0 really matter To the extent this is true, it is true only because there is a bug in the code that hides posts with negative points from the hot pages. What you are saying is that it doesn't matter if posts with negative points are shown on hot, because posts with negative points are not shown on hot. ...I hesitate to even ask this, but, well: Do you actually understand the bug, and the impact it has on how posts are sorted? Because your attempts at explaining it make no sense. The reason negative posts don't show up on the front page is because of this bug. That's why the bug has some (slight) importance; it is not the reason why the bug has no impact. It does have an impact.

Semaphor 13y ago
> If it were not for the bug, then many posts with a negative score would show up on hot pages. I think you misunderstood. What I got from this, is that articles under 0 MUST NOT show up on the Hot page. Now that could probably have been implemented as a filter, but I don't think it's a bug doing it in this weirder way.
- Lazare 13y ago
  Well, here's the thing. ketralnis said: > The new page is sorted by date ignoring hotness, and if something has a negative score it's not going to show up on the front/hot page anyway. The key word there is "anyway". We're discussing the code that makes them not show up on the hot pages, so the word "anyway" makes no sense. If your theory were true, I would expect him to say: "This code is important because if something has a negative score then we don't want it to show up on the hot page", but he doesn't; rather he treats negative articles not showing up as law of nature. Paraphrasing, he says "This code is unimportant because it doesn't do anything, because article wouldn't have shown up anyway" But it does do something, and they would have shown up. My theory is that the confusion comes from him saying "front/hot" page. Everything he said is true about the front page, and the front and hot pages use the same algorithm. But the same algorithm applied to different data yields very different results, and everything he said is blatantly false when discussing the hot page of small, low-traffic subreddits. In short, I think he's trying to say "hey, negative articles won't show up on the default front page no matter what, so what are you talking about?". And the response is "yes, but it has a huge impact everywhere". (Notably: The hot page of small subreddits, as well as some customized front pages and multireddits.) You can't conflate front/hot the way he does, because the bug is ONLY shown when _hot() is called on a low-traffic source.

klmr 13y ago

> This comes up every 6 months or so And it has never occurred to the reddit developers to document the behaviour in the code base? Regardless of whether there’s a bug in the implementation, that is one poorly-written piece of code.

ma2rten 13y ago

This makes we wonder, did you A/B test your ranking algorithm?

Pxtl 13y ago

The problem occurs on low-traffic subs. The front-page of a low-traffic sub will often have the 1s listed right on the front - new stuff ready for upvoting. All it takes is one downvote to kick those things off the front. These low-traffic subs don't have enough users to have their own Knights of New constantly patrolling the /new view, so the Hot page is pretty much it. Basically, it becomes a job of a moderator to constantly check /new to rescue anything that suffered a downvote infanticide.

ufmace 13y ago

The best justification anyone can come up with for not fixing the bug is an excuse that it probably isn't that important? Huh? Even if it only affects 1% of users, why not fix it? It's only 2 characters, and there have apparently been pull requests for ready-made fixes already. Why not just fix it, make Reddit a tiny bit better, and not have people complaining about it every 6 months or whatever.

samclearman 13y ago

How does it make any sense to multiple the date by the sign of the score? It's true that it only matters when the score is negative, and so it doesn't really affect much in practice, but the code is clearly a typo.