4 ms·

Reclaim Reddit: Greasemonkey script to remove Ron Paul stories

15 points by pc 19y ago

pg 19y ago
Prediction: Ten years from now Ron Paul will be remembered mainly as someone whose supporters exposed a flaw in the naive implementation of vote-driven news sites.
- trekker7 19y ago
  He did raise a ton of money through the Web in a short amount of time... for better or for worse, all that upvoting has some power to it.
- JulianMorrison 19y ago
  That's not a flaw - that's grassroots democracy. It looks messy because it is. You should worry more about the tidy politicians who seem to just coast silently into first place. Why do they not need to engage with the public or stir up any passion?
  - staunch 19y ago
    He definitely has a lot of legitimate supporters. They're still a minority though and yet they dominate Reddit as if no one else existed. That's a flaw in the system. The entire group of people who support him are acting as a blindly loyal voting bloc and upvoting anything with his name in it. This is essentially how the neocons were able to game their way into control of the USA. A small group of blindly loyal fanatics working together can have a disproportionately large effect (just look at 9/11), especially when the system is highly flawed. I think it's quite possible that in 10 years most of us internet geeks will primarily remember Ron Paul as "that libertarian guy who was always upvoted on social news sites". Unless he wins ;-)
    - Alex3917 19y ago
      "He definitely has a lot of legitimate supporters. They're still a minority though and yet they dominate Reddit as if no one else existed. That's a flaw in the system." So Reddit should be representative of the tastes of someone who got 1,000 on the SAT, makes 29,000 a year, has 2.1 kids, and is morbidly obese?
      - deleted 19y ago
        [deleted]
    - JulianMorrison 19y ago
      Small groups of true believers are common in social movements. This is neither new nor sinister. The founders of the USA were an influential small group.
      - pg 19y ago
        No one's disputing that. What's broken about the naive implementation of social news is the degree to which a small group of true believers can take it over.
        JulianMorrison 19y ago
        You'll have seen this before with Lisp on Reddit. Some people always upvote, some people always downvote, some people downvote because they're tired of seeing it, and the vast, vast majority simply have no opinion. To them, the words "Lisp" and "pebble" have identical emotional affect. So consequently a small core of Lispers can flood the front page, or, as the ratio of fans to bashers shifts, they can be crowded into obscurity even on the programming page. The small group leads the large group because, in regard of that topic, the large group is as happy with as without. That "small group leading" effect is what makes any-to-many media such a ferment of ideas. Suppose you used an algorithm that refused to raise articles with less than mainstream interest. You'd end up duplicating the banality of broadcast TV, which also relies on broad and shallow appeal. There's a reason the slang calls it the "lowest common denominator"!
  - pg 19y ago
    It's the opposite of grassroots democracy. Grassroots = spontaneous and decentralized. That would not naturally produce the tidily regular stream of Ron Paul stories we see on reddit. This seems to be an organized campaign. This is not a groundswell of support; it's an attempt to exploit the vulnerabilities of social news sites in order to give the appearance of one.
    - JulianMorrison 19y ago
      It's not organized - it's enthusiasm. I speak as one who has been known to post a Ron Paul story or two, although not in the big leagues. The number of big posters is small, although I suspect a "long tail", but the number of voters is large. If all the votes came from sock puppets, the Reddit staff would be fighting back. They aren't. I think the answer is that Reddit is small enough to be 100% saturated and consequently 100% polarized into love, hate, and don't want to hear about it. The RP lovers are simply a slightly larger group than the sum of the other two, and as such they dominate the front page.
    - DanielBMarkham 19y ago
      There's an interesting question about how social networks actually work, as opposed to how we all think they should work. In reality, your real, live social network probably includes people who are really excited about things that bore or annoy the heck out of you, yet both of you self-censor to keep the network alive. There's no self-censoring on the net. People post and write just whatever they feel like.
      - pg 19y ago
        I'm not talking about people merely voting up what they like. What I suspect is that a group of Ron Paul supporters (maybe organized by the campaign, maybe not) got together and said: reddit has 100k (or whatever) readers, but all it takes is 500 votes to get a story to the stop of the frontpage. So all we have to do is get 500 of us to sign up for reddit accounts, and we own reddit. As far as I know, no one thinks voting rings should be a component of "how social networks actually work." And in fact, reddit has software for neutralizing them. It's just not good enough.
  - Goladus 19y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing
- rms 19y ago
  The only people who will remember Ron Paul for dominating social news sites are the small percentage of people that use social news sites right now. Among the mainstream, he'll be mentioned as a candidate who was very successful in marketing himself and raising money over the internet. I expect he will run as a Libertarian after he doesn't get the Republican nomination; he'll probably do much better than your average Libertarian candidate.
- mynameishere 19y ago
  I think the flaw is pretty well-known. Frankly, I'm encouraged by any non-standard candidates who actually get noticed one way or the other.
- byrneseyeview 19y ago
  Do you worry about that being the case with, say, you or Joel Spolsky or, uh, Lisp? To an outsider, these phenomena all look the same: a pretty obscure person or technology getting lots of attention from a certain kind of website. When you're outside of a popularity bubble, you have pretty good odds of identifying it as such -- but that doesn't mean you can't be inside another popularity bubble, too. (I don't actually think this is true. As far as I know, support for Spolsky, Paul, and Lisp is genuine, and its concentration at reddit is just a typical network effect. I don't see why this has to be any more complicated than "People who like Ron Paul news will read it at reddit and vote it up at reddit, attracting more people who like Ron Paul news")
  - pg 19y ago
    No. The topics reddit has focused on so far have generally been the topics hackers are interested in. That's why the Ron Paul stories stand out so much. I know a huge cross section of hackers of all different types, and Ron Paul doesn't figure anything near as large in their conversation as he does on reddit. It would be easy to astroturf reddit. And I don't think even Ron Paul suppporters would deny that the campaign most likely to do it would be that of an outsider candidate whose supporters were renowned for their effective use of the Internet. But you know, I am done talking about this. Whenever I even mention Ron Paul I end up wasting hours in arguments isomorphic to arguments with trolls. I'm not claiming Ron Paul supporters are trolls, just that trying to reason with fanatics tend to produce the same sort of threads as trying to reason with trolls. The discussion on this thread is precisely why politics is off limits on news.yc. In this case it crept in through a point about the design of news aggregators. But politics is like floating point contagion. If you make a point that's even partly about politics, that's the part everyone will focus on, and the discussion becomes a political one.
    - paul 19y ago
      I'm curious what you would consider a "good" argument (not isomorphic with trolls) argument against your statements in this thread? Perhaps I'm misreading, but many of your comments come off as essentially dismissing the Ron Paul phenomenon as the work of a handful of zealots. It's not surprising that his supporters disagree with that notion, as it implies that their efforts and views are not legitimate. BTW, here is a video of Ron Paul with a bunch of hackers. The room was completely packed and overflowing into a second room (connected by video). Of course they aren't all RP supporters, but a large fraction are. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCM_wQy4YVg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCM_wQy4YVg
samwise 19y ago
There is a simple reddit fix. Rather then hosting crappy parties in different cities they should work on story filtering. So that users can filter ANY news title. there a simple work around for Ron Raul supporters, They can misspell r0n p@ul.
- jgrahamc 19y ago
  Just adding tagging plus tag filtering would do a lot. John.
- mechanical_fish 19y ago
  His running mate's name will be "vi4gr4 ci4li5".
michaelneale 19y ago
Its too late for him. There is no good left in him. Darth Vader betrayed and killed, your reddit.
- davidw 19y ago
  Yeah, Ron Paul is a symptom, not the root cause.
tocomment 19y ago
I like the Ron Paul stories on Reddit. I agree with others, this is grass roots democracy.
bigtoga 19y ago
I'll post the same thing here that I did at reddit: there's no use for this script since the Reddit Content Filter, another GM script, is already out there (and way superior - no offense meant). the RDF includes filtering by title, user, and/or site as well as RegEx... http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/8751 http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/8751
deleted 19y ago
[deleted]

15 points by pc 19y ago

pg 19y ago

Prediction: Ten years from now Ron Paul will be remembered mainly as someone whose supporters exposed a flaw in the naive implementation of vote-driven news sites.

trekker7 19y ago
He did raise a ton of money through the Web in a short amount of time... for better or for worse, all that upvoting has some power to it.
JulianMorrison 19y ago
That's not a flaw - that's grassroots democracy. It looks messy because it is. You should worry more about the tidy politicians who seem to just coast silently into first place. Why do they not need to engage with the public or stir up any passion?
- staunch 19y ago
  He definitely has a lot of legitimate supporters. They're still a minority though and yet they dominate Reddit as if no one else existed. That's a flaw in the system. The entire group of people who support him are acting as a blindly loyal voting bloc and upvoting anything with his name in it. This is essentially how the neocons were able to game their way into control of the USA. A small group of blindly loyal fanatics working together can have a disproportionately large effect (just look at 9/11), especially when the system is highly flawed. I think it's quite possible that in 10 years most of us internet geeks will primarily remember Ron Paul as "that libertarian guy who was always upvoted on social news sites". Unless he wins ;-)
  - Alex3917 19y ago
    "He definitely has a lot of legitimate supporters. They're still a minority though and yet they dominate Reddit as if no one else existed. That's a flaw in the system." So Reddit should be representative of the tastes of someone who got 1,000 on the SAT, makes 29,000 a year, has 2.1 kids, and is morbidly obese?
    - deleted 19y ago
      [deleted]
  - JulianMorrison 19y ago
    Small groups of true believers are common in social movements. This is neither new nor sinister. The founders of the USA were an influential small group.
    - pg 19y ago
      No one's disputing that. What's broken about the naive implementation of social news is the degree to which a small group of true believers can take it over.
      - JulianMorrison 19y ago
        You'll have seen this before with Lisp on Reddit. Some people always upvote, some people always downvote, some people downvote because they're tired of seeing it, and the vast, vast majority simply have no opinion. To them, the words "Lisp" and "pebble" have identical emotional affect. So consequently a small core of Lispers can flood the front page, or, as the ratio of fans to bashers shifts, they can be crowded into obscurity even on the programming page. The small group leads the large group because, in regard of that topic, the large group is as happy with as without. That "small group leading" effect is what makes any-to-many media such a ferment of ideas. Suppose you used an algorithm that refused to raise articles with less than mainstream interest. You'd end up duplicating the banality of broadcast TV, which also relies on broad and shallow appeal. There's a reason the slang calls it the "lowest common denominator"!
- pg 19y ago
  It's the opposite of grassroots democracy. Grassroots = spontaneous and decentralized. That would not naturally produce the tidily regular stream of Ron Paul stories we see on reddit. This seems to be an organized campaign. This is not a groundswell of support; it's an attempt to exploit the vulnerabilities of social news sites in order to give the appearance of one.
  - JulianMorrison 19y ago
    It's not organized - it's enthusiasm. I speak as one who has been known to post a Ron Paul story or two, although not in the big leagues. The number of big posters is small, although I suspect a "long tail", but the number of voters is large. If all the votes came from sock puppets, the Reddit staff would be fighting back. They aren't. I think the answer is that Reddit is small enough to be 100% saturated and consequently 100% polarized into love, hate, and don't want to hear about it. The RP lovers are simply a slightly larger group than the sum of the other two, and as such they dominate the front page.
  - DanielBMarkham 19y ago
    There's an interesting question about how social networks actually work, as opposed to how we all think they should work. In reality, your real, live social network probably includes people who are really excited about things that bore or annoy the heck out of you, yet both of you self-censor to keep the network alive. There's no self-censoring on the net. People post and write just whatever they feel like.
    - pg 19y ago
      I'm not talking about people merely voting up what they like. What I suspect is that a group of Ron Paul supporters (maybe organized by the campaign, maybe not) got together and said: reddit has 100k (or whatever) readers, but all it takes is 500 votes to get a story to the stop of the frontpage. So all we have to do is get 500 of us to sign up for reddit accounts, and we own reddit. As far as I know, no one thinks voting rings should be a component of "how social networks actually work." And in fact, reddit has software for neutralizing them. It's just not good enough.
- Goladus 19y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing
rms 19y ago
The only people who will remember Ron Paul for dominating social news sites are the small percentage of people that use social news sites right now. Among the mainstream, he'll be mentioned as a candidate who was very successful in marketing himself and raising money over the internet. I expect he will run as a Libertarian after he doesn't get the Republican nomination; he'll probably do much better than your average Libertarian candidate.
mynameishere 19y ago
I think the flaw is pretty well-known. Frankly, I'm encouraged by any non-standard candidates who actually get noticed one way or the other.
byrneseyeview 19y ago
Do you worry about that being the case with, say, you or Joel Spolsky or, uh, Lisp? To an outsider, these phenomena all look the same: a pretty obscure person or technology getting lots of attention from a certain kind of website. When you're outside of a popularity bubble, you have pretty good odds of identifying it as such -- but that doesn't mean you can't be inside another popularity bubble, too. (I don't actually think this is true. As far as I know, support for Spolsky, Paul, and Lisp is genuine, and its concentration at reddit is just a typical network effect. I don't see why this has to be any more complicated than "People who like Ron Paul news will read it at reddit and vote it up at reddit, attracting more people who like Ron Paul news")
- pg 19y ago
  No. The topics reddit has focused on so far have generally been the topics hackers are interested in. That's why the Ron Paul stories stand out so much. I know a huge cross section of hackers of all different types, and Ron Paul doesn't figure anything near as large in their conversation as he does on reddit. It would be easy to astroturf reddit. And I don't think even Ron Paul suppporters would deny that the campaign most likely to do it would be that of an outsider candidate whose supporters were renowned for their effective use of the Internet. But you know, I am done talking about this. Whenever I even mention Ron Paul I end up wasting hours in arguments isomorphic to arguments with trolls. I'm not claiming Ron Paul supporters are trolls, just that trying to reason with fanatics tend to produce the same sort of threads as trying to reason with trolls. The discussion on this thread is precisely why politics is off limits on news.yc. In this case it crept in through a point about the design of news aggregators. But politics is like floating point contagion. If you make a point that's even partly about politics, that's the part everyone will focus on, and the discussion becomes a political one.
  - paul 19y ago
    I'm curious what you would consider a "good" argument (not isomorphic with trolls) argument against your statements in this thread? Perhaps I'm misreading, but many of your comments come off as essentially dismissing the Ron Paul phenomenon as the work of a handful of zealots. It's not surprising that his supporters disagree with that notion, as it implies that their efforts and views are not legitimate. BTW, here is a video of Ron Paul with a bunch of hackers. The room was completely packed and overflowing into a second room (connected by video). Of course they aren't all RP supporters, but a large fraction are. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCM_wQy4YVg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCM_wQy4YVg

samwise 19y ago

There is a simple reddit fix. Rather then hosting crappy parties in different cities they should work on story filtering. So that users can filter ANY news title. there a simple work around for Ron Raul supporters, They can misspell r0n p@ul.

jgrahamc 19y ago
Just adding tagging plus tag filtering would do a lot. John.
mechanical_fish 19y ago
His running mate's name will be "vi4gr4 ci4li5".

michaelneale 19y ago

Its too late for him. There is no good left in him. Darth Vader betrayed and killed, your reddit.

davidw 19y ago
Yeah, Ron Paul is a symptom, not the root cause.

tocomment 19y ago

I like the Ron Paul stories on Reddit. I agree with others, this is grass roots democracy.

bigtoga 19y ago

I'll post the same thing here that I did at reddit: there's no use for this script since the Reddit Content Filter, another GM script, is already out there (and way superior - no offense meant). the RDF includes filtering by title, user, and/or site as well as RegEx... http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/8751 http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/8751

deleted 19y ago

[deleted]