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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

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

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