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The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy

• ejz 12y ago
  Very cool. Although, maybe another possible explanation is that people get "tired" at reading a whole page and skip to the next page, resulting in a top of the page bias. Also, love the use of R. R is beautiful.
  • xiongchiamiov 12y ago
    R is awful. It's full of decisions made by people who seem to not have much programming experience, in that they seem good at the time but cause major issues later on. See, for instance, http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2012/06/08/r-the-master-troll-of-statistical-languages/ http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2012/06/08/r-the-master-troll... , http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2008/12/use-equals-or-arrow-for-assignment.html http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2008/12/use-equals-or-ar... , http://shape-of-code.coding-guidelines.com/2012/02/29/parsing-r-code-freedom-of-expression-is-not-always-a-good-idea/ http://shape-of-code.coding-guidelines.com/2012/02/29/parsin... , and the necessity of http://tim-smith.us/arrgh/ http://tim-smith.us/arrgh/ (I wrote up some stuff about the *apply functions, but not yet in a form suitable for the guide: https://github.com/tdsmith/aRrgh/issues/18 https://github.com/tdsmith/aRrgh/issues/18 ) .
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
• mrfusion 12y ago
  Dumb question but what is the reddit front page? Isn't it customized for everyone depending on what you're subscribed to? Or are there a ton of users that never log in? It seems like you wouldn't get much value out of reddit if you just view the front page without logging in?
  • lbotos 12y ago
    Reddit has a default frontpage for people who don't have accounts. I lurked for years and was just fine without actually creating an account. :)
    • mrfusion 12y ago
      Isn't the default page mostly cat pictures and jokes? I tried viewing it logged out one time and I couldn't figure out who would like that?
      • Guvante 12y ago
        That is what the OP is about, they have since altered their algorithms to avoid pure cat pictures and jokes by inflating the value of certain sub reddits.
      • oftenwrong 12y ago
        For many people, reddit is merely a source of internet junk food. They go there for cheap, quick hits of mindless amusement. See also: buzzfeed, 9gag, imgur, funnyjunk, etc.
        • visarga 12y ago
          I wish so hard I could filter out the junk posts. Just give me something to read, a good article, a debate.
          • egypturnash 12y ago
            Log in, unsubscribe from all the default front-page subreddits, and put together your own mix based on stuff you're interested in. The Reddit I read by doing this is a pretty genteel and sensible place.
      • Ollinson 12y ago
        r/all right now has 4/25 threads from the funny subreddit no cat pictures, 2 gifs of dogs being cute I check r/all because it's the breadth focused zeitgeist of the internet. Whether the comments are right or wrong doesn't matter. Once you can fix a point on popular sentiment you can interpret how it will ripple through more "prestigious" forums.
  • ihuman 12y ago
    Todd was using the default front page, which consists of these subreddits: http://www.reddit.com/r/defaults/comments/24zz8z/list_of_default_subreddits_may_07_2014/ http://www.reddit.com/r/defaults/comments/24zz8z/list_of_def...
  • oftenwrong 12y ago
    The author defines the term "default front page" with an annotation: "In other words, assuming you’re not logged in. I don’t have any supporting info, but I’d imagine that a large chunk of reddit’s traffic comes from logged out users."
  • Pxtl 12y ago
    The default front page is also the default set of reddits you're assigned when you create a new account. There is tremendous inertia there so the "front page" is still a useful concept. Also, there's /r/all, which tends to closely mirror the front-page since non-default subreddits rarely climb in /r/all
  • ChrisArchitect 12y ago
    yeah, not a dumb question - there are a ton of not logged in 'casuals' who just come by to consume consume consume whatever frontpage throws up
    • ChrisArchitect 12y ago
      related recent reddit blog post about the 'defaults', changing them etc...which was not without controversy of course but ... http://www.redditblog.com/2014/05/whats-that-lassie-old-defaults-fell.html http://www.redditblog.com/2014/05/whats-that-lassie-old-defa...
• selmnoo 12y ago
  One thing I'm interested in knowing is whether Reddit manipulates the votes on its own submissions. See, for example, r/blog: http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/new/ http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/new/ Every submission made there went to the frontpage. What are the chances? I mean, it's hard to believe that mainstream Redditors at this point are so interested in Reddit news that they keep sending every Reddit announcement to the top. What's more likely, to me at least, is that Reddit is either leveraging its knowledge of how things work to get to the top in a surefire way, or it's plain messing with the upvote numbers. I would love to see data on these submissions, if possible. Of course, there's good reason for them to actually do this -- they need to advertise the Reddit marketplace stuff and so on, it's how they make money.
  • cryptoz 12y ago
    My guess here is that r/blog (and r/announcements?) is special in that every redditor is subscribed to it. I think I remember some small choas around us all being auto-subscribed to a subreddit we didn't care about (potentially). So it caused a small storm, but ~100% of redditors subscribe to it, which is untrue of probably every other subreddit
    • shalmanese 12y ago
      Every new reddit user is subscribed to all of the default subreddits and has to manually unsubscribe to get any of them off their front page.
    • xiongchiamiov 12y ago
      They're just like other default subreddits, which is to say that you can unsubscribe from them. I only resubscribed recently because I started working at reddit and figured I should know what's going on in my own company.
  • Guvante 12y ago
    1500 people hitting up arrow because the poster is an admin is believable to me given Reddit's size.
• mason240 12y ago
  >Much to my surprise, I found out that reddit's front pages are not a pure "meritocracy" based on votes, but that rankings depend heavily on subreddits. Is this really a surprise? If just went by upvotes alone, a sub with 1M subscribers will always dominate a sub with 500k. You need to factor in the that context.
  • dazmax 12y ago
    That's what I thought at first too, but the data makes it clear that it isn't just based on votes weighted by subscriber count either.
    • ketralnis 12y ago
      It's not votes weighted by subscriber count at all. It's "hotness" weighted by the hotness of the highest-hotness link per subreddit Hotness: https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/lib/db/_sorts.pyx#L45-L56 https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/lib/db/_s... Front-page weighting: https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/lib/normalized_hot.py https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/lib/norma...
• ThomPete 12y ago
  I left reddit years ago (and found HN) because although I agree with mostly liberal views it became too much of an echo-chamber for liberal views the frontpage is the extreme example of that. There are many great sub-reddits of course but it's not a place for politicial discussions (in fact I am still looking for a good place to have political discussions) Edit: Why does my personal experience get downvoted?
  • mrfusion 12y ago
    It's odd the Ron Paul was popular on Reddit for a while though. How do you explain that?
    • ThomPete 12y ago
      I don't. I am not saying everyone there is liberals but most are at least from my experience.
    • drpgq 12y ago
      Reddit was a pretty libertarian place in the very beginning.
    • deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    • skwirl 12y ago
      Ron Paul was "popular" on almost every website on the internet because his fanatical supporters flooded the web with an endless barrage of Ron Paul support. Reddit, newspaper comments, other discussion boards, polls, you name it, they were there to tell the world about Ron Paul. They were a very loud minority.
      • eli 12y ago
        That sounds like a borderline conspiracy theory. If Ron Paul's popularity on Reddit around 2008 was a fascade, it was very convincing.
    • 12y ago
• nevergetenglish 12y ago
  "I found out that reddit's front pages are not a pure meritocracy based on votes, but that rankings depend heavily on subreddits" (meritocracy was between commas). Clearly votes are not what people think when you speak about merits, but let it be.
• minimaxir 12y ago
  Relatedly, the Hacker News front page is not a meritocracy either. That's why counterbalance tools like flagging exist. Additionally, dang is implementing algorithms to identify articles that slip through: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8157698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8157698 EDIT: I misread the article's argument; there's a lot of luck on HN, but I cannot confirm there's a systemic bias toward people/topic.
• adrianlmm 12y ago
  I feel the same, about reddit, I only go to r/linux and r/android, I don't go to r/news or r/technology anymore, let alone the front page, is all liberal biaz, and I like impartial news.
  • Guvante 12y ago
    When you login you get to pick the subreddits that show up on the front page. Getting rid of /r/politics was why I created a login and now I have a front page with few "easy laughs" due to self selection (no /r/funny etc.)
• Dewie 12y ago
  "meritocracy" is a pompous and politically charged word to use in this context, but ok.
• phillmv 12y ago
  This is a gorgeous post and I shiver at the thought of how much work went into this! Thoughtful, detailed and chock full of great visualizations of the data. I'd be interested in a similar analysis of HN, as I'm interested in the editorial intent thus revealed. On tangential note, though, I was a bit surprised by the hypothesis. 'Meritocracy' to begin with is a dubious fiction, but especially so when mapped on to the vote distribution of a given post in a semi-decentralized human-moderated environment that is constantly being gamed. "Merit" just seems like a big value judgement over such a noisy channel.
  • minimaxir 12y ago
    A note about the graphics: all the charts were made with R/ggplot2. Not only ggplot2, but basic ggplot2: the charts in the blog post can be made with about 5 lines of code maximum each. You can customize ggplot2 for even more beautiful charts, such as the ones used in my analysis of HN comments: http://minimaxir.com/2014/10/hn-comments-about-comments/ http://minimaxir.com/2014/10/hn-comments-about-comments/ Note that reproducing this analysis for the HN front page is harder since there is a lot that happens behind the scenes that cannot be generalized. Here's an attempt at performing such an analysis (note dang's comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8533757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8533757
    • mikecb 12y ago
      My favorite example of ggplots ease and customizability comes from xkcd style graphs: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12675147/how-can-we-make-xkcd-style-graphs-in-r http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12675147/how-can-we-make-...
    • beambot 12y ago
      Not all the charts are ggplot2. It looks like the big interactive one is javascript, specifically HighCharts.
    • jedmeyers 12y ago
      By the way, there is an awesome course track on Data Science from Johns Hopkins on Coursera right now, which includes introduction to R. https://www.coursera.org/specialization/jhudatascience/1?utm_source=spark&utm_medium=banner https://www.coursera.org/specialization/jhudatascience/1?utm...
• vuldin 12y ago
  This is an interesting study into how Reddit works, but I have to say that I'm fine with the fact that Reddit is neither a meritocracy or democracy when it comes to how posts make it to the front page. I'd rather not see any more funny or aww posts on the front page than are already there (I can go to their subreddits directly when I want to). In fact, I'd rather see a variety of posts from subreddits I don't usually go to or usually follow. I want to see thing I don't already follow. Most posts I end up liking are ones I find in the subreddits I visit. I'd like my front page to give me posts from other unsubscribed subreddits so that I may end up expanding which subreddits I'm subscribed to.
  • tomphoolery 12y ago
    > In fact, I'd rather see a variety of posts from subreddits I don't usually go to or usually follow. There is a little line of text on the top of the reddit front page called "trending subreddits"...I've found a bunch of cool stuff that way http://imgur.com/okDu5AN http://imgur.com/okDu5AN But of course, the best way to find new subreddits is to read the first 5 or so comments on a weird gif or picture. Someone will link to either subreddit that it came from, or a subreddit where it could have been posted.
    • Kalium 12y ago
      I'm pretty sure that those are human-selected rather than algorithmically selected.
  • deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
• josefresco 12y ago
  Many years ago I had an article on my personal blog about web design climb it's way to the front page of Digg (I'm dating myself here) and Reddit. Despite my server buckling rather quickly, I still saw at least ~250K visits over a couple days (Digg then was slightly more popular) and to this day (5+ years later) that one first page post continues to deliver tens of thousands of visits a year thanks to a rather healthy Google rank and a huge network of incoming links from related tech blogs. Reddit exposes you to a huge audience, who then in turn comment, link to, and debate your post. Reddit's memory is short however, and within hours your post will be gone. However the reverberating effects benefit you in many ways and almost guarantee traffic for years if the topic is "evergreen".
• kzrdude 12y ago
  Reddit doesn't have just one frontpage anymore, the defaults vary depending on country.
• eplanit 12y ago
  For both Reddit and HN, articles/posts live or die based on popularity, not meritocracy nor karma.
  • minimaxir 12y ago
    A high karma is a causal effect for popularity, however. (on HN, an article at #1 will receive much more activity than an article at #30.)
• gfunk911 12y ago
  Sounds like there are 50 subs that get spots 1-50, sorted mainly by vote count.
  • kevincox 12y ago
    Not quite, as you can see multiple posts from the same subs in the top 50 and it changes. They aren't fixed "slots" but just appear to be weighted like that.
• johnasb 12y ago
  Reddit is internet power - I cant recall a day in the last 5 years when I haven't checke reddit. When people ask me what websites do I read I can't recall any other than reddit. So funny. And I grew up with slashdot. People dont even know what slashdot is anymore. Reddit is the internet explorer button for me.
  • mtbcoder 12y ago
    A while back ago I would have agreed with you (also having spent a lot of time on Slashdot), but the quality of posts these days on the front pages keep from returning on a regular basis. Yes, I know that with Reddit you need to unsubscribe from the defaults and things like that and there are quality sub-reddits out there. But from my perspective, the front page used to contain enough good content that one could causally scan through and find something interesting without the haggle of signing up, maintaining subscriptions, searching for relevant content and things like that. At the end of the day, I'm just there to browse and not jump through a bunch of hoops just to filter out junk that only appeals to the under 18 crowd.
• AngrySkillzz 12y ago
  Nice job. I guess the practical takeaway is, if you don't want to look at funny pictures and animal GIFs, start on page 2.
  • ketralnis 12y ago
    Or just unsubscribe from /r/funny and /r/gifs. The default front page is total nonsense, you have to find reddit for yourself.
  • mlrtime 12y ago
    Or you can just filter them to create your own front page. Reading reddit becomes a much different experience once you start to customize it.
• icesoldier 12y ago
  I'd like to see this kind of analysis done on /r/all, since it seems to more closely operate like the author anticipated. The default front page is meant to weight the subreddit like they discovered, but IIRC /r/all is strictly based on score and time, as if everything was submitted under the same subreddit.
• _deh 12y ago
  Lovely piece of work.
• Siecje 12y ago
  On HN how is it that posts with 7 points make it the front page but others do not?
  • minimaxir 12y ago
    Posts with 7 points that get those points quickly (within a half hour of being posted) will hit the front page due to the time portion of the algorithm. Whether it stays there is another story.
• freshflowers 12y ago
  No shit Sherlock. It's no secret that the front page is heavily weighted. It's also subject to personalization, so basically no two redditors have the same front page. The default front page is just the landing page for newcomers to get a first impression and a starting point for personalization. An analysis of and comparison with /r/all would have been way more interesting.
• redthrowaway 12y ago
  They talked about this eons ago. Maybe 3, 4 years? It's an attempt to highlight smaller subreddits and hopefully boost subreddit discovery.
• vinhboy 12y ago
  Good time for me to do my annual bitching about how much I hate HN comments. So who made the most agreeable comment on this thread? I don't know...
• jedberg 12y ago
  This post is interesting, but he should have just read the code: https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/lib/normalized_hot.py https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/lib/norma... This is an effect of the normalization algorithm, which biases towards trying to have a post from as may different subreddits as possible on the front page. Edit: At least we're consistent! Ketralnis said the same thing about an hour ago. :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8568021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8568021
  • Havoc 12y ago
    Thats an awful lot of funny looking graphs to blame on a "normalization algo". e.g. >r/funny posts simply never appear on the bottom half of page one or most of page two Note the "never" part....not just rarely...never. Well within this 1.2 million point dataset anyway.
    • raldi 12y ago
      It's likely that, at any given time, the top 2-3 links of /r/funny are highly-ranked enough to make the front page -- except the algorithm won't let more than one from that subreddit through at a time. So the alpha-funny link makes it, and the beta-funny link has to sit on page 3, suppressed, unable to take its rightful spot... until suddenly alpha-funny is too old, and is kicked off the front page, at which point beta-funny immediately ascends to take its place.
      • Havoc 12y ago
        I see. That does make sense. Bit of a curious view on "normalization" but I can see how that would result in the strange graphs.
        • raldi 12y ago
          It's kinda like the British royal family: Prince Charles is just one heartbeat away from the throne, but as long as the queen is healthy, she's the one who gets to be on all the money.
• fenomas 12y ago
  IANAQ* , but could not the effects shown in this article occur from content-neutral rules, combined with some clustering in the popularity of various subreddits? For example, assume there is a rule that a given subreddit can have no more than N posts in the top 50 at a given time. It seems like this alone would explain the clustering shown in the article. Super-popular subreddits like /r/funny would rarely have posts on page 2, simply because they usually already have N posts on page 1. Thus they drop off sharply in likelihood to appear in the 40s, then shoot back up after #50 when the limiting stops. Meanwhile clusters 2 and 3 appear to be the subreddits which rarely and often (respectively) reach the top 50, but only due to the limiting rule. Cluster 2 is the least popular in the unlimited spots past #50, so it makes sense that it usually reaches the lowest of the limited spots, while cluster 3 (apparently medium in overall popularity) takes the middle region. Naturally I'm just squinting at it, but it looks like the article's findings could easily occur without Reddit treating some subreddits differently from others (as I take the author to imply it might, given the title). Am I missing something? * I am not a quant :P
  • jagger27 12y ago
    For those curious, quant |kwänt| noun informal a quantitative analyst. ORIGIN 1970s: abbreviation.
• devindotcom 12y ago
  One thing that immediately jumped to my head when I saw the falloff towards 50 and then the jump right after 50 was simply visual prominence. I would guess that people naturally pay more attention to posts that appear at the top of the page, whether it's page 1, 2, or 3. There's also a blip of attention at the very bottom, since that post is also visually and conceptually distinct - everyone looks directly at it because it's the last one, so it gets more eyeballs and potentially quite a few people giving it a charity vote to "save" it from dropping to the next page. Meanwhile people scan more quickly over posts in the middle, perhaps (as I do) merely skimming over a couple words and the score, to see whether it merits moving my eyes over the whole line (because my time is that valuable).
• Subi 12y ago
  Beautiful post very interesting data. The balance trying to be achieved can most simply be described as known good content vs. discovery. I wouldn't call it uneven it's more like; this is interesting vs we might think you'll find this interesting but we're taking a gamble because it has low visibility. I'm betting subreddits can move from cluster to cluster over time as well fairly frequently. Maybe an interesting thing to try to track over the next month or 2?
• jelloPuddin 12y ago
  Just a though: It looks like things toward the bottom of a page drop off in popularity. Perhaps users are more engaged when looking at the top of the page, clicking all the links, and perhaps less engaged towards the bottom, skipping remaining links and just going to the next page. I imagine this would only be seen by users who use the actual page rather than RES.
• johan_larson 12y ago
  Is anything actually a meritocracy?
  • krapp 12y ago
    On the internet? No.
• ionwake 12y ago
  and again this why you should use http://www.sagebump.com/?info&view=technocrat http://www.sagebump.com/?info&view=technocrat to manage your social aggregator news
• JabavuAdams 12y ago
  There's no such thing as a meritocracy, unless you include ability to game the system in your measure of merit. Either that, or every system is a meritocracy, and you're just not trying hard enough to win.
• Thoguth 12y ago
  Popularity isn't exactly a meritocracy either. That is, while popularity is correlated with quality, the two are rarely considered identical, and one is often a poor heuristic for the other.