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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/

by 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.
- ehmorris 12y ago
  The score does not correlate directly w/ number of upvotes
  - Guvante 12y ago
    It is close enough, especially for content that is not likely to be down voted.
  - minimaxir 12y ago
    It's not a r = 1 correlation, but it's definitely strongly correlated.
- sigmar 12y ago
  This seems likely to me as the same thing seems to occur when a moderator on a small subreddit makes a post (even without making it stickied). Users seem to take it upon themselves to upvote out of reverence.
vuldin 12y ago
I've always assumed there was no doubt Reddit moved their own posts up to the top in some unmeritocratic, undemocratic way... it serves the same function of sticky threads on phpbb (and other) forums. The massive amount of votes on these posts would happen after being moved to the top as a form of self fulfilling prophecy... people are interested in what Reddit (the org) is doing to improve Reddit (the site).
mherdeg 12y ago
Some discussion at https://www.reddit.com/r/BestOfReports/comments/2g62rg/dont_want_something_on_your_front_page_dont/ https://www.reddit.com/r/BestOfReports/comments/2g62rg/dont_... ( which, btw, has a pretty funny screenshot of off-topic "reports" that a Reddit blog post got) says that it is possible to unsubscribe from /r/blog and /r/announcements, but it is not the default.
rkuykendall-com 12y ago
> 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. "Mainstream Redditors" don't decide what is on the homepage because they don't vote. Only about 20% of redditors vote, and only about 20% of voters comment [1]. If you still find it hard to believe, just read the 900+ comments written in less than a day on their most recent post, which announced nothing and was just about how it's nice to be nice to people. [1] http://www.quora.com/reddit-website/What-percent-of-Redditors-read-but-rarely-contribute http://www.quora.com/reddit-website/What-percent-of-Redditor...
- sillysaurus3 12y ago
  Only about 20% of redditors vote, and only about 20% of voters comment [1]. That doesn't really ring true. If you make a post with a question in the title, you'll often get 5+ answers before a single person votes. Even downvotes. Maybe it's more accurate to say "Of those people who don't hang out in the new submissions queue, only about 20% of the voters comment." But, really, Reddit could do anything it wants internally, and we'd have no idea. Only they have access to the stats. They already compress the votes so that it only looks like there are ~10,000 votes maximum, when in fact hundreds of thousands of people have probably voted on certain posts.
  - ketralnis 12y ago
    > They already compress the votes so that it only looks like there are ~10,000 votes maximum, when in fact hundreds of thousands of people have probably voted on certain posts Again I'm out of the loop by several years here. But to my knowledge, no that's not true. There are just fewer voters than you think there are.
    - sillysaurus3 12y ago
      It's possible, but it seems unlikely. https://www.reddit.com/comments/z1c9z https://www.reddit.com/comments/z1c9z Obama's AMA. According to the sidebar, (upvotes - downvotes) = 14,700, with upvotes/(upvotes+downvotes) = 94%. Reddit recently changed their algorithms so that the 94% figure is very accurate. That means 14,700/0.94 ~= 15,600 people voted, according to the sidebar. Here are Reddit's traffic stats for the Obama AMA: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/z3msa/traffic_stats_from_obamas_iama/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/z3msa/traffic_stats_f... The AMA brought in an extra two million uniques over two days. Also, it was one of the most legendary and historic events thus far on the internet, because it was the first time a sitting US president directly engaged with the public on a social media website. Reddit has millions of subscribers. They can't really obfuscate the subscriber counts, because the subscriber count for each subreddit is visible every day. If it suddenly slowed down, people would notice. And the info needs to be available to moderators in order to manage their subreddit. Therefore, when /r/funny says it has 7 million subscribers, we can be reasonably certain there are at least 7 million Reddit accounts, many of which are active. So, assuming there are only about a million active Redditors (there are probably more), and that a large number of those Redditors visit http://www.reddit.com/r/all http://www.reddit.com/r/all on a regular basis, and considering that the Obama AMA was one of the most significant events in Reddit history (and indeed all internet history), and considering that over three million people viewed the AMA, it seems hard to believe that only 15,000 people voted on it. It's possible. Statistics are one of the most counter-intuitive fields. Behaviors emerge at scale which aren't seen in the initial stages. Maybe it's possible people saw that 5,000 people had already upvoted the AMA, and so were less likely to upvote it themselves. But given the nature of politics and the significant historical status of the event, could it be true that the fate of the AMA was influenced by just a few thousand people? Another observation: Reddit has had steady upward growth, but I remember that as of a few years ago the upvote counts were regularly reaching 3k. That number hasn't gone up too much in the meantime: https://www.reddit.com/r/all/ https://www.reddit.com/r/all/ ... but Reddit's traffic seems to have doubled since the start of 2013: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=reddit http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=reddit If the number of voters could be calculated as a simple percentage of total active Reddit accounts, and Reddit's traffic has doubled, then why haven't the vote counts in /r/all also doubled? That said, I'm not entirely convinced of my position. Reality is weird, and I'm often wrong. All I'm saying is that if it's true that only 15,000 people voted on Obama's AMA, and that a submission on /r/all regularly receives only ~5k votes out of a million active redditors who see it, then I'm surprised. EDIT: The more I think about it, the more I think I'm mistaken. If it were true that Reddit compresses the vote counters for submissions, then they'd also have to do it for comments, because otherwise the top comment would regularly display a count that's way higher than the submission. They'd also have to compress the added comment karma, etc. This is where it moves from "plausible" to "the simplest explanation is that very few people vote." Huh. Interesting.
pb2au 12y ago
Reddit does intend to have the /r/blog posts on the front page, but they don't necessarily need to rig the votes. As mentioned in the article, the algorithm for selecting which posts appear on the homepage seems to allocate slots for each subreddit. If one subreddit has more people voting than another subreddit, they can both appear alongside each other, rather than the larger one always filling the homepage. Since the only posts made to /r/blog are infrequent, they will always get the slot for the subreddit and will likely always appear on the front page or second page even with few votes. Then, because they are visible to many users, they can attract more votes.
ketralnis 12y ago
I've been out of the loop for a few years, but no the votes aren't manipulated. But the normalisation algorithm https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/lib/normalized_hot.py https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/lib/norma... does prefer to get one at least of each subreddit. This means that if /r/blog has a post it will probably be placed on the front page immediately. That action gets it a lot of votes just because it's very visible.
- raldi 12y ago
  > I've been out of the loop for a few years, but no the votes aren't manipulated. AHA! Let's just cancel out the double negative ("no" and "n't") and look what we uncover, in this former reddit admin's very own words: "the votes are manipulated"
  - uberdog 12y ago
    That's not how english works. That's not a double negative.
    - raldi 12y ago
      Now let's cancel out the double negative ("not", and "not") in what you said: > That's how english works. That's a double negative. Exactly!
      - thezilch 12y ago
        Or... > That's a double positive. Indeed!
  - cortesoft 12y ago
    Umm, that isn't a double negative.
  - pygy_ 12y ago
    For those who don't know, raldi is a former reddit admin as well.

by selmnoo 12y ago

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.

ehmorris 12y ago
The score does not correlate directly w/ number of upvotes
- Guvante 12y ago
  It is close enough, especially for content that is not likely to be down voted.
- minimaxir 12y ago
  It's not a r = 1 correlation, but it's definitely strongly correlated.
sigmar 12y ago
This seems likely to me as the same thing seems to occur when a moderator on a small subreddit makes a post (even without making it stickied). Users seem to take it upon themselves to upvote out of reverence.

vuldin 12y ago

I've always assumed there was no doubt Reddit moved their own posts up to the top in some unmeritocratic, undemocratic way... it serves the same function of sticky threads on phpbb (and other) forums. The massive amount of votes on these posts would happen after being moved to the top as a form of self fulfilling prophecy... people are interested in what Reddit (the org) is doing to improve Reddit (the site).

mherdeg 12y ago

Some discussion at https://www.reddit.com/r/BestOfReports/comments/2g62rg/dont_want_something_on_your_front_page_dont/ https://www.reddit.com/r/BestOfReports/comments/2g62rg/dont_... ( which, btw, has a pretty funny screenshot of off-topic "reports" that a Reddit blog post got) says that it is possible to unsubscribe from /r/blog and /r/announcements, but it is not the default.

rkuykendall-com 12y ago

> 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. "Mainstream Redditors" don't decide what is on the homepage because they don't vote. Only about 20% of redditors vote, and only about 20% of voters comment [1]. If you still find it hard to believe, just read the 900+ comments written in less than a day on their most recent post, which announced nothing and was just about how it's nice to be nice to people. [1] http://www.quora.com/reddit-website/What-percent-of-Redditors-read-but-rarely-contribute http://www.quora.com/reddit-website/What-percent-of-Redditor...

sillysaurus3 12y ago
Only about 20% of redditors vote, and only about 20% of voters comment [1]. That doesn't really ring true. If you make a post with a question in the title, you'll often get 5+ answers before a single person votes. Even downvotes. Maybe it's more accurate to say "Of those people who don't hang out in the new submissions queue, only about 20% of the voters comment." But, really, Reddit could do anything it wants internally, and we'd have no idea. Only they have access to the stats. They already compress the votes so that it only looks like there are ~10,000 votes maximum, when in fact hundreds of thousands of people have probably voted on certain posts.
- ketralnis 12y ago
  > They already compress the votes so that it only looks like there are ~10,000 votes maximum, when in fact hundreds of thousands of people have probably voted on certain posts Again I'm out of the loop by several years here. But to my knowledge, no that's not true. There are just fewer voters than you think there are.
  - sillysaurus3 12y ago
    It's possible, but it seems unlikely. https://www.reddit.com/comments/z1c9z https://www.reddit.com/comments/z1c9z Obama's AMA. According to the sidebar, (upvotes - downvotes) = 14,700, with upvotes/(upvotes+downvotes) = 94%. Reddit recently changed their algorithms so that the 94% figure is very accurate. That means 14,700/0.94 ~= 15,600 people voted, according to the sidebar. Here are Reddit's traffic stats for the Obama AMA: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/z3msa/traffic_stats_from_obamas_iama/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/z3msa/traffic_stats_f... The AMA brought in an extra two million uniques over two days. Also, it was one of the most legendary and historic events thus far on the internet, because it was the first time a sitting US president directly engaged with the public on a social media website. Reddit has millions of subscribers. They can't really obfuscate the subscriber counts, because the subscriber count for each subreddit is visible every day. If it suddenly slowed down, people would notice. And the info needs to be available to moderators in order to manage their subreddit. Therefore, when /r/funny says it has 7 million subscribers, we can be reasonably certain there are at least 7 million Reddit accounts, many of which are active. So, assuming there are only about a million active Redditors (there are probably more), and that a large number of those Redditors visit http://www.reddit.com/r/all http://www.reddit.com/r/all on a regular basis, and considering that the Obama AMA was one of the most significant events in Reddit history (and indeed all internet history), and considering that over three million people viewed the AMA, it seems hard to believe that only 15,000 people voted on it. It's possible. Statistics are one of the most counter-intuitive fields. Behaviors emerge at scale which aren't seen in the initial stages. Maybe it's possible people saw that 5,000 people had already upvoted the AMA, and so were less likely to upvote it themselves. But given the nature of politics and the significant historical status of the event, could it be true that the fate of the AMA was influenced by just a few thousand people? Another observation: Reddit has had steady upward growth, but I remember that as of a few years ago the upvote counts were regularly reaching 3k. That number hasn't gone up too much in the meantime: https://www.reddit.com/r/all/ https://www.reddit.com/r/all/ ... but Reddit's traffic seems to have doubled since the start of 2013: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=reddit http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=reddit If the number of voters could be calculated as a simple percentage of total active Reddit accounts, and Reddit's traffic has doubled, then why haven't the vote counts in /r/all also doubled? That said, I'm not entirely convinced of my position. Reality is weird, and I'm often wrong. All I'm saying is that if it's true that only 15,000 people voted on Obama's AMA, and that a submission on /r/all regularly receives only ~5k votes out of a million active redditors who see it, then I'm surprised. EDIT: The more I think about it, the more I think I'm mistaken. If it were true that Reddit compresses the vote counters for submissions, then they'd also have to do it for comments, because otherwise the top comment would regularly display a count that's way higher than the submission. They'd also have to compress the added comment karma, etc. This is where it moves from "plausible" to "the simplest explanation is that very few people vote." Huh. Interesting.

pb2au 12y ago

Reddit does intend to have the /r/blog posts on the front page, but they don't necessarily need to rig the votes. As mentioned in the article, the algorithm for selecting which posts appear on the homepage seems to allocate slots for each subreddit. If one subreddit has more people voting than another subreddit, they can both appear alongside each other, rather than the larger one always filling the homepage. Since the only posts made to /r/blog are infrequent, they will always get the slot for the subreddit and will likely always appear on the front page or second page even with few votes. Then, because they are visible to many users, they can attract more votes.

ketralnis 12y ago

I've been out of the loop for a few years, but no the votes aren't manipulated. But the normalisation algorithm https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/lib/normalized_hot.py https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/lib/norma... does prefer to get one at least of each subreddit. This means that if /r/blog has a post it will probably be placed on the front page immediately. That action gets it a lot of votes just because it's very visible.

raldi 12y ago
> I've been out of the loop for a few years, but no the votes aren't manipulated. AHA! Let's just cancel out the double negative ("no" and "n't") and look what we uncover, in this former reddit admin's very own words: "the votes are manipulated"
- uberdog 12y ago
  That's not how english works. That's not a double negative.
  - raldi 12y ago
    Now let's cancel out the double negative ("not", and "not") in what you said: > That's how english works. That's a double negative. Exactly!
    - thezilch 12y ago
      Or... > That's a double positive. Indeed!
- cortesoft 12y ago
  Umm, that isn't a double negative.
- pygy_ 12y ago
  For those who don't know, raldi is a former reddit admin as well.