this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2024
96 points (75.0% liked)

You Should Know

33262 readers
167 users here now

YSK - for all the things that can make your life easier!

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must begin with YSK.

All posts must begin with YSK. If you're a Mastodon user, then include YSK after @youshouldknow. This is a community to share tips and tricks that will help you improve your life.



Rule 2- Your post body text must include the reason "Why" YSK:

**In your post's text body, you must include the reason "Why" YSK: It’s helpful for readability, and informs readers about the importance of the content. **



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding non-YSK posts.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-YSK posts using the [META] tag on your post title.



Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.

If you harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

If you are a member, sympathizer or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.

For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- The majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.

Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.



Partnered Communities:

You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.

Community Moderation

For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.

Credits

Our icon(masterpiece) was made by @clen15!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

They changed the algorithm on Dec 7, 2016.

Before: https://web.archive.org/web/20161206000344/https://www.reddit.com/

After: https://web.archive.org/web/20161208000333/https://www.reddit.com/

Best guess, based off the vote count differences of those two days, is that if you see a vote with 100,000 count, it's likely closer to 20,000 count (divide by roughly 5 or so).

There was a post about it by KeyserSosa on Dec 6, so it's not some conspiracy or anything.

I figured YSK.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] azertyfun 144 points 1 day ago (5 children)

I was there Gandalf...

Before that date their algorithm was soft-locked to around 5k upvotes. If a post was extremely, massively popular it would climb to maybe a bit over 10k but that was insane. There was clearly a logarithmic scaling effect that kicked in after a few thousand upvotes. Not entirely sure why, perhaps to prevent the super-popular stuff from ballooning in some kind of horrible feedback loop.

The change was to uncap the vote counts. One day posts just kept climbing well beyond the 5k mark. Now what they also did was recalculate old posts in order not to fuck up the /top rankings. Kinda. Took a while and I'm not sure they got to every post.

I don't know or care if reddit does vote manipulation, but this ain't proof and I don't see how it is unbelievable that a website with tens of millions MOA would occasionally have a post with 100k+ upvotes.

[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Yeah, OP's post is misleading. Back then, they announced that they will make that change in how votes are displayed.
So they literally did the opposite of what OP is claiming, they started showing real numbers. Those numbers don't seem unrealistic at all to me. Reddit is one of the most popular websites, and the nature of the frontpage will just mean that posts that reach the top will have huge amount of votes.

I don't know why are we still talking about reddit here. I'm pretty sure everyone who is here, already hates it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

I use Reddit and Lemmy and I’m pretty sure I’m not alone. I don’t really understand people who treat them as mutually exclusive.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

I try to treat them as mutually exclusive as in I try really really hard to not use or browse reddit unless absolutely needed. Instead channeling whatever interaction I do into lemmy.

You ever hear of voting with your wallet? Well on the internet you vote with your attention and interaction. Whatever site you use and contribute to inevitably grows in content value from your discussions (if you are one of the few who actually post and writes well thought out comments).

Im a prideful nerd who believes people should be willing to sacrifice convinence or protest against something indefinitely if they really believe in the cause. Theres many parts of lemmy I don't like but its core tenants of decentralized federation and non-profit community operated social internet services run with open source software speaks to me enough.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

I don’t necessarily disagree but I feel such actions are only meaningful when undertaken as part of a large, organized movement. There is no such movement currently. My presence or absence on Reddit is of little consequence individually.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

I understand the sentiment and agree that an individuals abstenance or lack there ofay not have an visible impact on the macroscale. Reddit will exist and be used with or without me or 10,000 like me.

I judge myself by my own actions and their relation to my personal philosophies. If I violate my priciples or don't even try to uphold them then what kind of person am I? Someone who talks the big talk to get in on a morally superior circle jerk but won't walk the walk when nobody's looking, thats who. And thats wrong, to me. Even if nothing else is achieved through reddit abstinence, I do feel good about upholding my personal values by participating in a personal protest. It matters to me.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

This recalculation happened shortly after reddit went closed source. I don't think we should trust their word that they had all of a sudden 'fixed' the problem, whose fix just so happened to really drive their stock value.

It's not misleading, it's the reality of what happened. Their public post was PR justification. It was about that point on that every decision they made was for $ and not for transparency.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

What does MOA stand for in this context?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 20 hours ago

In the context of the sentence I’m guessing it was a typo for MAU, monthly active users.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

Was gonna say, I explicitly recalled it being the removal of the scaling algo, so if anything the current vote counts (this has possibly changed since that 2016 adjustment) are more accurate. Reddit has a massive userbase, and posts in default subs are naturally going to get upvoted substantially. There's no real viral algorithm to reddit, you just see things that are upvoted.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

don’t know or care if reddit does vote manipulation

It does, showing random vote numbers on posts when you refresh.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I figured most people here knew about it, but also just as many probably forgot about it, at least deep in the memory banks. ;)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Your explanation says that a post with 100k actually has 20k. What this guy is saying is that it does actually have 100k.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

It's impossible really to say. This was their official code citation:

Over the past few months, we have carefully recomputed historical votes on posts and comments to remove outdated, unnecessary rules.

I mean on the face of it, maybe they were telling the truth?

But they are a for profit corporation, and that year forward was when the enshittification really began. I guess I just have little reason to believe that they didn't just alter the algorithm to make it look like there was more engagement than there was.