this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2024
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95
YSK: The vote counts on reddit are completely made up. (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
31 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 13 hours ago

"Completely" made up is a bit hyperbole. They're not random, they are usually in some way indicative of the number of upvotes/downvotes a post is getting.

The reality is that any naive upvote system can be gamed. The more popular Lemmy gets, the more lucrative it will be to systematically manipulate which posts/comments are promoted and which get buried. And a naive voting system that just reflects the raw number of up/down votes is trivial to manipulate. It's harder than a signal in the noise issue, it's more of a signal in a deliberately crafted manipulated signal issue.

If Lemmy gets more popular, it's only a matter of time before it's forced to come up with alternative methods for deriving post sentiment.

[–] azertyfun 143 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] 47 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 13 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] 1 points 12 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 12 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 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 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 18 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.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Why should we know this

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 day ago

Because much of lemmy still is obsessed with reddit.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yep I remember. Its an estimate...kinda. there were many reasons given but at the time it felt bad. Like they were trying to hide the counts...which I still think they do.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

I think the given reason was to prevent vote manipulation by fuzzing the counts or something like that, but I always to took it as the admins and supermods cherry pick which posts they want to promote and alter the counts, so basically pushing certain messages and politicking.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 13 hours ago

True and seeing it happen once (the famous one) makes it likely.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 day ago

Yeah I remember seeing a post in January 2017, I think it was a picture of Obama, that had something like 80k upvotes when I'd never seen anything on Reddit to get even half that before

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago

I just stopped paying any attention to points afterwards. It was all worthless past then anyways.

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

That site is crappy. I never look at all and rarely look at popular. I glance at my own feed but rarely get to a second page.

It's gross if you look at all or popular and narrow it down to an hour and look at the bots going hog wild

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Softcore porn of the future: Bots Gone Wild

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

What's a reddit? Is it like those ice boxes that people used before refrigerators?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

TIL ice boxes were often called refrigerators long before electric refrigerators were common

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

Reddits were often called refrigerators long before electric refrigerators were common.

FTFY.