YSK: The vote counts on reddit are completely made up.
YSK: The vote counts on reddit are completely made up.
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.
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
/toprankings. 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.
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.
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.
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.
What does MOA stand for in this context?
In the context of the sentence I’m guessing it was a typo for MAU, monthly active users.
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.
don’t know or care if reddit does vote manipulation
It does, showing random vote numbers on posts when you refresh.
Why should we know this
Because much of lemmy still is obsessed with reddit.
"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.
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.
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.
True and seeing it happen once (the famous one) makes it likely.
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
Softcore porn of the future: Bots Gone Wild
I just stopped paying any attention to points afterwards. It was all worthless past then anyways.
What's a reddit? Is it like those ice boxes that people used before refrigerators?
TIL ice boxes were often called refrigerators long before electric refrigerators were common
I noticed reddit have constant post-election copium. Like "It's not over, Fani Willis case is unpardonable" Wtf lol. So silly. Its like those "Umm achtually, trump will be president on March 4." when Biden won. Ridiculous copium. I feel like reddit algorithm is trying to push for a lib Jan 6 so that trump will have an excuse to invoke insurrection act (not like he wont try regardless, but with a lib Jan 6, there will be no resistance from the military to carry out his orders).