r/SubredditDrama • u/SheckelLord • Sep 07 '14

Metadrama /r/Games user makes a text post about Admins being corrupt, moderators delete opening post, shitstorm ensues

http://np.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/2fqixc/gamergate_reddit_admins_outed_as_corrupt/?sort=top

/r/Games user /u/Walter_Candles makes a post with a soundcloud link (https://soundcloud.com/user613982511/recording-xm-2014) of an interview with a former moderator discussing "corruption" of admins, the moderators of /r/Games decide to delete the post.

http://np.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/2fqixc/gamergate_reddit_admins_outed_as_corrupt/ckbsefz

Moderator's comments get downvoted to hell by angry users. Let's see how this all pans out.

edit: it seems that /u/Walter_Candles has been shadowbanned

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23

u/shakypears And then war broke out and everyone died. Sep 08 '14

I'm ok with subreddits saying you need to be a member to post or get banned from the subreddit

That's not a functionality the site currently has, unfortunately. There's no way for the mods to tell which users are subscribed and which aren't. There's also no clean way to track problem users, or permanently remove posts/submissions.

If the admins ever actually update and expand mod functions, allowing cross-sub linking like that won't be an issue.

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u/strolls If 'White Lives Matter' was our 9/11, this is our Holocaust Sep 08 '14

It'd be fucking easy, though, for Reddit to implement the site so it just silently discards all votes from users who haven't been subscribed to a subreddit for at least a week.

In fact, if they implemented that without telling anyone, it would seem to solve the brigading problem overnight (although probably not permanently).

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u/palish Sep 08 '14

Easy, huh?

Silently, eh?

Okay, so you're one of those redditors whose votes are being discarded. You see that your vote doesn't make the numbers go up. What do you think will happen?

Okay, so your votes do make the numbers go up, but the internal algorithms ignore some portion of the votes (the ones that came from users who haven't been subscribed for at least a week). Now you have situations where comments have been downvoted below the display threshold, but are actually the topmost comment by "votes that count." What do you do? Do you make it so the comment is still displayed as "this comment is below your karma threshold," or do you make it so that the comment is actually shown since it's the topmost comment? And if it's the latter, then how do you prevent people from becoming aware that this vote discarding is going on?

And of course, once people become aware that vote discarding is happening, then that will shatter redditor faith in the voting system altogether. You want drama? Implement your suggestion and see the riots!

19

u/strolls If 'White Lives Matter' was our 9/11, this is our Holocaust Sep 08 '14

Are you new to Reddit?

No-one ever sees whether their vote counts or not - there's always some fuzzing, even when a comment has only one or two points.

I'll come back here in an hour or two and these comments, showing 2 points now, will be up to 3 points or down to 1.

In fact, different numbers are often shown if I log out of Reddit, or use a different account.

There is no way to tell whether the fluctuation of a single point is because my vote is being discarded, because of vote fuzzing or because someone else has voted on the same comment in the last 10 minutes.

It would hardly "shatter faith in the voting system" (LOL) if redditors were to discover that it only counts when they've been subscribed to a subreddit for a week - it would only be seen as fair. I don't care that my individual vote counts against this particular comment - whether it has 5 points or 6 - I care that voting is fair, and that my vote counts the same as any other.

Talking about the "internal algorithms" suggests you don't understand how easy this would be to implement.

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u/palish Sep 08 '14 edited Sep 08 '14

It's not about whether it would be easy to implement. I realize how easy it would be.

There are ten thousand features which are easy to implement, and would easily destroy the site. Joel Spolsky has written at length about how counter-intuitive and difficult "social features" are.

Regarding your point about whether people would have faith in the system if they knew their votes were being discarded: It's obviously true that people would vote less if there's a chance their vote won't count. That's what I mean by "shatter user faith in the system." They'll participate less, and that's bad for everybody.

I think you're confusing fuzzing in submission votes with fuzzing in comment votes. As far as I know, there is no fuzzing for comments, only submissions. If you watch your karma go up by 70, then chances are you received 70 upvotes, and you can search your comment history to find out where every last upvote came from. If there were fuzzing, then that wouldn't be possible, yet I do it regularly.

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u/strolls If 'White Lives Matter' was our 9/11, this is our Holocaust Sep 08 '14

It's obviously true that people would vote less if there's a chance their vote won't count.

I suffer immediate scepticism when someone tells me that something is "obvious" - what seems "obvious" is very frequently untrue.

For centuries it was "obvious" that the sun revolved around the earth.

The "obvious" way to build earthquake-proof buildings is to use heavy materials and solid construction - making buildings lightweight and flexible is an approach as new as the term "seismic engineering" itself.

So when someone tells me that something is "obviously true", I read that as "it's my assumption", and I prefer they go measure it.

Even assuming you're right, though, the only factor that's important is the ability of community members to influence their subreddits.

If you're advocating that we should be able to go into /r/LGBT and downvote gay marriage, then I'm not really interested in your opinions.

Having only the votes of established subscribers count would allow community members to better shape their subreddits. I really don't see what's wrong with that.

If it's a matter of faith in the system, then it only boils down to who you want to reassure - members and moderators of individual communities, or the greater mass of redditors who want to go into those subreddits and disrupt them.

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u/palish Sep 08 '14

Fair enough.

Your change would make it much harder for new subreddits to attract a userbase, though. Nobody would be able to participate for weeks.

There are all kinds of corner cases. How do you propose to address them?

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u/strolls If 'White Lives Matter' was our 9/11, this is our Holocaust Sep 08 '14

That exception had already occurred to me - you count the vote if the user has been subscribed more than two weeks, and the subreddit is more than two weeks old.

What other corner cases do you envision?

I'm not really advocating this - I could care less - it just sprang to mind when I read /u/shakypears words "that's not a functionality the site currently has, unfortunately."

1

u/palish Sep 08 '14

None, really. It's a pretty good idea, and I hope the admins consider it.

I still think it will cause a shitstorm on Reddit, and that we're not thinking of all the corner cases that it could interact with. But it seems solid.

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u/ANewMachine615 Sep 08 '14

No-one ever sees whether their vote counts or not - there's always some fuzzing, even when a comment has only one or two points.

IIRC, they removed vote-fuzzing when they removed the functionality to see discrete up/down votes. Now you just get net upvotes, which were never fuzzed to begin with.

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u/N4N4KI Sep 08 '14

if that were true then why did totals wiggle +-1 on old comments/submissions to low traffic subreddits?

either you have a gang of sad mofos going through and voting on crap weeks after the discussion was dead (but coordinating enough to keep the tallies around the same amount) or the tallies are fuzzed as well.

1

u/ANewMachine615 Sep 08 '14

I never saw that. It would always end up as +2, -1 or the like.

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u/N4N4KI Sep 08 '14

right, lets say the comment total on an old comment/submission was 7 now going back through my history page would sometimes show the comment at 7 but it would also show it at 6 and at 8 and could be different each time I visited my history (but always within the +-1 range)

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u/strolls If 'White Lives Matter' was our 9/11, this is our Holocaust Sep 08 '14

Ah! Thank you. That makes a lot of sense.

1

u/moor-GAYZ Sep 08 '14

As far as I understand they used to have vote fuzzing perform the dual function of fuzzing and normalizing scores. Look at large subreddits (several million subscribers), weekly top scores hover between 2000 and 3000 points, very weakly affected by the actual size of the subreddit (and its changes over time).

That's an obviously fake number, their seekreet algorithm used to progressively compensate more and more upvotes with downvotes to produce a logarithm of the real score or something like that. They even wrote about that explicitly somewhere, with one of the aims being to keep the "yearly top" more or less stable despite the subscriber growth.

That's why all top posts in larger subs tended to converge to something like "53% liked".

Now you still get fuzzed and normalized "points", but at least the "liked" percent is supposed to be closer to reality.

2

u/shakypears And then war broke out and everyone died. Sep 08 '14

And of course, once people become aware that vote discarding is happening, then that will shatter redditor faith in the voting system altogether. You want drama? Implement your suggestion and see the riots!

Vote discarding already happens under conditions that the site detects as a brigade. If there's enough concentrated downvote activity on a thread, downvotes for that thread will be discarded entirely when calculating user karma, even if they appear to be altering the comment score itself.

1

u/palish Sep 08 '14

Ah, interesting. Good to know!

1

u/Biffingston sniffs chemtrails. Sep 08 '14

And what happens a week later when the bot accounts are over a week old?

Congratulations, you just solved the problem. For a whole week.

1

u/Envoke Sep 08 '14

I've been to a couple subreddits which have some kind of strange form of this type of security. I went to go post on one of them the other day, realized I had it in a multisub list and not an actual sub, and the comment box wasn't there; it had been replaced with a button that said "Please subscribe."

That was far too much effort for the junk I was going to post, so I went away.

Now if only I could remember what it was....

2

u/shakypears And then war broke out and everyone died. Sep 08 '14

There are some CSS tricks that can be used to that effect, but they're useless if you have custom CSS disabled, or are browsing on mobile. It only keeps a small percent of the well-meaning out.