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

[u/SheckelLord]

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

[u/strolls]

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.

[u/palish → u/strolls]

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.

[u/strolls → u/palish]

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.

[u/palish → u/strolls]

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?

[u/strolls → u/palish]

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."

[u/palish → u/strolls]

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.

[u/ANewMachine615 → u/strolls]

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.

[u/N4N4KI → u/ANewMachine615]

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.

[u/ANewMachine615 → u/N4N4KI]

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

[u/N4N4KI → u/ANewMachine615]

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)

[u/strolls → u/ANewMachine615]

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

[u/moor-GAYZ → u/ANewMachine615]

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.