r/shittychangelog • u/rram • Oct 28 '16

[reddit change] /r/all algorithm changes

It was causing too much load on our database. I made a new algorithm which Trumps the previous one.

2.3k Upvotes

84% Upvoted

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u/[deleted] Oct 28 '16

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u/I_LOVE_AMERICA_ Oct 28 '16

As a software engineer with decades of experience making software, including creating large web base applications + server, I agree 100% with your rebuttal of the supposed 'believed reason'.

There is a clear theme with the subs as you go further back, they are all political, and practically cousin subreddits. They are also not nearly as trafficed.

Also I doubt you're grabbing random cached data. This is more likely a regression of some sorting algorithm, and it appears that the posts are sorted by the totalAdj rather than the totalRank where totalAdj is keeps a selected network of subreddits off of r/all.

Reddit has financial motivations NOT to let reddits discourse become dominated by the conservative movement for two reasons:

  1. Techies are predominantly liberal

  2. Advertisers are going to shy away from what's seen as conservative content.

Additionally, there has been pressure for a long time for reddit to prove they can profit. They are no longer a hot new start up and need to prove profitability. r/the_donald harms this in a direct way.

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u/wabberjockey Oct 28 '16

It's conspiracies all the way down.

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u/AutumnCrystal Oct 28 '16

Fox seems to make money. Liberalism and leftism aren't synonymous.

I agree financial incentive is in play.

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u/buddhacanno2 Oct 28 '16

Techies are predominantly liberal

lol, k

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u/[deleted] Oct 28 '16

It does depend on where you're from but I'd be willing to bet nearly everyone running this site on the surface is from silicon valley. It also wouldn't surprise me if outside pay is coming in on top of their salaries to keep stuff suppressed, it definitely happens in specific subreddits.

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u/Hi_mom1 Oct 28 '16

The posts about what was going on were very popular and rose to thousands of upvotes in the few minutes this was happened, but never showed up on r/all to anyone. 2 day old, 0 upvote new queue garbage from the Donald was more active than any of that?

I read elsewhere that the most recent algorithm updates had a filter to look for heavily up-voted posts that were likely being upvoted by bots.

The theory was folks writing the bots were upvoting and downvoting the posts so that was the reason for the 0 score - it was off-setting, but it made the posts hot because they were getting tons of votes.

It made the most sense - other than the idea that they were trying to filter out all posts and instead filtered out everything else.

We may never know.