Does it strike someone as strange that Reddit comment rating system is antagonistic by definition?

Cyberpunkd

Cyberpunkd

Member
For those that do not know it's a simple Thumbs Up/Down system that allows you to rate each comment. The ones with negative votes are hidden, those with more positive votes pushed towards the top of the discussion.

Does anyone find this flawed by design? That means the comments that are promoted and visible to others are the ones that the majority agrees with, which kills any discourse not shared by said majority. It's the very definition of a Internet opinion bubble.
 
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Yes, it is as you say. Dissenting opinions are punished, majority opinions amplified, which results in self-reinforcing groupthink bubbles. Online communities are already susceptible to that so Reddit ends up being one of the worst offenders. Their super moderator system where a dozen or so people control thousands of subs also doesn't help.
 
Reddit is a cesspool and echo chamber. But I personally think Reddit is a monitoring system to get all the crazy and dangerous together in 1 place to monitor them. And I also fail to take anyone that uses Reddit serious
 
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It's annoying to read. I don't post there but Google results for answers to inquiries I have take me there on occasion. I search a bunch of automotive stuff and results show there. Then I have to unhide downvoted responses to understand what is being talked about and differing opinions.
 
It's one of the reasons I prefer a message board format like we have here. People can react to a post to show they agree with it but it doesn't make that post more prominent.
 
Kvally said:
It's annoying to read. I don't post there but Google results for answers to inquiries I have take me there on occasion.
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Exactly this, I was thinking of patching Thief: The Dark Projects to run on the Steam Deck, all the answers were directing me to Reddit (which turned out to be awesome, I even managed to get EAX sound working).
 
I mean that's how most of comment sections work nowadays on the internet, on Youtube, Dsqus, Quora, etc.

And this comment definitly didn't go unoticed despite the downvotes

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Cyberpunkd said:
For those that do not know it's a simple Thumbs Up/Down system that allows you to rate each comment. The ones with negative votes are hidden, those with more positive votes pushed towards the top of the discussion.

Does anyone find this flawed by design? That means the comments that are promoted and visible to others are the ones that the majority agrees with, which kills any discourse not shared by said majority. It's the very definition of a Internet opinion bubble.
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The system doesn't really work. Most of the time, the first 5-10 highly rated comments are just stupid jokes.
 
Signalis said:
Reddit is a cesspool and echo chamber. But I personally think Reddit is a monitoring system to get all the crazy and dangerous together in 1 place to monitor them. And I also fail to take anyone that uses Reddit serious
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This.

Reddit is a leftwing cesspool and echo chamber that wouldn't exist without porn and other degeneracy.

Most of the main subreddits are controlled by a handful of power users (Ghislaine Maxwell used to be one), and in general, the site is overrun by bots and astroturfed PR campaigns.

I suspect there are also certain subreddits that are used as honeypots by intelligence agencies (both US and foreign).
 
Poppinfresh said:
This.

Reddit is a leftwing cesspool and echo chamber that wouldn't exist without porn and other degeneracy.

Most of the main subreddits are controlled by a handful of power users (Ghislaine Maxwell used to be one), and in general, the site is overrun by bots and astroturfed PR campaigns.

I suspect there are also certain subreddits that are used as honeypots by intelligence agencies (both US and foreign).
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Lol there are subs literally for everything. How the fuck is it a leftwing cesspool, when i get notifications all the time from extreme right wing subs in my country, only because i engaged once or twice with them? There is everything to everyone, there are literally subs (And one of the most used ones) about europe for europeans and such and in each sub the answers or posts pertaining to the majority of that sub will be voted positively and rise or negatively and be hidden.
 
EviLore said:
Yes, it is as you say. Dissenting opinions are punished, majority opinions amplified, which results in self-reinforcing groupthink bubbles. Online communities are already susceptible to that so Reddit ends up being one of the worst offenders. Their super moderator system where a dozen or so people control thousands of subs also doesn't help.
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Well it could be worse like Slashdot. They use randomly selected moderators who pretty much do the same thing as reddit. (Even though the moderation guidelines literally say not to do that.) But what makes it worse is that if you get moderated down enough you get pre-moderated down. What this means is if you don't say the right things right away then you get silenced right at the beginning. I wonder how many people go on that site, get silenced off the bat and then just leave never to come back.)
 
Loope said:
Lol there are subs literally for everything. How the fuck is it a leftwing cesspool
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It's a leftwing cesspool because the entire site skews left. This is especially evident in larger subreddits where any sort of conservative or right-leaning comments will be downvoted to oblivion, while anything remotely left-leaning (especially related to Trump) will be highly upvoted.

Even subreddits that you'd expect to skew right, like /r/christianity and /r/conservative, have been tainted by leftist thought to a certain degree.

Another great example: /r/kotakuinaction, the "Gamergate" subreddit is so co-opted that you can't even mention anything remotely related to troons without your comment being almost instantly deleted.
 
Poppinfresh said:
It's a leftwing cesspool because the entire site skews left. This is especially evident in larger subreddits where any sort of conservative or right-leaning comments will be downvoted to oblivion, while anything remotely left-leaning (especially related to Trump) will be highly upvoted.

Even subreddits that you'd expect to skew right, like /r/christianity and /r/conservative, have been tainted by leftist thought to a certain degree.

Another great example: /r/kotakuinaction, the "Gamergate" subreddit is so co-opted that you can't even mention anything remotely related to troons without your comment being almost instantly deleted.
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Related to troons?
 
Cyberpunkd said:
For those that do not know it's a simple Thumbs Up/Down system that allows you to rate each comment. The ones with negative votes are hidden, those with more positive votes pushed towards the top of the discussion.

Does anyone find this flawed by design? That means the comments that are promoted and visible to others are the ones that the majority agrees with, which kills any discourse not shared by said majority. It's the very definition of a Internet opinion bubble.
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You are absolutely right except you did not seem to take into account that If the design was "getting the most engagement possible to make the most profit", then it is not flawed.
 
Cyberpunkd said:
For those that do not know it's a simple Thumbs Up/Down system that allows you to rate each comment. The ones with negative votes are hidden, those with more positive votes pushed towards the top of the discussion.

Does anyone find this flawed by design? That means the comments that are promoted and visible to others are the ones that the majority agrees with, which kills any discourse not shared by said majority. It's the very definition of a Internet opinion bubble.
Click to expand...

A flawed system run by these people:

 
Reddits sarcasm detector is broken, they take everything so seriously forget to add /s at the end of a sarcastic comment and expect to get dogpiled and downvoted.

Reddit like Resetera is a good containment site to stop the crazies infecting most of the other discussion places.
 
Reddit is overall a shithole. But on the topic of up/down votes it went even more downhill when they stopped showing the downvotes. You can have a comment on -1 and you're like "not a special post", but in reality it has 100.000 upvotes and 100.001 downvotes. I often sorted by "Controversial" when I was there to get any interesting takes.
 
That's not just Reddit, most social platforms work like that now. It's more about likes and visibility than real discussion. Some communities are still good for deeper talks, but they're rare.
 
Tying the user score (number of upvotes) to systems is also part of the corruption of that place.

I noticed a few times, enough to see a pattern, that if you posted content that was valid and interesting, then mods would remove/shadow the post, citing some bullshit reason, and then post it themselves to farm the karma.
That marked the beginning of the end for me, then when the API fiasco made it easy for me to stop browsing the site all together.

It was great in the early days post-Digg fuck up, the place was pretty libertarian and allowed all voices to do their thing, but then a few car crash subreddits pushed, power at the top changed and it became an echo chamber of left wing virtue signalling.
 
It makes sense once you understand it's not a discussion platform but a cultural engineering platform.

The intent is to shift the human users towards a desired set of beliefs. Successfully demonstrating you can parrot those desired beliefs is rewarded with 'upvotes' and higher visibility, while expressing a contrary belief is punished with 'downvotes' or -particularly if you pose a risk of swaying people away from the desired set of beliefs- a ban.

Many accounts -probably most imo- are not human users. These bot accounts exist to put the human users in an environment where it seems like 'everyone' thinks x, so they should think x as well. The need to 'fit in' is very strong, especially among young people, and can be easily abused.
 
I'm more surprised at how they are still up with the their squad of absolute pussy mods that take offence about fucking everything.
 
I want to think the original idea was conceived from good - albeit naïve - intent. However, over time, the feature has become a source/target of consensus misuse and manipulation. Especially, in the wake of bot activity campaigns and such equivalents to promote certain views and topics. I wouldn't call it "antagonistic", but, yeah, its a flawed system by default which should only be taken at surface value. Tread carefully if you ever scrape or accumulate data from places like Reddit for visualization.
 
calico said:
It makes sense once you understand it's not a discussion platform but a cultural engineering platform.

The intent is to shift the human users towards a desired set of beliefs. Successfully demonstrating you can parrot those desired beliefs is rewarded with 'upvotes' and higher visibility, while expressing a contrary belief is punished with 'downvotes' or -particularly if you pose a risk of swaying people away from the desired set of beliefs- a ban.

Many accounts -probably most imo- are not human users. These bot accounts exist to put the human users in an environment where it seems like 'everyone' thinks x, so they should think x as well. The need to 'fit in' is very strong, especially among young people, and can be easily abused.
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Hypereides said:
I want to think the original idea was conceived from good - albeit naïve - intent. However, over time, the feature has become a source/target of consensus misuse and manipulation. Especially, in the wake of bot activity campaigns and such equivalents to promote certain views and topics. I wouldn't call it "antagonistic", but, yeah, its a flawed system by default which should only be taken at surface value. Tread carefully if you ever scrape or accumulate data from places like Reddit for visualization.
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I mean you're both describing all social media in general. Like on Twitter how you « own » someone if your comment gets more likes than the initial tweet (called « ratioed » or something like that)

I mean come on
 
I don't know if you can sort the comments globally or do you have to do it separately everywhere, but I do like the negative votes system. A ton of platforms, youtube included, removed negative reactions and the big players (like the movie studios) are the ones profiting from it since you can't express your reaction without writing a comment or see how other people are reacting (on a larger scale).
 
Baemono said:
I mean you're both describing all social media in general. Like on Twitter how you « own » someone if your comment gets more likes than the initial tweet (called « ratioed » or something like that)

I mean come on
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Being ratioed in a Twitter discussion means that a large number of people disagree with the original tweet, but all replies are visible. But if people disagree with comments on Reddit, those people can make sure those comments are hidden from view. Posters with the "wrong" opinions can also get bad karma scores that will make it impossible to start a discussion or even post at all. That's a lot like a social credit score system. And then there's the phenomenon that Reddit moderators have the power to block people from joining their subforum if they've been know to post on the wrong subreddits.
 
xrnzaaas said:
I don't know if you can sort the comments globally or do you have to do it separately everywhere, but I do like the negative votes system. A ton of platforms, youtube included, removed negative reactions and the big players (like the movie studios) are the ones profiting from it since you can't express your reaction without writing a comment or see how other people are reacting (on a larger scale).
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YouTube should have video downvoting (and it remains highly useful via extension). Different use case—it's a great heuristic as a general red flag to investigate why the video is divisive, e.g., low quality content, false information, ideological nonsense.
 
kruis said:
Being ratioed in a Twitter discussion means that a large number of people disagree with the original tweet, but all replies are visible. But if people disagree with comments on Reddit, those people can make sure those comments are hidden from view. Posters with the "wrong" opinions can also get bad karma scores that will make it impossible to start a discussion or even post at all. That's a lot like a social credit score system. And then there's the phenomenon that Reddit moderators have the power to block people from joining their subforum if they've been know to post on the wrong subreddits.
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Awful, like a dystopian nightmare but it's real life
 
Cyberpunkd said:
That means the comments that are promoted and visible to others are the ones that the majority agrees with
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I think this is a large part of the problem, the up/down vote system is not "agree/disagree".
Upvotes are meant to be used for information that adds value to the discussion, downvotes are meant for the opposite of that.
Yet what you see is that people will just downvote you because they don't like you or what you said, or simply disagree.
This causes potentially great information to be buried because it doesn't align with the rest of the echo chamber, or is simply considered "wrongthink".
 
I agree that Reddit's format leads to majority rules discussion, which can be rather boring and misleading. I tend to use reddit as a troubleshooting resource as a result. Lord forbid you have a counter opinion, your shits getting buried.

To a certain extent, I feel a similar way about reactions on here. Of course your comment doesn't get hidden on Gaf, but reactions can subconsciously influence the way that people consider someone else's post. It does cut down on " This right here " posts, but I never felt like the juice was worth the squeeze. I imagine I'm in the minority regarding this.
 
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