• azertyfun@sh.itjust.works
    135·
    22 days ago

    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 /top rankings. 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.

    • Wistful@discuss.tchncs.de
      43·
      22 days ago

      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.

      • laverabe@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
        64·
        22 days ago

        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.

    • Flatfire@lemmy.ca
      4·
      22 days ago

      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.

    • ABCDE@lemmy.world
      3·
      22 days ago

      don’t know or care if reddit does vote manipulation

      It does, showing random vote numbers on posts when you refresh.

    • laverabe@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      53·
      22 days ago

      I figured most people here knew about it, but also just as many probably forgot about it, at least deep in the memory banks. ;)

      • pwnicholson@lemmy.world
        7·
        22 days ago

        Your explanation says that a post with 100k actually has 20k. What this guy is saying is that it does actually have 100k.

        • laverabe@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          41·
          22 days ago

          It’s impossible really to say. This was their official code citation:

          Over the past few months, we have carefully recomputed historical votes on posts and comments to remove outdated, unnecessary rules.

          I mean on the face of it, maybe they were telling the truth?

          But they are a for profit corporation, and that year forward was when the enshittification really began. I guess I just have little reason to believe that they didn’t just alter the algorithm to make it look like there was more engagement than there was.