I have been on reddit for just about 12 years now. Something I’ve noticed over time is just how hateful the place has become. A complete outrage machine. Every single sub became filled with it. I’ve filtered so many subreddits over the last few years, it’s insane. I don’t know enough about this place to be sure, but I do hope it doesn’t become the same type of echo chamber of anger.
Their algorithm is designed to stoke hatred and conflict, so they get more user retention.
Which is probably the main reason they closed their source code.
While this is true with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube I think reddit algorithm wasn’t designed that way.
The three sites I mentioned don’t have option to downvote (well, YouTube removed it recently) this is purposefully done so anything that is controversial will drive engagement. People like to show disapproval, since there’s no downvote in case of Facebook they will likely use the laughing emoticon or write a nasty comment, in case of Twitter or YouTube they will do the same. There is activity, those posts will be promoted and engaging even more people.
In reddit you could downvote a comment or even report it to moderators. The comment it will make it go to the end of the list and even collapse it. If moderator gets involved the comment will be even removed and a nasty user possibly banned.
This actually moderates the community. I noticed that on reddit the most hateful communities actually need moderators to tip the scales in the other direction.
This is why I’m not fully convinced that beehaw.org and tildes.net made a good choice blocking downvotes, as this requires more work from the moderators and prevents community to moderate itself. Though at least tildes.net has labels, which maybe do this function.
Since they “fuzzed” their upvote and downvote algorithms, there’s no way to prove reddit upvotes and downvotes are accurate at all. They can easily artificially say “this post has 10000 upvotes” in their backend, and we would never know if they did that.
I suspect reddit actually just fakes votes on some posts.
That’s a good point. I was assuming there was no tampering with it.
There’s been evidence over the years that they manipulate the rise/fall and weighting of votes to manipulate the r/all and r/popular front pages manually at times. Unfortunately a lot of this “evidencd” was statisical analysis by the_donald which significantly calls into question the veracity. Not specifically because they were right wing, but because they had vested interest in appearing as victims of unfair admins on the site to further their tribalism.