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.
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.