Reddit points, or why there are no posts with like 200,000, 500,000, or more upvotes

iammolotov · 3 months

Can I add a corollary question to this: is the system designed to bring down exceptionally highly-rated posts after some time, or does this happen naturally (IE people changing their votes from upvotes to either downvotes or neutral)? For example, when Steve Jobs died, the highest rated post reporting that had at one point that I saw, 7000ish points, and I don't even know if that was the peak. Now it has about 3200. Is that from people getting tired of seeing it and downvoting it to get rid of it, or an auto balancing system?

executex · 3 months

I think the vote fuzzing algorithm they have makes things hard to tell if they are truly popular or just a bit more popular than the other posts.

Even the worst submissions that make it to the front page can garner 1000+ upvotes net. Yet some spectacular posts may only get like 2000+ net upvotes.

Why doesn't the algorithm just record every upvote and display it (then fuzz it after)? There should be posts that are like 200K upvotes, 250k upvotes on the front page, versus a 10k upvote post.

It makes the site seem very small and unpopular. If they were accurate, journalists could write news articles about some story developed on reddit, (like the orphanage guy who was given thousands of dollars by redditors), they could have said "400,000 redditors voted on the issue!" But instead they see 3000 net upvotes, and the journalist will think "yeah I'm not going to mention that it got 3000 votes, that is insignificant..."

How can a politician judge whether SOPA/PIPA is an important issue, if his interns only see 2000 upvotes on an important issue?

OrangerineMan · 3 months

Along the same line, the actual number of up/downvotes gets fudged a little bit on purpose; I believe the actual score is accurate however the number of up and down votes may not be.

HJAC · 3 months

Because of the 1% rule

Simply put, only 1% of the community creates content, 9% modifies or edits, and the rest just lurk (hence the term "Reddit Lurkers"). This is compounded by

You don't need to upvote to view content
You need to take an extra step to upvote (creating an account/logging in)
People are just lazy

IAmACollegekid · 3 months

I upvoted this thread as an experiment.

theCHENRY · 3 months

a tiny fraction of the people who use reddit actually bother to vote.

and an even smaller portion of them comment.

Which is why its entirely possible to see content near the top, with a bunch of upvotes, and yet the comments are entirely negative.

silenti · 3 months

I'm usually too lazy to upvote anything unless it is exceptional. I would make sense that most of reddit acts this way as well.

bitchesloveplazas · 3 months

Follow up question, how do posts rise to the top? I mean, no ones really goin to "new" and upvoting shit there do they?

boatplane · 3 months

Reddit does not want to create another "1%" out of karma whoring. That's why.

Adam-O · 3 months

Challenge Accepted. Have an upvote.

bearzooka · 3 months

It would be interesting if users could view the number of times a post has been 'viewed' as well as upvoted

fuckingcaptcha · 3 months

A lot of people don't vote on everything they view (i.e. me), and also things get downvoted a lot. For every post with like 1000 upvotes, you'll find that it probably got like 8000 upvotes and 7000 downvotes, which is 15,000 people viewing and voting. So then you have maybe another 15K who saw it and didn't vote, and then another 15K lurkers who saw it and can't vote due to not having an account.

There's probably many, many dead accounts out there too that have never or rarely been used, which can often give a website the impression of being much larger than it is, so I'd guess reddit has a good thousand or so of those if you subtract the number of lurkers who never made accounts.

So now on one post you have 45K viewers, plus the thousands who never even saw the post due to not being subscribed to that subreddit, plus the thousands of lurkers who saw it and didn't vote, plus the thousands of dead accounts out there that give the image of having many where there are few, and the result is probably up there in at least 100K, if not more.

Voila.

sobu · 3 months

Because the upvotes are spread over the reposts.

ayb · 3 months

On a similar note, can we get a negative 500,000 downvote?

FartingBob · 3 months

I was recently wondering this. Clearly the algorithm of how many votes a link shows has changed over time. All the highest upvoted posts were a while ago generally, even though reddit has far more viewers and active accounts now than it did a year or 2 ago. On my front page (plenty of default subs, and other big and small subreddits) there is always loads of posts with 1000 points, but 10 or less that have 2000+ each day. 3000+ points is very rare, maybe 1 or 2 a day (if any) on my front page.

Maybe a better way of doing it to encourage more user participation and avoid a small number of people being responsible for pushing a post to the top of the front page (such as what happened to digg, for different reasons) would be to let people vote without signing in. Maybe give these votes 10% of the voting power of registered voters, and limit how many stories can be upvoted each day per IP address for lurkers.

This would encourage people to get more involved, even if its just clicking an up arrow, and once they've made that small step, maybe they would like to create an account and shower us with their lovely meme knowledge. And of course, if the new redditor is female they should be given as much oppertunity to post on /r/gonewild as possible.

heretoplay · 3 months

You have to actively vote. I vote on 1 out of 25 submissions I see. Not on purpose I just don't think to do it unless I feel it needs more points or less. I go through my saved section only to find 25% of them are upvoted. I feel bad but if I have seen it, it means it was already on the front page needing no more upvotes for more views.

Upvotes on a front page submission are pointless. You upvote so that the submission gets seen by others by getting to the front page. You downvote when the submission offers nothing to a redditor either in discussion or entertainment. The place where votes matter most are in the new section.

bobyd · 3 months

I'm feeling a sense of déjà vu... again.

emospartan911 · 3 months

i am the 1%

nemodot · 3 months

Called me a lurker??? UPVOTE

seiyonoryuu · 3 months

i get the feeling here that karma is even more pointless than we thought. :/ i mean, voting does almost nothing, right? if the votes are changed by the algorithm and dont get registered/ dissapear... fairly stupid system. i suppose upvotes just help to get you post seen by more people?

oddly, my karma has gone up quite a bit, but it doesnt match the actual total of votes when i look at my submissions O.O makes no sense

[deleted] · 3 months

[deleted]

Erpp8 · 3 months

I'm sorry I don't have the source, but reddit automatically downvotes posts so that they eventually fade away from the front page. If it was what it truly seems like it is, there would quickly be a post with 10,000 some upvotes on the front page, and it wouldn't move from there quickly because it would be the first thing people saw, and likely paid the most attention to you. Once again, sorry I read the source a few months ago and can't track down the source. But basically, it's to hide old stuff and show new stuff.

noxbl · 3 months

I've read all the posts in this thread and one thing was omitted: People stop voting on older posts. There's a surge of posts the time it is active, mostly a few hours, and then it dies away and the votes stop coming. The highest rated posts are here: http://www.reddit.com/r/all/top/?sort=top&t=all and the top post with fuzzing has 21k ups and 4k down, but if everyone upvoted for a long time it could get into the 200k's, it just doesn't because the post is rarely visited compared to the new ones.

bobmillahhh · 3 months

I know this is buried and won't get answered... but does that 1% include simple posts like this one? Does it include linking your favorite song or a stupid repost of a funny picture?

rockrolla · 3 months

Hmmmph. I'm still confused. Thanks, reddit(ors).

popcorncolonel · 3 months

/r/TheoryOfReddit would be a good place for you :)

rZvFTW · 3 months

Answer : too much lurkers

geokes · 3 months

The point of upvoting is to let others see the comment or link, if something's already on the front page there's no need to upvote. And laziness.

TheDudePenguin · 3 months

I think it mainly comes down to laziness and there is no reward for upvoting. Being upvoted is nice, but why would I care if I do or don't upvote? The voting system should reward us somehow, just so that maybe we will see some more active members.

DoesNotTalkMuch · 3 months

Reddit has hundreds of thousands of viewers every day, but fewer than one in a hundred people actually sign in.

On top of that, the antispam features of reddit change how things look on the front page. People who study trends believe that the votes are slowed down after a certain point. It's impossible to tell for sure though, because the anti spam features are kept secret.

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