https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/5iwl72/comment/dbc470b
created by [deleted] on 18/12/2016 at 14:10 UTC
1067 upvotes, 23 top-level comments (showing 23)
Comment by Autoxidation at 18/12/2016 at 15:33 UTC
182 upvotes, 3 direct replies
This is also the reason why memes tend to dominate subreddit content. I've seen it happen several times, especially as subreddits grow quickly. Too often, smaller, thoughtful subs are drowned out by an influx of subscribers unfamiliar with the subreddit culture.
I think the only way to effectively combat this is active moderation and enforcement of rule standards.
Comment by Bartek_Bialy at 18/12/2016 at 15:26 UTC
84 upvotes, 2 direct replies
It's called The Fluff Principle[1]. I've read about a solution that proposes to include discussion factor[2] in the algorithm:
Most of the observers have noted that voting tends to favor low-investment content: it's easier to upvote something simple, like an image macro or a pun thread, than it is to read and upvote a thoughtful piece of in-depth journalism or a long detailed comment
add a heavily-weighted fourth criterion which is: the length of the comment and its children. This would prioritize comments that are both detailed themselves and those that generate subsequent detailed conversation/responses. The aggregate length of an entire thread of one-liners might be outweighed by a different thread consisting of one or two long comments.
Comment by [deleted] at 18/12/2016 at 16:26 UTC*
41 upvotes, 1 direct replies
[deleted]
Comment by yodatsracist at 18/12/2016 at 19:16 UTC
49 upvotes, 3 direct replies
o shit waddup.
This kind of stuff is why I wish communities like /r/truereddit and /r/foodforthought were run more like /r/askhistorians. I wish there was more curation, at the very least a pruning of off-hand comments or comments that clearly had only read the headline, rather than pure algorithmic sorting (which is so dependent, as we all know, on not just how digestible the comment as /u/deggit points out but *when* it was posted). I wish at the very least that mods of those sort of discussion based communities had the power to sticky or otherwise distinguish particularly high quality comments.
But this whole discussion reminds me of one section of my favorite essays, callled "Solitude and Leadership[1]":
1: https://theamericanscholar.org/solitude-and-leadership/
I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise. And often even that idea doesn’t turn out to be very good. I need time to think about it, too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job done and move on to the next thing.
I used to have students who bragged to me about how fast they wrote their papers. I would tell them that the great German novelist Thomas Mann said that a writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. The best writers write much more slowly than everyone else, and the better they are, the slower they write. James Joyce wrote *Ulysses*, the greatest novel of the 20th century, at the rate of about a hundred words a day—half the length of the selection I read you earlier from *Heart of Darkness*—for seven years. T. S. Eliot, one of the greatest poets our country has ever produced, wrote about 150 pages of poetry over the course of his entire 25-year career. That’s half a page a month. So it is with any other form of thought. You do your best thinking by slowing down and concentrating.
I wish there were a way for Reddit to guide you more towards people slowing down and concentrating, people who add to the conversation, rather than first thoughts. Reddit is certainly better than most comment sections, but I feel like the large community gives it potential flexibility that the mods and engineers haven't yet found a way to fully take advantage of.
Comment by [deleted] at 18/12/2016 at 19:07 UTC
13 upvotes, 1 direct replies
That's a great way of explaining it.
The other glaring problem with reddit is that the upvote system inherently creates an echo chamber and causes users to associate a high number of upvotes with truth.
But people on reddit aren't the best equipped at determining what is actually the truth, especially because of how easily the overall score of a comment or post is influenced by early votes. You frequently see cases where someone who *sounds* like they know what they are talking about writes a really long post on a technical subject and is upvoted simply because what he is saying passes the smell test.
But just because something sounds nice at a first glance doesn't mean it actually holds up to scrutiny.
The echo chamber comes from the fact that reddit effectively censors comments that get a low score. You literally have to click a button just to see comment with a negative score, and the negative score isn't based on how well you actually understand a topic.
As a result, you have to remain very wary when reading reddit comments and blindly accepting "bumper sticker" ideologies, especially because of their potential to unwittingly impose fringe political views by disguising them as merely a scientific truth (see: 'statistics don't lie' as a favorite talking point of Stormfront members).
Comment by AbouBenAdhem at 18/12/2016 at 15:49 UTC
22 upvotes, 2 direct replies
The faster people can read something, the more likely they'll upvote it...
I don’t think that’s *necessarily* the case: you could upvote 25% of the short posts you read, and 75% of the long ones; but if it takes you ten times longer to read each long post, you’ll end up upvoting more short posts in spite of yourself.
Comment by sobri909 at 18/12/2016 at 18:19 UTC
9 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Chomsky on concision in the US media
The US media are alone in that you must meet the condition of concision. You gotta say things between two commercials. And that's a very important fact, because the "beauty" of concision - you know, saying a couple of sentences between two commercials - is that you can only repeat conventional thoughts.
Comment by Vainity at 18/12/2016 at 18:27 UTC
8 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Reddit seems like the place where the popular attention whoring kids get the top votes and the intellectual or controversial discussions take a back seat.
I mean, the whole system keeps track of how accepted and liked your opinion is.
To many, they might want to feel like they fit in so they say things that will give them easy karma and thus validates that they are liked.
If you aren't following the new trends then you get left behind.
Remember, it isn't always about discussing a topic, it isn't about being right or wrong, it's about communicating with someone and being liked.
And that's why Reddit is flawed. Because people value karma and popularity over cohesive discussion.
/u/Deggit explains how it happens, I'm explaining why it happens.
Comment by wraith313 at 18/12/2016 at 22:00 UTC*
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
deleted ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^0.5620 ^^^What ^^^is ^^^this?
Comment by tmewett at 18/12/2016 at 23:45 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
One way of combatting this that I like is Steam's review system. In the main body of the page it shows the top reviews, sorted roughly by some product of functions of "upvote" percentage and vote count. On the side, styled in an understated way, is a list of newer reviews with low vote counts.
I also like how they directly ask a question wrt voting: "was this review helpful to you?" I find, being asked, I vote with a higher frequency.
Comment by TYRito at 19/12/2016 at 05:08 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Interesting. I like seeing this here. For some reason, people get really defensive when one criticizes reddit. So it's good to see a post that actually takes a long hard look at the site.
If I were to add, I would say that I'm not a huge fan of upvoting and downvoting, at least for comments. It allows people to discredit and hide ideas without even taking the time to respond to them and prove them wrong(in the case of downvoting). Or to shove an idea(but more often a shitty pun) in someone's face, rather than just letting it stand on its own(in the case of upvoting). And what purpose does voting on comments serve? I don't know if there is an official justification for the system, but from what I've heard separately, is that the system is intended to remove spam, but we all know it removes a lot more than that. It's not a surprise that the places that I actually have had coherent and fair discussions on "classic" forums, youtube, 4chan, and other websites that don't have an upvoting/downvoting system. Not to say that coherent discussions aren't possible on reddit, it's just that the site tends to attract the type of people who would rather downboat your post than engage in a discussion with you.
Comment by doctortofu at 19/12/2016 at 06:52 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
The user does make some good points, and I believe they can be applied not just to reddit, but to real life too. Looking at most popular music, entertainment, hell, even politicians, you can see the same principles at work - short clips, talking points, brief flashes of easily digested information you can immediately recognize is what dominates all popularity contests - I think it's one reason twitter, rapid cuts on youtube, short news articles (who has time to read anything more than a headline?) and so on are so popular.
The question (to which I have no answer) is, can you make something both popular AND insightful/valuable? It's definitely difficult - I mean, I find myself skimming through long text (anything from a longer reddit post, to text in a game, to newspaper articles, to books) more and more recently, so maybe it is not possible after all - just like with training your muscles, you have to overcome your own resistance and making yourself better requires *some* amount of pain/discomfort...
The point is, though, I think it's not just reddit, it's not just the *hive*mind - seems to me it might be the mind in general.
Comment by McWaddle at 18/12/2016 at 19:53 UTC
1 upvotes, 1 direct replies
That user does the same as the ELI5 mod team: mistake post length for post quality.
Consider their example: "Starting?"
Why is that automatically a bad response? If the poster had gone through the GOP's history and cited examples of them not having "the moral high ground" since, oh, the Civil Rights era, would it have made the post arguably better? If I agree, do I need more information? If I disagree, do I need more?
If I don't know anything about the topic, then yes, I need more. But does a casual discussion forum require providing anything more than casual discussion?
How about this for a measure of quality: Does the short, glib comment begin a good discussion?
Or another: Is it accurate?
There are times when I want to write out lengthy opinions on a given subject, and there are times when I want to voice my opinion without writing several paragraphs. I claim both are perfectly acceptable, and in fact, usually prefer brevity.
Comment by jokoon at 18/12/2016 at 16:35 UTC
2 upvotes, 3 direct replies
Maybe force comments to have a minimum length, or give longer comment an upvote bonus factor (each upvote counts as 100% + the length of the comment divided by ten).
What I would like to see is a "slower" reddit, meaning more thorough, long comment sections that drag for longer. The content on reddit tends to refresh way too fast. Maybe there could be a fast and a slow reddit.
Comment by KimonoThief at 18/12/2016 at 19:57 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
A long comment isn't necessarily an especially insightful comment. Deggit makes some good points:
But quite honestly the rest of his comment is essentially repeating this over and over with **bold** *italic* words and LOTS of CAPITALIZATION and fucking expletives, and 99% of his comment contained made-up statistics and potshot psychology theories.
Concision and tone go a long way.
Comment by [deleted] at 18/12/2016 at 17:43 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
This is the system working as designed if not as intended. The larger the subreddit, the more people who will only care to read top and short comments, the more banal, short comments to fulfil that demand, the more pressure on quality, "late" content to smaller subredits with less noise and a higher proportion of people seeking and validating quality, thoughtful content. This has been the dynamic in every socially or popularly edited forum for public discourse since the dawn of time. Banal speech drives out good.
Comment by otakuman at 18/12/2016 at 21:46 UTC
1 upvotes, 2 direct replies
This comment thread[1] adds an interesting thought:
Other sites have already tackled this problem, but unfortunately the solutions are "stop it being so easy to comment", and "everyones upvote is no longer equal". See stackoverflow or slashdot for examples.
What if karma were compartmentalized by subreddit? Votes from people with higher reputation could carry more weight.
Comment by Katamariguy at 18/12/2016 at 22:35 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I do believe that sorting comments by "new" for a given period of time (first 6-12 hours?) would create an improvement. If anything, it would help to spread out the relative attention given to comments.
Comment by informat2 at 19/12/2016 at 02:52 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
So if, let's just take a hypothetical that never ever happens on Reddit, let's say that there's an article with a misleading headline and the top 10 upvoted comments are replies from people that clearly never read the article but are good at circlejerking.... now there is literally no real estate to discuss the content of the article, even though the article succeeded at being upvoted to the top of the subreddit.
Usually the few kinds of comments a that can rise up a few hours after the post gets submitted is ones call out the post for being wrong.
Comment by Zopo at 19/12/2016 at 04:38 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I always have to hide the first comment in a thread because it always has 400 child comments trying to piggy back off of it.
Comment by Traveledfarwestward at 19/12/2016 at 07:29 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Sort by best? Doesn't that help this issue?
Comment by [deleted] at 18/12/2016 at 16:55 UTC
0 upvotes, 0 direct replies
This sort of thing happens in real life all the time in discussions. There was one kid I had a class with, Ian. He was great at coming up with quick one lined answers or comments that made him some knowledgeable. He would spurt out something along the lines of "If the republicans are so worried about spending they would defund our military! " Now, on the surface that makes sense. But what are you going to defund? There was a very good comment that got posted here once upon a time explaining that it's much harder than just cutting spending because of the importance of what the military is sending on which, I admit, I took some cliffnotes from and used against him. He gave some answer like "well it doesn't matter because we have the strongest military in the world anyway! " and the teacher shut the discussion down. But this kid did exactly the same thing that happens here. Take a witty comment (many times he ripped it straight from John Oliver), apply it, and sans a challenge you come off looking real smart.
Comment by Submitten at 18/12/2016 at 18:49 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
A lot of users see upvotes as a reward rather than something to sort useful content.
Someone will make a reference, be it a meme, song lyric, movie quote or political quip and suddenly lots of people give it an upvote to tell themselves that "yep, I get your comment, other people might not understand it but I do so here's an upvote fellow intellectual".
And from there's it's a circle of meta, memes and predictability.