Creating communities automatically web2.0 style
rzwitserloot posted in tech on May 14th, 2006
Wherein I bash a decision made by my current (but soon to be ex-?) favourite news aggregator, reddit, continue on for an encore about how any such popularity contest-based stuff is doomed from the beginning, and then offer a workable solution for all to enjoy.
reddit has changed their news rating system to become basically a cheap knockoff of the much lamented digg. Downvotes no longer matter for an item’s positioning on the hot-list, which is the list almost all reddit users look at. The current implementation is far worse - at least a blatant lie on digg will eventually cause a warning to be shown suggesting that a lot of people are of the opinion that the article in question is a bag of bovine excrement.
A popularity contest where downvotes don’t matter automatically means that controversial articles, along with articles that appeal to mindless evangelisers, automatically wins. Truth factor has absolutely no relevance and will probably get in the way of up votes.
I could wax rhapsodic about how, let’s say, Google(50 up votes from the google-tards) is investing in lets say debian (50 up votes from the linux-tards) with a funny byline (50 up votes from the trigger happies).
That would probably hit front-page even if the first comment on the article explicitly mentions that it’s all a made up story.
This isn’t how social networks are ever going to work right.
The second problem with popularity contests, exacerbated by not counting downvotes, is the visibility issue. In practice, provided the material has a very modest amount of shock and awe value, the first 10 votes are decisive. 10 votes is a very low number. A very easy to rig number. If any article, on digg or reddit, gets 10 votes within 10 minutes, it’ll zoom up to the top of reddit’s hot links, and of digg’s diggspy. This automatically results in a lot more eyeballs on the article, and as eyeballs translate directly to upvotes (and downvotes, but those are ignored), this status quo will now no longer change. Without those early 10, you’re crowded out and your interesting submission never gets a shot. I actually noticed this before: I submitted an article. Goes down in flames. A week later someone else submits the exact same thing. Over 200 ups for the second submission, only 15 for mine, 12 of which arrived after I left a comment linking to the original submission in the new one. popular, and not so popular. This is the rule, and not the exception.
I’ve written about this in more general terms before.
At least with reddit, a controversial or flat out wrong article had a chance to quickly drop back down and into oblivion when some rational souls identified it for what it was and gave it the deserved downvote sendoff.
Yet, down votes, as reddit used to factor in, have their own share of problems.
The Solution
On to a workable solution then: Automatically generated communities. First some theory: There’s a fine line to walk when creating a community for the purposes of sharing news. On one hand, you don’t want a completely random sampling from world internet using population, because the only articles that come though then are utterly shallow and/or sensational. On the other hand, tightening the requirements too far results in Groupthink, where everyone basically vehemently agrees with each other till the cows come home. You don’t learn anything new.
I think there’s a middle ground. For example, a friend of mine I knew from my days in America eventually revealed he was a bush supporter. I’m known to be a bit too liberal to normally agree with republicans at this point in time, but because I’ve valued his advice before I at least give his arguments an honest ear. I still rejected them, but the point is: I was far more open to his arguments than I would have been had it been a random article. I am not confronted with a gazillion idiotic items, but I do get a limited amount of new input over time. Enough to process it properly, not enough to swarm my ability to look at conflicting views.
Unfortunately, it’s difficult to create such a group. Leaving it up to people by themselves can work but may lead to groupthink. In fact, any predesigned group is automatically forced into groupthink for at least some issues UNLESS the membership is constantly changing, because a limited group of people will always 100% agree on one issue or another. Hence, forcing people to create their own group is difficult and time consuming.
Hence, it should be automated. How about this: When I’m logged into reddit, each item’s score is determined solely by people who vote the same way I do at least 75% of the time. Only those people who have voted on at least 20 articles I also voted on apply.
Any other votes are simply ignored for me. This should find its way back to the item’s ‘ups’, it’s ‘points’, and its placement in the reddit hotlist - everywhere, in other words.
That also takes care of reddit’s so far fairly shallow promise of filtering to your preferences.
May 14th, 2006 at 22:30
rzwitserloot,
You are wrong about what floats to the top.
What will float to the top is the NEUTRAL articles that everyone agrees on assuming the demographic is 50-50. With evenly balanced demographics the only thing that will get ups from both sides, are puppy-cat videos and humor, call this Farq content. Take a look at what is in the top 20. Don’t see too many partisan stories at the moment.
If the demographics are not balanced then partisan articles will float as high only to the degree their base population outweighs the opposing population. The only way that partisan articles get to the top of the list with up only votes is if the population is skewed dramatically to one demographic base, and that the average interest of the larger demographic out weighs the combined average interest in what would be neutral content.
The theory of rigging is mental masturbation. Yes there is an event horizon early on in the process that necessarily moves new articles to hot with very few votes, but this isn’t really what people who have been complaining on Reddit are upset about. You see if the articles making this jump were non-political then they would actually be thankful for this and assume the system worked correctly. But really its not that the political
articles persay upset these most recent whiners, its that political content of the articles they don’t agree with that really has their panties in a bunch. They wouldn’t care so much if 99% of Reddit wanted to read those stories, its that its a affront to them personal to have to even see the titles.
Ironically this reflects the state of the nation in which extremely partisan media conglomerates have isolated their consumers form reality and trained them to become upset when confronted with non-approved messages.
In fact based on the analysis of how up only voting actually works we can see the real culprit here, that large percentages of Reddit users actually want to read and share very partisan articles, and a minority of readers who are not used to dealing with being confronted with political realities that they disagree with are crying like babies. Mommy Mommy make the bad men go away!! This is actually a good thing for Reddit because it is reflecting the actual national trends in which some 60+% of the country is absolutely upset with the direction the country is going and some 30-% are in denial.
Now how to deal with these whiners. Content filtering. If you really can’t deal with bad news, or you really don’t want to you should be able to turn it off. Therefore a richer voting system needs to be created, so that people can categorize the reasons for why they vote yes or no, as well as their sensativity toward things they don’t like or agree with so that meaningful filtering can take place for the disaffected. Which of course can be worked out in civil discussion Here in the features subreddit
But odds are you won’t do this because the reasons for your problem are political and not technical.
May 14th, 2006 at 22:49
Parhaps you want the Recommended tab instead of the Hot tab?
Do you thini that the Recommended tab should be the default for logged in users going to reddit.com?
May 15th, 2006 at 0:52
I was banned from Reddit by moderators who took the simple rules of Reddit - “Reddiquette” - lied about the meanings of certain rules and regurgitated these lies to an unsuspecting visitorship.
These moderators (and some others who, by their posts, were obviously opposed to my politics) went so far as to overtly harass me (”I hope the authorities come and take your computer, and with any luck, your house,” was one quote) and then traverse into my collection of previous posts and continue to “downmod” them for days after their initial posting. A racial epithet was even thrown my way by a moderator. Nearly all comments in my posts degenerated into flame wars (and yes, I do have saved screen shots of these comments). Since, I have found that I’m not alone in this type of treatment. There are many people who have suffered the same fate at the hands of a few “Redditers.”
There is small coterie of people who actually believe the site is theirs and theirs alone. They have reshaped Reddit into their own vision and run it, content-wise, into the ground.
The person, or group of people who create a Reddit-type of community and follow the basic premise that the message is what is important rather than the messenger, and that the message is all that can be commented on, will be a worthy, and infinitely more popular successor to Reddit.
May 15th, 2006 at 2:25
Regarding Patience’s post (#2): This discussion is currently taking place at reddit: http://reddit.com/info/5xpt/comments
Regarding Kevin Olney: The problem with such outrageous statements is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I feel for your dilemma that it’s somewhat difficult to prove such a thing, but there it is.
As far as your final paragraph - that’s just flat out wrong. You can create a community, but unless you want to implement very tough limits on new users, eventually your success will be your downfall. I must also submit that I haven’t really seen any serious amount of personal jabs on reddit. It hardly seems to be the reason that reddit is currently not really showing the kind of news I want to see - nor was it the reason for this ranting.
Note for example that your complaint about folks downmodding you days after posting: That doesn’t matter one iota. Either way no one will look at it, OR, if they find it, they probably won’t care too much about the score by that time. (ie, after a search).
@Douglas: That’s a start, but first the recommendation page needs to work properly. My suggests are one possibly way which might result in a working recommendation system.
May 15th, 2006 at 4:43
Email me a private email address, I’d be happy to attach and send the comments from Reddit in their original form.
Implenting tough limits on users is really not the answer. However, if the present limits of Rediquette were followed, there would be fewer problems with voting and comments on the site.
This coterie of people I mentioned - and their followers - do in fact drive articles up or down. Sure, up votes only renders Reddit absolutely useless, but down votes without reading an article is equally useless. This type of activity leads implied restrictions on what type of articles can be posted, as well as who can post articles dealing with certain topics.
May 15th, 2006 at 5:00
Fine post, thoughtful and (in my opinion) quite accurate in its assessment of what’s wrong with ‘popularity contests’ in terms of ranking newsworthy items. Reddit and Digg are great fun (and often helpful), but have built-in limits, and I’m hearing a lot of people expressing concerns similar to yours.
If popularity were all, prom kings and queens would go on to become Presidents and titans of industry and culture. But that isn’t the way the world works.
It is, however, more or less the way Google and most search engines work. While it’s difficult to see how Google could do what they do any other way (although they certainly are trying), this does suggest that there’s a lot of information buried within the ‘net that would outshine the results on most search engine’s front pages, if only there were better ways to discover quality and relevance. There’s a new search engine out there, somewhere, that will change the way we find news and search results. The tools we have now will be seen as a crude beginning (as those of us know who remember how early Alta Vista and other search engines couldn’t find their ways through a fraction of today’s ‘net).
May 15th, 2006 at 5:36
Google actually gets a more or less decent result out of rating one person’s vote higher than the next - a link to a page from a highly respected (read: google ranked) page helps your own page rank a lot, too.
They’re sort of making it work that way even with the entire internetting world ‘voting’, as it were.
Image what would happen if those votes turned personal.
May 15th, 2006 at 13:09
Everyone seems to have an opinion about how would fix the problems with Reddit. The truth is, whatever voting/recommendation system they implement, it’s going to generate positive feedback (more votes->hot->more votes) and hence unpredictable emergent behaviour.
Basically, it’s a difficult problem. From my personal experience, I tend to upvote things a lot more than I downvote them. So just because someone upvoted 20 things that I also upvoted, doesn’t necessarily mean that I agree with them.
May 15th, 2006 at 13:19
You know what I don’t understand is how is reddit and digg not like a FFA site. I could digg twenty stories a day and include a link to my site in the middle and garner some traffic. And if all of my diggs were of similiar topic no one would be none the wiser. I used digg briefly however forevergeek.com pointed out how the site is not so democratic and is geared to the owner of the site and his buddies.