• azertyfun@sh.itjust.works
    87·
    3 days ago

    I was there Gandalf…

    Before that date their algorithm was soft-locked to around 5k upvotes. If a post was extremely, massively popular it would climb to maybe a bit over 10k but that was insane. There was clearly a logarithmic scaling effect that kicked in after a few thousand upvotes. Not entirely sure why, perhaps to prevent the super-popular stuff from ballooning in some kind of horrible feedback loop.

    The change was to uncap the vote counts. One day posts just kept climbing well beyond the 5k mark. Now what they also did was recalculate old posts in order not to fuck up the /top rankings. Kinda. Took a while and I’m not sure they got to every post.

    I don’t know or care if reddit does vote manipulation, but this ain’t proof and I don’t see how it is unbelievable that a website with tens of millions MOA would occasionally have a post with 100k+ upvotes.

    • ABCDE@lemmy.world
      1·
      3 days ago

      don’t know or care if reddit does vote manipulation

      It does, showing random vote numbers on posts when you refresh.

    • laverabe@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      22·
      3 days ago

      I figured most people here knew about it, but also just as many probably forgot about it, at least deep in the memory banks. ;)

      • pwnicholson@lemmy.world
        5·
        3 days ago

        Your explanation says that a post with 100k actually has 20k. What this guy is saying is that it does actually have 100k.

        • laverabe@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          21·
          3 days ago

          It’s impossible really to say. This was their official code citation:

          Over the past few months, we have carefully recomputed historical votes on posts and comments to remove outdated, unnecessary rules.

          I mean on the face of it, maybe they were telling the truth?

          But they are a for profit corporation, and that year forward was when the enshittification really began. I guess I just have little reason to believe that they didn’t just alter the algorithm to make it look like there was more engagement than there was.

  • mommykink@lemmy.worldEnglish
    81·
    3 days ago

    Yeah I remember seeing a post in January 2017, I think it was a picture of Obama, that had something like 80k upvotes when I’d never seen anything on Reddit to get even half that before

  • mesamune@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    3 days ago

    Yep I remember. Its an estimate…kinda. there were many reasons given but at the time it felt bad. Like they were trying to hide the counts…which I still think they do.