what does karma do? Votes determine what gets seen and what doesn’t. [...] Views determine what kind of content gets circulated, which determines who makes money. Views also determine what ideas people are exposed to and influenced by, which in turn determines how they will attempt to change the minds of others concerning those ideas. Karma is the currency of attention and influence.
Let me be clear: you cannot push dogshit to the top of reddit. [...] However, you can push kind-of-good-but-not-great stuff to the top of reddit. This happens all the time. There is a lot of money in it.
Redditors are often shocked at the dishonesty that goes on in the corporate world, but I think that’s because so many redditors work as programmers, which is comparatively way more honest than most professions. If you deal with people for a living, you’re usually dealing with bullshit, because most people are bullshit factories. [...] Wikipedia overwhelmingly considers articles from organizations “reliable” and articles from individuals “not reliable”—note that these are the same organizations where a PR person calls up a friend and contrives a story.
Vote nudging is perhaps the most common type of vote manipulation on reddit. [...] Vote nudging happens when someone arranges themselves or a few other people to give a link a boost of upvotes during its initial appearance on a subreddit, and then leave the link to grow organically. Vote nudging is extremely successful because the first five upvotes are the most influential portion of a link’s lifespan, because when a link has one vote you can kill 100% of its votes by downvoting it. [...] So, the vast majority of links will die in the first few upvotes. You might think of it as surviving infant mortality—once children don’t die from the vast majority of death-causing things, their life expectancy rockets forward. [...] Vote nudging is difficult to call manipulation because (a) it’s very easy to organize and (b) this is undoubtedly common practice at countless marketing firms that promote their content.
Reverse-nudging is more insidious and it’s when you vote negatively to all content blocking your link’s position to a higher page. So let’s say your link is 40th—you’d downvote the 10 submissions above 40 [...] This would probably rise you to the 35th spot
Here is something you need to understand about reddit: The number of people who don’t read the article and “skip to the comments” is immense, and people who do this register upvotes as some kind of truth rating (as opposed to “content we want you to see” rating). This viewpoint could not be more erroneous, but vote manipulation exploits people who think this way. [...] people don’t tend to read the whole discussion, so a completely crushing counterargument could be at +1 or +2 forever.
Asch conformity experiment. If conformity pressure can delude someone about the size of lines right in front of their face, they can be influenced by a number telling them that they’re disagreeing with 1000 people.
How many people are uninfluenced by votes? In other words, how many people think for themselves? There is no way to know for sure unless you have access to data a normal user does not, but I’d suspect it’s something like 20-30%.
Thanks, these are excellent highlight reels.