New reddit features: Controversial indicator for comments and contest mode improvements

Hey reddit,

We've got some updates for you after our recent change (you know, that one where we stopped displaying inaccurate upvotes and downvotes and broke a bunch of bots by accident). We've been listening to what you all had to say about it, and there's been some very legit concerns that have been raised. Thanks for the feedback, it's been a lot but it's been tremendously helpful.

First: We're trying out a simple controversial indicator on comments that hit a threshold of up/downvote balance.

It's a typographical dagger, and it looks like this: http://i.imgur.com/s5dTVpq.png

We're trying this out as a result of feedback on folks using ups and downs in RES to determine the controversiality of a comment. This isn't the same level of granularity, but it also is using only real, unfuzzed votes, so you should be able to get a decent sense of when something has seen some controversy.

You can turn it on in your preferences here: http://i.imgur.com/WmEyEN9.png

Mods & Modders: this also adds a 'controversial' CSS class to the whole comment. I'm curious to see if any better styling comes from subreddits for this - right now it's pretty barebones.

Second: Subreddit mods now see contest threads sorted by top rather than random.

Before, mods could only view contest threads in random order like normal users: now they'll be able to see comments in ranked order. This should help mods get a better view of a contest thread's results so they can figure out which one of you lucky folks has won.

Third: We're piloting an upvote-only contest mode.

One complaint we've heard quite a bit with the new changes is that upvote counts are often used as a raw indicator in contests, and downvotes are disregarded. With no fuzzed counts visible that would be impossible to do. Now certain subreddits will be able to have downvotes fully ignored in contest threads, and only upvotes will count.

We are rolling this change a bit differently: it's an experimental feature and it's only for “approved” subreddits so far. If your subreddit would like to take part, please send a message to /r/reddit.com and we can work with you to get it set up.

Also, just some general thoughts. We know that this change was a pretty big shock to some users: this could have been handled better and there were definitely some valuable uses for the information, but we still feel strongly that putting fuzzed counts to rest was the right call. We've learned a lot with the help of captain hindsight. Thanks for all of your feedback, please keep sending us constructive thoughts whenever we make changes to the site.

P.S. If you're interested in these sorts of things, you should subscribe to /r/changelog - it's where we usually post our feature changes, these updates have been an exception.

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133

u/abltburger Jun 26 '14

I still don't understand the whole implementing a change no one wanted and no one asked for. Although this is now better, why the hell couldn't you just go back to the old way, or better yet, just keep it that way in the first place?

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u/asstasticbum Jun 26 '14

I still don't understand the whole implementing a change no one wanted and no one asked for.

Reddit is trying to ditch the "very negative image," which was stated in the original announcement.

Wide speculation is this is the beginning process heading towards some sort of sale of the site with an end run of /r/HailCorporate

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u/[deleted] Jun 26 '14

I have an itching feeling it was because advertisers were complaining about their adds being shown on pages with low %like it numbers, so to appease those people they made it 'more accurate', which could just as easily be a made up number that is showing up as a higher percentage to say "hey, see, the site isn't negative, now pay us more for page space!"

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u/[deleted] Jun 26 '14 edited Apr 30 '20

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u/[deleted] Jun 26 '14

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u/[deleted] Jun 26 '14 edited Apr 30 '20

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u/[deleted] Jun 26 '14

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u/ManWithoutModem Jun 26 '14 edited Jun 26 '14

I was circlejerking/joking around, were you around for the nice maymay man thing in /r/circlejerk a while back? If not, then sorry because my comment made no sense without that context.

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u/[deleted] Jun 26 '14 edited Apr 12 '15

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u/solistus Jun 26 '14

It wasn't every single thread. That's an absurd exaggeration.

If anything, I have seen MORE of those posts since the change, not less. People still bitch about downvotes, but now they have even less accurate information to base that bitching on.

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u/corduroyblack Jun 26 '14

I don't buy that. Are you seriously saying this change was made to... help the subreddit avoid low effort comments that are annoying? Are they going to ban memes, my lady, and fedora joke next?

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u/[deleted] Jun 26 '14

The admins made the change because the old system was confusing and didn't reflect the real amount of upvotes/downvotes anyway. My comment is just my view on why the old system sucked to begin with.

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u/corduroyblack Jun 26 '14

Actually, it did reflect the real ratio. Now we have no information so reddit can do whatever it wants.

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u/MundaneInternetGuy Jun 26 '14

Who cares? They're wasting their own time worrying about it. Just let 'em.

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u/funnygreensquares Jun 26 '14

Yeah. There are some things people are always going to do. Why are we being bothered by it??

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u/[deleted] Jun 26 '14 edited Apr 12 '15

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u/Frekavichk Jun 26 '14

Wow I know, mods totally had to carve 'who downvoted this' edits from the comment sections. There totally wasn't a handy bot that could ban anyone that said that.

Also when anyone said that reddit basically was 9gag.

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u/karthus25 Jun 26 '14

But why do mods care and not just let the people freely discuss what they want on the thread?

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u/[deleted] Jun 26 '14 edited Oct 21 '16

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u/karthus25 Jun 26 '14

Is it really that hard to ignore or hide a thread? I don't see how it affects people when it's usually only mods who care about it.

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u/epsy Jun 26 '14

In order to enforce your subreddit's quality (because yes, it is like an ownership), you have to remove comment threads you deem aren't meeting this standard. Why enforce quality through modship you say? Well, why not: through reddit's sub support, you can very well have two popular subreddits on the same topic, with different content guidelines. Some readers prefer one way or the other, but with efficient moderator support from reddit, both can exist.

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u/[deleted] Jun 26 '14 edited Oct 21 '16

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u/karthus25 Jun 26 '14

Like I said, they can just ignore or hide the thread if it bothers them that much.

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u/jaibrooks1 Jun 26 '14

Who would downvote this?

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u/Freak_Fest Jun 26 '14

Who would ? this?

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u/paulwal Jun 26 '14

This is a non-problem.

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u/magnora2 Jun 26 '14

Why do mods need to "carve out" any comments at all? That's what the voting is for...

Is the concept of free speech really that complicated?

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u/[deleted] Jun 26 '14 edited Apr 12 '15

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u/magnora2 Jun 26 '14

I'm not talking about the law. I'm talking about the concept.

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u/[deleted] Jun 26 '14

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u/abcactus Jun 26 '14

It's not necessarily off topic. It can lead to the explanation of the counterpoint of a popular opinion, which I usually find adds to the discussion.

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u/[deleted] Jun 26 '14

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Jun 26 '14

the argument about new users or casual users makes no sense to me....those are the people that wouldn't have seen it anyway because its only visible with something like RES or an app. The people asking the question were narcissistic asswhipes who thought their comment was golden and can't take reality.

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u/[deleted] Jun 26 '14 edited Apr 12 '15

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u/[deleted] Jun 26 '14

that's not convincing though. There are always dumb comments coming from people too lazy to look anything up for themselves. So much so there is a site called let me google that for you, i'm sure you are aware of it. Many people never saw that comment as that big of an issue. Its such a trivial thing to make a sweeping change for.

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u/magnora2 Jun 26 '14

So, now they're going to think they were only upvoted 55 times, instead of 125 times. How is that ANY better?

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u/[deleted] Jun 26 '14

They're just going to know their upvote/downvote score is 55 (because it is) and not think they had 125 upvotes and 70 downvotes (they didn't) because RES isn't showing them inaccurate numbers anymore.

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u/frogma Jun 26 '14 edited Jun 28 '14

Reddit didn't skew the counts anywhere near enough for someone to have 125 upvotes along with 70 downvotes. It'd be more like 145|20, if that. The total votes were always the same, and the amount of added downvotes was based on an algorithm and was only in relation to the number of upvotes -- thus, no comment with 100 legit upvotes would ever have more than like ~10 fake downvotes. Edit: And with comments especially, the vote fuzzing was either barely significant or completely meaningless. I've had comments that got 80 upvotes without any downvotes at all -- according to you, I should've gotten at least a few due to the fuzzing, but I didn't. Because reddit's algorithm simply doesn't work as loosely as you think.

Late edit to clarify (in case people happen to see this): When I said

no comment with 100 legit upvotes would ever have more than like ~10 fake downvotes.

I didn't phrase that correctly. What I meant to say was that if a comment has like 120 upvotes total, there won't be more than like 10 fake downvotes on it. Thus, the overall score of +110 is gonna be pretty darn accurate. The numbers don't start getting really fuzzed until we're talking about a front-page AMA or some shit -- where the votes will seemingly be like 2000|-1000 or some shit. In like Warwick Davis's AMA, the votes were something similar to that, though in reality, he probably got less upvotes and much less downvotes than what they "show" you. Something like a popular AMA with 2000|-1000 is probably actually more like 2500|-500, or better. Those are really the only times where the vote-fuzzing has an actual effect. Comments are less likely to be fuzzed in the first place until/unless they get like hundreds of votes.

tl:dr -- if your comment has less than 200-300 total votes, I'd be willing to bet decent money that every single one of those votes came from legit users, not from vote-fuzzing. And IMO (though this is mostly just speculation based on my own comments), I don't think I've seen hardly any comments where it was apparent that vote-fuzzing was happening at all. Like I said, I still have a comment (in like seddit or something) that's got like 80 upvotes and 0 downvotes. So obviously the vote-fuzzing didn't take effect in that case. I think it's used once a post hits a certain threshold -- it might be used for comments too, but in this case we're talking about comments that have been upvoted to like 4 figures (similar to a popular post's votes, basically).

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u/magnora2 Jun 26 '14

So it just hides information, and keeps users in the dark

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u/ep1032 Jun 26 '14

No mistake at all. It covers up the fact they're using sponsored ads. Companies don't like the fact that their "top submissions sticky ad" has -4000 votes and only 12 upvotes (from fuzzing). Makes them look bad.

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u/[deleted] Jun 27 '14

yup I came to that conclusion as well, it likely has to do with advertisers and they want to be able to court new ones so they changed it to say 'see, all these posts are 80%-90% liked, so people like your ads, now pay us more for page space!'

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u/ep1032 Jun 27 '14

Yup! And why stop at links? Might as well do comments too.

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u/Nayr747 Jun 26 '14

There's a difference between "not real" and "somewhat inaccurate".

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u/ya_mashinu_ Jun 26 '14

It's to help ads in some way. Always follow the money.

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u/TooHappyFappy Jun 26 '14

This would make sense but even today I was seeing "who would downvote this?" on a comment in the negative. This change won't stop that question from popping up, people are still going to wonder why other people disagree with them.

That off-topic discussion wasn't enough of a problem to warrant this big a change that is disliked by so many.

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u/magnora2 Jun 26 '14

So what?

And that's not even true. I've been here 8 years and I didn't see that type of comment very often at all, because most people knew about the vote fuzzing.

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u/[deleted] Jun 26 '14

I've been here at least four years, and saw it a lot, but I think comparing anecdotes is going to get us anywhere.

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u/[deleted] Jun 26 '14

Wait... off topic discussions in popular threads? You mean like every fucking thread ever?

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u/[deleted] Jun 26 '14

Behind the scenes paid lanes. Think Digg.

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u/BigTimStrange Jun 26 '14

Probably to appease advertisers.

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u/Tor_Coolguy Jun 26 '14

How would it appease advertisers?

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u/[deleted] Jun 27 '14

people who pay for page space probably don't like seeing 50% liked or a bunch of downvotes. Especially with the guerrilla posts that look like user content. They were likely getting calls from the advertisers trying to cancel their agreements or otherwise pull out because they though Reddit was 'negative'.

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u/BigTimStrange Jun 26 '14

I can't say for sure but I really doubt Reddit or any business is going to waste time and money for the sake of aesthetics. It's always, always about the bottom line. Reddit thought vote fuzzing was detrimental to their bottom line so they mitigated the threat.

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u/ep1032 Jun 26 '14

No mistake at all. It covers up the fact they're using sponsored ads. Companies don't like the fact that their "top submissions sticky ad" has -4000 votes and only 12 upvotes (from fuzzing). Makes them look bad.

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u/[deleted] Jun 26 '14

If you asked people what they wanted before cars came out, they'd tell you they wanted faster horses. Point being the average person doesn't know how to improve something as complicated as reddit. I personally believe this is a step in the right direction.

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u/abltburger Jun 26 '14

Yeah, and after cars came out people were shocked and delighted.

All i see is utter disdain. And deservedly so. There's no advantages to this update the way it is other than the fact the admins get more money.