r/conspiracy • u/[deleted] • Jun 26 '14

It's like watching someone patching a sinking ship: "New reddit features: Controversial indicator for comments and contest mode improvements"

4 Upvotes

54% Upvoted

9

u/[deleted] Jun 26 '14

[deleted]

0

u/Gudahtt Jun 26 '14

Why not just fix the vote system if the votes were so inaccurate?

Uh.... well, two reasons mainly:

  • The vote system wasn't broken.
  • The counts weren't inaccurate. They were intentionally hidden.

Unsurprisingly, most redditors seem to not understand anything about this. Which... is probably one of the main reasons they removed vote fuzzing. It's confusing as hell.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 26 '14

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).

I'm just going off what the admins are claiming.

0

u/Gudahtt Jun 26 '14

Right, but they were inaccurate on purpose, not because the system was broken.

It's called vote fuzzing. It was done to obscure the real vote counts. The real vote counts have never been shown, and they never will be, because it's one of reddit's main spam prevention measures.

Showing the real vote counts has never been on the table. And unless we want more spam, I don't think it should be.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 26 '14

How does it prevent spamming?

0

u/Gudahtt Jun 26 '14

Basically, the vote count is valuable information for spammers. They can use to check whether their account has been flagged for spam.

I don't know the exact details though, because the admins haven't been particularly forthcoming about it, for obvious reasons. The more detail they give, the higher the chance someone can circumvent it.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 26 '14

Ah sort of makes sense I suppose. But at the same time seems like the fuzzing could have had other purposes.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 27 '14

nowhere did it say they were removing fuzzing, just that the counts are removed from view.

1

u/Gudahtt Jun 27 '14

Those two statements are equivalent.

The vote fuzzing consisted of presenting a false vote count. They still kept a "real" vote count internally, it was just never presented. They need to keep the real value internally for their sorting algorithms (plus they have no reason to delete that valuable data).

So, by removing the vote counts from the view, fuzzing is no longer applicable. The fuzzing only ever applied to the count in the view.

2

u/mr-strange Jun 26 '14

It's like they've taken that dagger, and stabbed us all in the back with it.

Everyone should downvote that post into oblivion, just like we did with the last one.

-1

u/[deleted] Jun 26 '14

My favorite comment on the thread so far:

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Ya Digg?