Visibility on Reddit is essentially predicated on early votes. Get a few upvotes and even mediocre comments will often remain at the top due to momentum. Less than -4 and it's doomed to oblivion (ie. downvote the competition).
One of the most popular linked sites on reddit (quickmeme) got to where it was with only a few strategically placed votes for each link, and it took ages for them to be found out and similarly banned: http://www.dailydot.com/business/reddit-quickmeme-banned-mil...
More broadly, the algorithm reddit uses is not only known wrong/buggy:
It's possible HN suffers from the same flaw (initial sort and feedback loop from such) since it's the natural (naive) way to produce such algorithms. The machine can't tell if it's quality content or just easy to upvote, and the latter is more common.
TL;DR: Visibility == early votes from people who have no interest in depth and don't read the articles anyway.
Over at kuro5hin (which in general should not be used as a model for successfully running an online community) rusty addressed the problem of initial votes being too influential by hiding the score of a comment until it had received 6 votes.
Of course reddit is flawed. Anyone that has spent time on Slashdot or Advogato could have told you the whole premise of up/down voting is beyond silly.
No, the utility of up/down votes is in retention. It's nothing more than a Skinner box that people check in on to see if they are winning or losing. Which is how Digg and Reddit both became huge in a short amount of time.
Do you know Slashdot's system? jhmarten wasn't criticizing community-based moderation, only the simplistic model of up/down voting, when compared to ones which get users to specify why they're voting.
Compared to Reddit as a whole, yes, but that's because Reddit is a collection of disparate subreddits, not a single common area. Slashdot had 5.5 million users in its heyday, which is on the same order of magnitude of the biggest subreddits.
> It's possible HN suffers from the same flaw (initial sort and feedback loop from such) since it's the natural (naive) way to produce such algorithms.
I always assumed that's why blatant blogspam sometimes makes it to the front page of HN.
I wonder if the HN countermeasures are stronger than Reddit's. For HN submissions to have much of chance of sticking around you really need a few quick upvotes.
I was under the impression that reddit's algorithm randomized top comments, while also adding weight to other parameters. Adding randomness seems like a pretty obvious way to reduce the impact of the "first mover" advantage. HN should do it too.
Visibility on Reddit is essentially predicated on early votes. Get a few upvotes and even mediocre comments will often remain at the top due to momentum. Less than -4 and it's doomed to oblivion (ie. downvote the competition).
One of the most popular linked sites on reddit (quickmeme) got to where it was with only a few strategically placed votes for each link, and it took ages for them to be found out and similarly banned: http://www.dailydot.com/business/reddit-quickmeme-banned-mil...
More broadly, the algorithm reddit uses is not only known wrong/buggy:
http://technotes.iangreenleaf.com/posts/2013-12-09-reddits-e...
but also generally defective:
http://www.reddit.com/r/circlebroke/comments/vqy9y/dear_circ...
It's possible HN suffers from the same flaw (initial sort and feedback loop from such) since it's the natural (naive) way to produce such algorithms. The machine can't tell if it's quality content or just easy to upvote, and the latter is more common.
TL;DR: Visibility == early votes from people who have no interest in depth and don't read the articles anyway.
edit: fixed links