Not The Onion

20599 readers

3043 users here now

Welcome

We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!

The Rules

Posts must be:

Links to news stories from...
...credible sources, with...
...their original headlines, that...
...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”

Please also avoid duplicates.

Comments and post content must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.

And that’s basically it!

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

kescusay@lemmy.world

374

Reddit decides to remove r/all (www.reddit.com)

submitted 1 day ago by slaacaa@lemmy.world to c/nottheonion@lemmy.world

109 comments fedilink hide all child comments

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/43627852

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] GenderNeutralBro 9 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Sort of. But the sorting algorithm is not so simple that you can call it neutral or natural.

I don't think the details of Reddit's ranking algorithm are public. Even within a single sub, it's not as simple as counting user votes. That's weighed against age, and all sorts of fuzzy bot/fraud detection mechanisms. I think Reddit intentionally injects noise into the system. You'll see phantom votes all the time to keep things "balanced".

And then in /all, I believe some subreddits are banned entirely, and again it's not as simple as "most votes" or "most votes weighed against age".

Here's a Chicago Tribune article from 2016 that mentions the change I mentioned before: https://www.chicagotribune.com/2016/12/01/reddit-to-crack-down-on-most-toxic-users-of-pro-trump-forum/

Reddit had to change one of its algorithms over the summer to try to stop r/the_Donald from dominating the board that displays all of Reddit’s content, known as r/all.

It's light on details and again, I don't think details were ever published. Reddit is closed-source so really it's anybody's guess how they're really ranking posts.

[–] SlurpingPus@lemmy.world 1 points 3 hours ago

The sorting algo was known in the past, and conceived by Randall Munroe of the XKCD fame. I'm guessing the gist is still the same, but with popularity metrics and antibot measures added on.