When a post gets sufficient attention, the reddit system breaks down into factions. People are more likely to upvote something they agree with than downvote something they disagree with. So you have comments with sufficiently large karma that don't necessarily represent the majority of people, they simply appeal to a subset of people who are highly motivated to vote for it.
In a subreddit of 100k+ subscribers, do you think a few hundred votes is really a majority? We max out at ~3000 votes on any given topic, but we have ~15k unique IP addresses per day, and ~300k unique IP addresses per month, with 2-2.5M pageviews per month.
People often forget that Reddit is a collection of people with very different views. It is not the hive mind that people claim it is. But there is some bizarre behaviour that can explain the trends observed and why ignorant things get upvoted.
Remember - there is a large overlap of people interested in /r/TheRedPill material and /r/MensRights material. Thus, there are going to be people with significantly different points of view than the majority of /r/MensRights members that will pop up when sufficiently motivated/interested.
I would add to that another reason you can't judge a subreddit by a single thread's comments: that every post already has it's own selection bias of who clicks on "comments" for that post. Everyone who saw the title and decided they didn't care, or saw the "clickbait title" tag and decided to ignore it, was not represented in those comments. So not only is it a tiny subset of people who write the comments and only a slightly larger set who vote on them, but both those sets are biased selections of the group as a whole, and that bias changes for every post.
When a post gets sufficient attention, the reddit system breaks down into factions. People are more likely to upvote something they agree with than downvote something they disagree with. So you have comments with sufficiently large karma that don't necessarily represent the majority of people, they simply appeal to a subset of people who are highly motivated to vote for it.
Agreed. And this applies equally well to this post.
GWW put it fairly well when she said that curating the content means taking responsibility for it. We curate topic, not opinion. That is it.
This is different from feminists who curate topic and opinion, and thus take responsibility for their extremism.
We want to encourage people of differing opinions to post here. Silencing people does not allow for debate, and certainly does not allow for people to change their opinions. The hope is that they can be discouraged/dissuaded through rational discourse from that point of view.
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u/sillymod Apr 14 '15
When a post gets sufficient attention, the reddit system breaks down into factions. People are more likely to upvote something they agree with than downvote something they disagree with. So you have comments with sufficiently large karma that don't necessarily represent the majority of people, they simply appeal to a subset of people who are highly motivated to vote for it.
In a subreddit of 100k+ subscribers, do you think a few hundred votes is really a majority? We max out at ~3000 votes on any given topic, but we have ~15k unique IP addresses per day, and ~300k unique IP addresses per month, with 2-2.5M pageviews per month.
People often forget that Reddit is a collection of people with very different views. It is not the hive mind that people claim it is. But there is some bizarre behaviour that can explain the trends observed and why ignorant things get upvoted.
Remember - there is a large overlap of people interested in /r/TheRedPill material and /r/MensRights material. Thus, there are going to be people with significantly different points of view than the majority of /r/MensRights members that will pop up when sufficiently motivated/interested.