I'll post the same thing here that I did at reddit: there's no use for this script since the Reddit Content Filter, another GM script, is already out there (and way superior - no offense meant). the RDF includes filtering by title, user, and/or site as well as RegEx...
Prediction: Ten years from now Ron Paul will be remembered mainly as someone whose supporters exposed a flaw in the naive implementation of vote-driven news sites.
Do you worry about that being the case with, say, you or Joel Spolsky or, uh, Lisp? To an outsider, these phenomena all look the same: a pretty obscure person or technology getting lots of attention from a certain kind of website.
When you're outside of a popularity bubble, you have pretty good odds of identifying it as such -- but that doesn't mean you can't be inside another popularity bubble, too.
(I don't actually think this is true. As far as I know, support for Spolsky, Paul, and Lisp is genuine, and its concentration at reddit is just a typical network effect. I don't see why this has to be any more complicated than "People who like Ron Paul news will read it at reddit and vote it up at reddit, attracting more people who like Ron Paul news")
No. The topics reddit has focused on so far have generally been the topics hackers are interested in. That's why the Ron Paul stories stand out so much. I know a huge cross section of hackers of all different types, and Ron Paul doesn't figure anything near as large in their conversation as he does on reddit.
It would be easy to astroturf reddit. And I don't think even Ron Paul suppporters would deny that the campaign most likely to do it would be that of an outsider candidate whose supporters were renowned for their effective use of the Internet.
But you know, I am done talking about this. Whenever I even mention Ron Paul I end up wasting hours in arguments isomorphic to arguments with trolls. I'm not claiming Ron Paul supporters are trolls, just that trying to reason with fanatics tend to produce the same sort of threads as trying to reason with trolls.
The discussion on this thread is precisely why politics is off limits on news.yc. In this case it crept in through a point about the design of news aggregators. But politics is like floating point contagion. If you make a point that's even partly about politics, that's the part everyone will focus on,
and the discussion becomes a political one.
I'm curious what you would consider a "good" argument (not isomorphic with trolls) argument against your statements in this thread?
Perhaps I'm misreading, but many of your comments come off as essentially dismissing the Ron Paul phenomenon as the work of a handful of zealots. It's not surprising that his supporters disagree with that notion, as it implies that their efforts and views are not legitimate.
BTW, here is a video of Ron Paul with a bunch of hackers. The room was completely packed and overflowing into a second room (connected by video). Of course they aren't all RP supporters, but a large fraction are.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCM_wQy4YVg
I'm curious what you would consider a "good" argument
A good reply is one that you can reply to by taking the discussion further, instead of having to re-explain what you said in the previous comment. The distinctive thing about conversations with both trolls and zealots is that you're always having to begin comments with "no, what I said was..."
I can see how you would think that a news aggregator is more prone to manipulation than your friends, but surely you can concede that it's also a broader sample. The problem with a conspiracy theory is that you have rebuttal-proof circumstantial evidence: there is literally nothing I can do to convince you that there isn't a conspiracy, except to point out that everyone else who sees conspiracies like this is wrong. As you put it on your old blog:
"Don't see purpose where there isn't.
Or better still, the positive version:
See randomness."
This doesn't seem to be a discussion of politics. It sounds more like psychology to me: you're very surprised that reddit is behaving in a way that you wouldn't have predicted, and so you're creating an extra phenomenon to explain it, instead of revising your original theory. It's a little pre-Copernican.
That's not a flaw - that's grassroots democracy. It looks messy because it is. You should worry more about the tidy politicians who seem to just coast silently into first place. Why do they not need to engage with the public or stir up any passion?
He definitely has a lot of legitimate supporters. They're still a minority though and yet they dominate Reddit as if no one else existed. That's a flaw in the system. The entire group of people who support him are acting as a blindly loyal voting bloc and upvoting anything with his name in it. This is essentially how the neocons were able to game their way into control of the USA. A small group of blindly loyal fanatics working together can have a disproportionately large effect (just look at 9/11), especially when the system is highly flawed.
I think it's quite possible that in 10 years most of us internet geeks will primarily remember Ron Paul as "that libertarian guy who was always upvoted on social news sites". Unless he wins ;-)
"He definitely has a lot of legitimate supporters. They're still a minority though and yet they dominate Reddit as if no one else existed. That's a flaw in the system."
So Reddit should be representative of the tastes of someone who got 1,000 on the SAT, makes 29,000 a year, has 2.1 kids, and is morbidly obese?
Small groups of true believers are common in social movements. This is neither new nor sinister. The founders of the USA were an influential small group.
No one's disputing that. What's broken about the naive implementation of social news is the degree to which a small group of true believers can take it over.
You'll have seen this before with Lisp on Reddit. Some people always upvote, some people always downvote, some people downvote because they're tired of seeing it, and the vast, vast majority simply have no opinion. To them, the words "Lisp" and "pebble" have identical emotional affect. So consequently a small core of Lispers can flood the front page, or, as the ratio of fans to bashers shifts, they can be crowded into obscurity even on the programming page. The small group leads the large group because, in regard of that topic, the large group is as happy with as without.
That "small group leading" effect is what makes any-to-many media such a ferment of ideas. Suppose you used an algorithm that refused to raise articles with less than mainstream interest. You'd end up duplicating the banality of broadcast TV, which also relies on broad and shallow appeal. There's a reason the slang calls it the "lowest common denominator"!
It's the opposite of grassroots democracy. Grassroots = spontaneous and decentralized. That would not naturally produce the tidily regular stream of Ron Paul stories we see on reddit. This seems to be an organized campaign. This is not a groundswell of support; it's an attempt to exploit the vulnerabilities of social news sites in order to give the appearance of one.
It's not organized - it's enthusiasm. I speak as one who has been known to post a Ron Paul story or two, although not in the big leagues. The number of big posters is small, although I suspect a "long tail", but the number of voters is large. If all the votes came from sock puppets, the Reddit staff would be fighting back. They aren't. I think the answer is that Reddit is small enough to be 100% saturated and consequently 100% polarized into love, hate, and don't want to hear about it. The RP lovers are simply a slightly larger group than the sum of the other two, and as such they dominate the front page.
There's an interesting question about how social networks actually work, as opposed to how we all think they should work. In reality, your real, live social network probably includes people who are really excited about things that bore or annoy the heck out of you, yet both of you self-censor to keep the network alive.
There's no self-censoring on the net. People post and write just whatever they feel like.
I'm not talking about people merely voting up what they like. What I suspect is that a group of Ron Paul supporters (maybe organized by the campaign, maybe not) got together and said: reddit has 100k (or whatever) readers, but all it takes is 500 votes to get a story to the stop of the frontpage. So all we have to do is get 500 of us to sign up for reddit accounts, and we own reddit.
As far as I know, no one thinks voting rings should be a component of "how social networks actually work." And in fact, reddit has software for neutralizing them. It's just not good enough.
I just got through reading an academic paper on fixing social systems. The entire paper was written along the lines of "how do we stop attacks?" In other words, if the system is broken, it must be because somebody is purposely breaking it in some way.
Whether it's 500 RP supporters purposely joining reddit or 500 of the existing reddit users who happen to be rabid Paul supporters, it's a distinction without a difference. The rest of us have to put up with the behavior of reddit simply because it has the attribute "all it takes is 500 votes to get a story to the top of the frontpage"
For a long time I was convinced RP supporters were purposely gaming the system. I've changed my mind in the last few months, though, after meeting and talking to some of these folks. They just are really excited, that's all, and they're already reddit, or digg, or whatever users.
Another way to look at it is thus: while it's true that a small number of users constantly "run" large social sites, that's because only a small number of users give a hoot about ranking or rating articles. The rest are just apathetic. But for certain topics, like Ron Paul, or LISP, or Mac vs PC, or tax policy, or weasel juggling, a _new_ set of small users suddenly becomes very energized. The system works as long as everybody is fairly complacent. Once anything starts really motivating people, you get these swings out of whack. That's my view, for what it's worth. Perhaps "voting ring" is one way to characterize them, but I'm not sure it does justice to the situation that's really occurring.
Can't it be both? A grassroots conspiracy? Just because a smallish-yet-largish (hundreds? thousands?) community of people has got together and decided to show their support for a particular candidate by overparticipating in online polls and social news sites doesn't mean that there's anybody organizing these people.
Of course they must be exchanging information somehow, but it doesn't look to me like anybody in particular is in charge.
From the variation between Ron Paul's prominence in hacker opinion and on reddit. Till now (and I have literally been observing reddit since day 1), the topics on reddit have been an exaggerated version of typical hacker opinion. E.g. though there were a lot of anti-Bush links, most people in the hacker world do dislike Bush. But I have literally never heard anyone mention Ron Paul in conversation except when talking about how his supporters spam the aggregators. He's like Levitra. I only even know his name as a spam token.
You are making the classic internet mistake. Your social circle is much, much more insular than you think it is. This is not a criticism, it's a result of the fact that you pick where you hang out, and so do the other people who hang out there. The internet is very effective at matching like with like - and the result is you think "everybody knows..." or "nobody has heard of...". Not so.
Well, let me give you an example. I know RP from lewrockwell.com (LRC). He's been a columnist there for literally years, long before he entertained any thought of a 2008 presidential run. LRC is a hub for hard core principled libertarians (and is friendly to libertarian anarchists). It's also pretty right-wing Christian, and can be a bit nutty. I don't care for that, but I come back for their libertarian articles. Ron Paul fits right in there. However, I wouldn't link an LRC article onto Reddit. What would be the point? Libertarian minutiae would never get voted up. So I'm a silent bridge between the two cultures. I expect a lot of the other more hardcore libertarians heard of him there. In another case, a hard leftist might have heard of him on DKos when he made the news for arguing with Giuliani over Iraq in the Fox debate. Each of these people bridges him onto Reddit. And if they decide not to be a silent bridge, but to open up the conduit and start linking articles, then suddenly people who never mentioned Ron Paul are crowing about him, and others are voting. But you don't see that, because you don't overlap DKos or LRC, so it comes like a bolt out of the blue for you. Who is this guy and where is his support coming from? It was already there, you just never got told.
Not to disagree with your main point, but Lew Rockwell stuff has been posted to reddit before: http://reddit.com/info/dmyp/comments/ made it to the top (it might have been the #1 all-time story for a while).
So was the sudden deluge of lolcat pictures onto Reddit also a voting ring conspiracy? I somehow doubt those get brought up in many of your real-life conversations either. Ron Paul is just another internet meme -- one which happens to be infectious because hackers tend to agree with his views.
I would disagree. Look at your karma levels in this thread. I never saw it so low compared to the responses to your posts by others. This would suggest that people in this forum(presumably hackers), like Ron Paul and are the same type of people upvoting on reddit/digg.
I don't like Ron Paul at all, and I didn't vote pg down, but I might have. I simply disagree with the premise that it's an active conspiracy. (Instead I voted up some other posters that responded)
Social sites are tyrannies of the vocal minorities (as is democracy, for that matter, but that's a longer rant). The whole idea of voting something up or down is a flawed _concept_. "Up" and "Down" have various and sundry meanings, and people are emotional animals, not rational ones. No amount of algorithm tweaking is going to make a bad concept into a good one.
Having said all of that, I felt like the game was rigged for RP too for a while. Now I've come to understand that social voting is a mob-like affair, and does not have the best interests of the reader in mind. If there was one thing I could fix in the world, that would be it. There's simply too much time being wasted by all kinds of smart people reading stuff that has no value to them. (whatever the topic) </rant>
I'm sure I'm going to get downvoted for this but...
I hope you realize that your idea of hacker opinion is likely slanted. It seems like you spend your time in either San Fransisco or Cambridge, two incredibly democratic locations. Of course you're going to hear people bash Bush incredibly passionately. Nobody likes Bush, not even in red states, so I can only imagine that's amplified where you are.
I can tell you that I sling code for a living and I'm very interested in the whole Ron Paul thing; I didn't hear about him from Digg or Reddit, I heard about him from the signs I see people holding every day on my way home from work so I looked him up on Google.
I think a lot more hackers lean libertarian than you give credit for.
Did everyone only read the last 3 sentences of that comment? Obviously in itself the fact that I don't hear anyone talking about Ron Paul means nothing.
The other part of the comment wasn't as interesting. Taken as a whole, what you said sounds indistinguishable from "Reddit used to be like what my friends talked about, only more so. Now it's like that, with another subject they didn't talk about. This is probably because it's being manipulated."
What's interesting is that I've heard this from all sorts of people on reddit! Some of them were talking about Google, some of them were talking about XKCD, some of them were talking about Steve Yegge, and lots of them were talking about you. So a) you're the first person to be right about this phenomenon, b) you just missed it before, or c) this is just how people react when they find out that they're suddenly in a minority within their peer group.
I'm not saying simply that reddit has drifted away from the kind of stuff my friends and I talk about. In fact, that observation was the raison d'etre of the site you just used to post this strawman paraphrase. What sticks out about the Ron Paul links is the suddenness and the magnitude of the change.
I'm talking about acceleration here, not velocity.
Apologies if the paraphrase came off sounding like a strawman. I was just pointing out that your statement is part of a larger category, and that the details (and verifiability) are constant. So reddit conspiracies are like religion: most people think it's just a matter of knowing which one is right; some of us realize they're all wrong.
Yes some supports of Ron Paul try to game Digg, Slashdot, Reddit and others. A quick look at ronpaulforums.com will confirm that.
However, if they were successful at doing what you describe wouldn't your prediction imply that most Ron Paul stories on Reddit would have a score greater than zero? A search for "Ron Paul" shows this to be false.
Is there some other objective measure that could be used?
The only people who will remember Ron Paul for dominating social news sites are the small percentage of people that use social news sites right now. Among the mainstream, he'll be mentioned as a candidate who was very successful in marketing himself and raising money over the internet.
I expect he will run as a Libertarian after he doesn't get the Republican nomination; he'll probably do much better than your average Libertarian candidate.
There is a simple reddit fix. Rather then hosting crappy parties in different cities they should work on story filtering. So that users can filter ANY news title. there a simple work around for Ron Raul supporters, They can misspell r0n p@ul.
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/8751