On: Reddit’s empire is founded on a flawed algorithm

[_3u10]

It's theoretically broken, in practice it works quite well.

[maxerickson → _3u10]

Is it even true that it is theoretically broken?

The blog sketches out a corner case that maybe isn't handled well, but posts with net negative votes probably aren't "hot", and I'm pretty sure they have mechanisms in there to make sure that bad voters are at least eventually ignored.

[DrStalker → maxerickson]

I don;t think anyone really cares how submissions are ranked once they are obviously net negative. The concern is for the first few votes; a submissions should not be effectively discarded because the first person to look at it did not like it.

[Grue3 → _3u10]

It doesn't work well at all, which is apparent if you look at any small subreddit.