
PG cites Ron Paul proliferation on Reddit as "evidence of design flaw in version 1 of social news" - brett
http://reddit.com/info/2n2tu/comments/c2n5v8
======
paul
I'm not convinced. What if the upvoting really is representative of a large
number of the users?

I don't upvote that often on reddit, but probably half of the time (at most
once per day) it is for a Ron Paul link (and it's always something that I read
and liked).

RP may be marginal at the national level, but that doesn't imply that he's
marginal at all other levels as well. And of course, "...great new things
often come from the margins, and yet the people who discover them are looked
down on by everyone, including themselves. ... But the best thing of all is
when people call what you're doing inappropriate. I've been hearing this word
all my life and I only recently realized that it is, in fact, the sound of the
homing beacon. "Inappropriate" is the null criticism. It's merely the
adjective form of "I don't like it." So that, I think, should be the highest
goal for the marginal. Be inappropriate. When you hear people saying that,
you're golden. And they, incidentally, are busted."

~~~
pg
Judging by the kneejerk pattern of the voting on the comment thread, it's
largely zealots.

~~~
nostrademons
I dunno. I'm beginning to hear Ron Paul evangelism from RL friends, mostly
over FaceBook. I'm pretty sure they didn't get it from Reddit.

I suspect it's mostly because people are so fed up with _everything_ connected
to the current Washington establishment that they'll vote for anyone who sets
himself up as an outsider. Ron Paul's been one of the few candidates that's
consistently against the Iraq war; many people will vote for him on that basis
alone, regardless of the rest of his positions.

I think it's telling that the friend who's been trying hardest to convince me
to vote for RP is a pro-choice Green Party atheist. When I showed him Ron
Paul's recent voting record (which included a bill to eliminate all federal
laws on abortion, a bill to privatize a large federal wildlife refuge, and a
bill to prevent laws on school prayer), he said "It doesn't matter. He's
against the Iraq war, and that outweighs everything else." He's willing to set
aside every other political belief he has for that one issue. I suspect a
decent-sized portion of the American electorate is the same.

~~~
pg
And this is supposed to refute what I said? Single-issue voters are the
ultimate zealots.

~~~
nostrademons
No. It's supposed to point out that nothing you've said refutes what Paul
said. Ron Paul's supporters may be zealots and yet still be representative of
a large number of voters.

------
forgotmylastone
The proliferation of Paul Graham stories on reddit were evidence of a design
flaw in version 1 of social news.

Such a small proportion of people who visit news sites vote that a group of
zealots can easily overtake a site like this. Spammers are comparatively easy
to guard against; they don't care enough to create 100 sockpuppet accounts,
and in any case the guys at reddit wouldn't have any qualms about killing
spams that seemed to be merely for profit. This is a tougher problem.

You could say all the anti-C++ stories were already evidence of this problem.
But a large proportion of programmers, even C++ users, disapprove of C++, and
an even larger proportion of the kind of people who would use a social news
site.

The Lisp zealots are another matter. This is more like spam; it's not just
people who hate C++ so much that they reflexively upvote stories that sound
critical of him; it's a deliberate attempt to market something online.

Incidentally, I'm not saying this because I have some kind of ulterior
motives. I think C++ is the worst language of my lifetime. And I am not anti-
Paul Graham. I know nothing about him except that every article he writes
makes it onto reddit--no one writes that much gold.

~~~
pg
This was answered 5 hours before:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=52322>

~~~
forgotmylastone
Lisp stuff practically only ever shows up on reddit; it is way overrepresented
there compared to Slashdot et. al.. And it is a similar sort of thing--people
want others to run into Lisp, while not actually finding the articles
interesting.

I'll give it to you on your essays though, they do pop up all over (however, I
will say that although I avoid Digg, Ron Paul can be found all over the place
over there).

------
Alex3917
The problem with social news isn't the zealots. It's that people vote for
stories they think would be good for other people to read instead of for
stories they find interesting themselves.

That's why Reddit ends up having the personality of John Kerry.

(And yes, I realize that this view is not mutually exclusive with the original
pg comment.)

~~~
pg
That's what I mean by zealots.

~~~
falsestprophet
To be fair, you never seemed terribly upset about the Paul Graham zealots.

~~~
pg
It seems to be a different kind of upvoting. When I write something new it
generally shows up on both reddit and del.icio.us/popular. Stuff about Ron
Paul only shows up on reddit. What that implies is that people are upvoting it
because they want _other_ people to read it, rather than because they found it
interesting themselves.

The reddit guys actually worried about this problem from the very beginning.
That was why initially there was such an emphasis on voting as a way of
training filters: if you voted for dumb stuff, you'd be punished by having to
read dumb stuff. But the filter-training message never got through, perhaps
because the filtering worked so badly for so long.

~~~
falsestprophet
I don't think that is the case. Your essays are fundamentally different than
the Ron Paul news stories. They have a limited shelf life. I don't really feel
a need to bookmark the latest Fox News injustice towards Ron Paul or clips of
his last debate or news that the s&p dropped 7% or news that Sarkozy won. I
want to read about it; I think it is important; but I don't need to read about
it 3 years from now.

But Ron Paul does end up on Digg and Technorati. Ron Paul posters are all over
my campus. There are packed rallies and meet ups. I think that Ron Paul is
important news right now. A lot of young, technically proficient people seem
to agree. (These are a lot of the same people who like you by the way.)

It would make good business sense to implement some sort of clustering method.
So, a great number of minority groups could happily use the site and view the
ads.

But, if you were the editor of reddit, I would hope you would not censor Ron
Paul's stories. The community would if it wanted to; if you search for Ron
Paul on reddit, you will find that the vast majority of his stories have 0
points. This invisible hand of the reddit market would surely please Ron Paul.

edit: My god does that last sentience sound dirty...

~~~
vlad
You're 100% correct. While PG is likely genuinely dissatisfied with the
current algorithms of reddit and digg, in this post, he was simply expressing
helplessness about the many Ron Paul stories he has had to see on one of his
favorite sites, and feels like he is responsible enough for the creation of
the site to try to do something about it, but not really being able to do so.

For instance, Paul's argument did not take into account that voting up Ron
Paul related articles is more about certain principles than about the man
himself.

Some people like that Paul is pro-drugs. Some people like that he has the most
consistent voting record. Some people like that he is libertarian. Some people
like that he's fiscally responsible. That is not a single issue, unlike what
PG has said in another post.

But beyond voting up unexpected political principles, readers also like to
vote for articles that mention that media outlets reset or deleted polls and
misrepresented their results, as well as those which criticize internet users
for heavily favoring Ron Paul the most--which redditors and diggers feel is an
attack on them or their intelligence.

Another reason users vote up Ron Paul stories is because users like rooting
for the little guy.

Another reason is that users feel there is an injustice being done, such as
that the main-stream media is not giving enough face time to all candidates.

Another reason has political roots--some users feel the other candidates
aren't good enough, and regardless of what they think about Ron Paul, he has a
consistent voting record.

Finally, many users vote up Ron Paul to vote for policy change, and realize
there is little chance Ron Paul will actually be elected.

It has also become a self-serving prophecy in the main stream media that
internet users heavily prefer Ron Paul and are responsible for online and text
messaging votes, so those who use the internet think that's who they should
vote for.

There are many, many reasons why Ron Paul is being selected. When articles
with his name come up, there are a variety of reasons to vote them up. Those
may not be good reasons to vote up those articles, but they're genuine, and I
doubt there's a conspiracy.

~~~
Zak
I don't think anybody (reasonable) believes there's a conspiracy. PG's
original point is that a large number of users seem to be voting for Ron Paul
stories not because they find the stories interesting and want to read more
like them, but because they want to help Ron Paul's campaign or express a
political opinion.

The intent of reddit is that users vote for posts they find interesting and
against posts they find boring. Any situation that leads to posts gaining or
losing points based on other criteria is a sign of a flaw in the system.

I'm not sure what the solution is. I don't find all Ron Paul articles boring,
but I only need to see one article about how Fox News tried to make him look
bad, not 30. Some sort of grouping might help. Once they have tags, I think it
would help to create a flagging system somewhat similar to Craigslist that
would allow users to suggest tags for posts. Once a certain number of users
suggest a tag, the tag is added to the post. That way, users could filter out
tags they didn't want to see, and override anybody who tries to game the
system.

~~~
vlad
"The intent of reddit is that users vote for posts they find interesting and
against posts they find boring. Any situation that leads to posts gaining or
losing points based on other criteria is a sign of a flaw in the system."

No, the intent of reddit was to get as many users as possible, whoever they
are--even if they like Ron Paul stories and pictures of cats--and then sell it
for a profit or go public. It's both the most logical conclusion and also the
advice of Paul Graham, their investor and advisor. Is Reddit (and digg) not
more popular than ever, and did Reddit not get bought? There is no stipulation
in Paul's articles or speeches about making something the perfect x, y, or z,
but about making something users want.

Paul says that News.YC is better, but it's because it has a much tighter focus
with the addition of moderation and the aspect of sharing news and ideas with
real people about real issues. It's also because those who have a lot of free
time on their hands and want to go where many users are, have the choice of
Reddit or Digg. If this site had been the first social news site, it, too,
would have deteriorated quickly.

------
tocomment
I'm not sure If I'm a counter example to this or not. I never voted on any
stories on reddit. So that would make me part of the non-voting majority. But
recently I felt the urge to upvote all Ron Paul stories to help his campaign.

~~~
pg
> recently I felt the urge to upvote all Ron Paul stories to help his
> campaign.

This is exactly what I mean about a design flaw. It only takes a hundred
people who do this, on a site with hundreds of thousands of readers.

~~~
rms
We've got a hundred people here. Maybe we should start a voting cabal to
upvote all of our startups.

~~~
pg
Don't make my life difficult. I have other stuff I need to work on. Don't make
me spend hours babysitting news.yc and implementing countermeasures against
abuse.

~~~
rms
Oh, no, startups do very well here without any gaming. We all really like
talking about our startups and discussing other people's startups.

I like this site to much to game it anyways. I'm talking about gaming reddit.

~~~
wyday
Don't piss in our own pool, piss in our neighbor's?

~~~
rms
Piss is a little harsh. It's just economics. Marketing is hard. I like taking
shortcuts.

------
brett
So the obvious question becomes: How does version 2 of social news prevent
this? How does/will news.yc deal with it?

For the sake of argument (though it may be true anyways), what if we assume
the Ron Paul voting is totally organic? What if over time a critical mass of
existing reddit community members decided it was important to knee-jerk upvote
any Ron Paul story without reading each story? So you have a block of
_legitimate_ users using the site for something other than the expressed goal
of the site (social news), presumably to the detriment of the rest of the user
base.

~~~
pg
I mentioned one way of dealing with lame submissions when we switched news.yc
to Hacker News: have human editors who mark good and bad submissions, and
weight people's future votes depending on which they predict. That would
probably be enough.

There are other possible solutions. For example, the reddit guys tried to
solve the problem of all the political crap on the frontpage by creating a
subreddit for it. But of course this is what happened:

<http://reddit.com/info/2n2tu/comments/c2n5ls>

There are also mechanical solutions along the lines of the type used to defeat
SEO. I.e. if a group of the same people always upvote the same stories, count
their votes less. If people vote on something without reading it first, count
their votes less. Etc.

~~~
rms
How can you tell when people upvote a story without reading it?

~~~
brett
At the very least reddit can tell when people upvote without clicking through
as they hijack the link and then redirect to it.

~~~
rms
That's a start. It's easy to game, but implementing a filter like that won't
make the results any worse.

------
jsmcgd
I don't think too much should be read into the recent activity on Reddit. Ron
Paul has actively promoted his campaign on the internet and has been a large
proponent of internet freedoms. So users' behaviour on reddit probably isn't
representative of the average American but actually quite representative of
the average Internet user. In other words reddit's ranking system hasn't been
abused in this sense.

------
mynameishere
People have given millions of dollars to Ron Paul. That's an ungame-able vote.
If Paul is getting 1-2 percent of real support among voters, then there should
be no shortage of Guiliani and McCain and Romney fans to quickly downmod any
stories they don't like.

But evidently, Paul is the only Republican candidate with fans on reddit. If
there's a "flaw" that's the only one.

By the way, LBJ was much, much worse than Bush.

------
nickb
Maybe Ron Paul proliferation is due to the man's ideas and his honesty?! And
his popularity on reddit and other sites is due to the fact that he resonates
well with what people think? Maybe people are sick of candidates that lie to
you all the time. You know... just stating the obvious.

~~~
pg
You don't seem to grasp that we're talking about a completely orthogonal
issue. Ron Paul could be the best presidential candidate in history. The
problem I'm talking about is simply a structural one: because such a small
proportion of visitors on social news sites vote, 100 of his vocal supporters
can dictate the stories for a site with 100,000 users.

 _Man_ is politics a tar baby. I wish I'd never made that comment on reddit.
Nothing personal (I mean this more about the reddit commenters than you), but
it's a topic that brings out the dumbest in everyone.

~~~
stuki
"...100 of his vocal supporters can dictate the stories for a site with
100,000 users."

Only for as long as the 100,000 is reasonably happy with what the 100 is
providing them. Otherwise you'd think they'd have the sense to either start
downvoting, or simply stop using reddit, rendering it a site with 100 readers
who all vote. More likely many of the 100,000 see reddit as their best source
for all the Ron Paul news the 'mainstream' media is 'trying to hide' from
them.

~~~
DougBTX
If those 100 are only upvoting to push it in the face of the 100,000, then
those 100 will leave if the 100,000 do.

"More likely many of the 100,000 see reddit as their best source for all the
Ron Paul news the 'mainstream' media is 'trying to hide' from them."

Please tell me you don't believe that. The RP posts are worse than lolcats.

------
davidw
If Ron Paul is the worst thing you found on reddit lately, you haven't been
paying enough attention. The site has more or less been 'owned' by the batshit
crazy fringes:

<http://reddit.com/info/2n64e/comments/c2n7nd>

------
jgrahamc
I agree with PG on this. I'm trying to fix this problem with Wildfire:
[http://www.jgc.org/blog/2007/09/problems-with-social-
news.ht...](http://www.jgc.org/blog/2007/09/problems-with-social-news.html)

John.

------
mattmaroon
Also from PG in that comment thread:

"I know there isn't widespread support for him because I rarely see references
to him anywhere except sites like this."

The best measure of any election is without a doubt the gambling market.
They've proven far more accurate than any poll. My favorite is
<http://www.intrade.com> where Ron Paul is tracking at around 4% to win the
Republican nod.

~~~
rms
Seems way too high to me. I don't know how the different bets in a prediction
market work, is there a way to make money when Ron Paul goes down?

~~~
mattmaroon
Yes, you'd sell Ron Paul shares right now. If you think he's way too high you
should.

I don't like your EV there though.

------
budu3
Or maybe reddit is working just fine and the front page reflecting the views
of the majority of reddit users. They like Ron Paul, lolcats and xkcd.

------
neuro
we should have fixed it back in the day -- those paul graham essays being
skyrocketed by zealots on reddit, including myself, was a leading indicator.

------
guest
Why not just show what each story each user voted for?

