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.
