You can’t see the votes: how Reddit reduces information cascade
We all love Reddit for various reasons — it has an active user base, it’s got an app with a great user experience, and you can pretty much find any topic you want — but I am always surprised by how well it is maintained as an online platform. Typically, online media and platforms are very susceptible to information cascades because of the voting mechanisms. It’s a self-fulfilling loop — you get more votes and you rank higher, which makes your posts or comments more “visible” to users. What makes the problem even more tricky is that online platforms are heavily time-favored — the earlier you make a post or comment about something, the more views you get from users, and the higher possibility that you get more upvotes. Thus, the information cascades on Reddit are intrinsically distinct from those in the music experiment by Salgankik, Dodds, and Watts. An ill-designed PageRank algorithm combined with misinformation cascades can have disastrous outcomes, but luckily Reddit came up with (what I think) an at least decent solution to this problem.
First, when someone makes a new post, you are not going to see its vote count until two hours later. This pushes you to really read through the post and decide whether it deserves more visibility, instead of blindly following the crowd. However, that doesn’t solve the time issue we mentioned earlier. So Reddit provides a second solution: the number of upvotes shouldn’t be the only factor that determines PageRank, and we should take into account the time of the upvotes. In other words, upvotes that are cast recently count more than upvotes cast a few hours ago, so a recent comment needs fewer upvotes to get to the sweet spot at the top of the page. And if the above all fail, we have moderators as the final safeguards (safe-gods, in some sense) that prevent misinformation cascade or personal attacks. Although these approaches do not tackle every single problem, they do make Reddit a more enjoyable place to an average user like me.
Lastly, I want to say that by no means Reddit is a perfect platform — when you have hundreds or thousands of comments that are stacked on top of each other in that weird tree structure, it can be very painful to read through them and find what is useful for you. In some sense, Quora is where you can read more quality posts from the so-called “professionals”. But I always find myself leaning towards Reddit for its rawness — it’s like a gold hunt, and you have to decide (often critically) what’s right and what’s wrong.
Source:
Ravenscraft, E. (2021, June 29). How Reddit attracts (and rewards) the worst type of comments. Medium. Retrieved November 19, 2021, from https://onezero.medium.com/how-reddit-attracts-and-rewards-the-worst-type-of-comments-3b7cad514da2.