Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by stetrain 1106 days ago
One phenomenon that I think drives this is that the engaged users (ie commenters) are usually a small subset of the total user base that upvotes things.

The engaged users care about the topic of the sub and tend to interact with it directly, while the larger audience is subscribed but mostly upvotes things from their main feed without caring which sub it is from, or visiting the sub itself to see what all has been posted there.

I have seen many cases where the “just let the votes sort it out” method leads to things being upvoted, presumably by those users scrolling their main feed who don’t even notice what subreddit it is from, and then comment sections full of “who is upvoting this junk” “this is the third time this has been posted this week” and “mods can we please do something about all of the X posts?”

So mods tend to be pulled in two directions by those two groups, and one is louder than the other so they tend to get their way.
2 comments
tyg13 1106 days ago
> I have seen many cases where the “just let the votes sort it out” method leads to things being upvoted, presumably by those users scrolling their main feed who don’t even notice what subreddit it is from, and then comment sections full of “who is upvoting this junk” “this is the third time this has been posted this week” and “mods can we please do something about all of the X posts?”

Also known as the "all unmoderated subreddits eventually become /r/pics" problem. It's why a lot of major subs opted-out of being default when that was still a thing.

I've heard a lot of argumentation along those lines from users that seem to really not care what really made Reddit a special place on the Internet. To them, Reddit is another Instagram/TikTok/Facebook clone, and it seems that's a viewpoint the company is trying to support. It seems completely brain-dead in terms of understanding why the website got popular in the first place, but it seems there's a good number of "satisfied" users that want it that way.

link
evandale 1106 days ago
> I have seen many cases where the “just let the votes sort it out” method leads to things being upvoted, presumably by those users scrolling their main feed who don’t even notice what subreddit it is from, and then comment sections full of “who is upvoting this junk” “this is the third time this has been posted this week” and “mods can we please do something about all of the X posts?”

Oh come on, you can't be serious. These are different groups of people. The same users who upvote things are not also complaining about what is being upvoted. You're not going to upvote things and then comment on the post to complain about how it's being upvoted.

It's the "engaged users" who create comment sections full of "who is upvoting this junk" because they don't understand the little circle of of people who make multiple "high quality" posts every day are the minority and the unwashed masses the moderators hate so much actually _DO_ want to see the reposts, memes, sunset pictures, and questions about the best place to find a burger because it's the one neutral topic people don't get into petty political fights over and comb through your comment history in an effort to dunk on you and defeat your point with an ad hominem.

link
stetrain 1106 days ago
> Oh come on, you can't be serious. These are different groups of people. The same users who upvote things are not also complaining about what is being upvoted.

Yes, that was the entire point of my comment.

link