[pupppet]

Leading up to the election Reddit fed me stories about Kamala’s huge rally turnouts, Trump‘s tiny rally turnouts, and endless links to stories about positive signs she would win. It was a forgone conclusion to me it was going to be a blowout for her.

[selfmodruntime]

Same. And for about 12 to 24 hours after the election loss it was... quiet. A few people coming to terms that the illusion had disappeared, but not in any way comparable to the interactions beforehand.

Then it returned with a vengeance.

[scarab92]

The default subs are filled with left-wing conspiracy theories these days.

A consequence of years of reddit allowing its mods to shadow ban centrist voices.

It’s hard to see how reddit escapes this mess. They need more normal people and less political zealots, but the site is already so far down the echo chamber path that its overt political partisanship scares off potential new normal users from participating.

[selfmodruntime]

> It’s hard to see how reddit escapes this mess

I don't see why they would. Rage drives engagement, and they just got the number one rage inducing factor back into public office for the next 4 years. This form of engagement also works better on progressives I think.

[firesteelrain]

Honestly, the internet is killing us all slowly. It was better not to argue with our neighbors on the Internet or even social media. Or fellow citizens or even foreign ones CONSTANTLY

[losvedir]

As someone with a reddit account old enough to vote, it's always been like that. If you only browsed reddit it would have been a sure bet that Bernie Sanders would be the democratic candidate, and Ron Paul was going to win before that.

[swores]

Reddit's algorithm of what to show you is based in part on what you've chosen to follow and in part on what is most likely to get you to stay on the site and engage with the content. It's not designed to give you an accurate view of upcoming election outcomes, and is not at all surprising that it might show someone mostly content from one side's fans, regardless of whether they side is going to win or not.

[gruez]

>Reddit's algorithm of what to show you is based in part on what you've chosen to follow and in part on what is most likely to get you to stay on the site and engage with the content.

You see the same phenomena on /r/all, which isn't personalized.

[harvey9]

'you' would mean the average user on /all rather than you personally.

I deleted my account ages ago to break my own habit.

[NooneAtAll3]

I lost faith in reddit algorithm when Silksong got announced, got 30k+ upvotes in multiple places... and /r/all was politics-only

[tanjtanjtanj]

I actually found out about the Silksong “announcement” from it being number one on the r/all feed followed by several other switch 2/games announcements in the top 5…

You have to remember that there was some pretty nutso tariff news right about the same time, not that strange for it to be highly represented on the front page.

[dinero_rojo]

Reddit’s algo is doing an astonishingly bad job if they want me to stay engaged based on the things I follow. I’ve got two seperate accounts one for general stuff, the other intended strictly for NSFW purposes and meeting people with similar interests. I spent maybe half an hour yesterday on the NSFW account blocking everything that wasn’t in my interests, but more and more unrelated (and general) subreddits kept being recommended to me. After a while of this, I gave up and deleted the app, which I can’t imagine is good for Reddit’s bottom line. I’ll probably be back at some point as it is still in my experience the best way to see that stuff and meet like-minded people, but I was kinda shocked at how difficult (impossible?) it was to just keep one account restricted to specific interests that I do kinda want to be engaged with.

[93po]

there is no part of the reddit algo that ever promotes pro-trump stuff, ever

[mvdtnz]

There was a brief moment when pro-Trump content would occasionally surface on the algorithm, at which point the site operators hit the panic button and banned the offending subreddit.

[firesteelrain]

r/Conservative is still popular. It never makes front page though

[dashundchen]

Conservative is even more of an echo chamber then your average subreddit. It has to be one of the most heavily moderated and censored sub on reddit.

Flaired only threads, so many bans and and hundreds of deleted posts on your average thread for anything against he MAGA party line.

[amiga386]

By which you mean /r/The_Donald

The reason for deliberately antagonizing them, and eventually banning them, was that /r/The_Donald's moderators were directly telling their membership to upvote specific posts so they'd rocket to the front page. "Inorganic results", "vote manipulation", "gaming the algorithm", whatever you'd like to call it.

So the admins had a reason to ban it, even if no doubt they and most of Reddit's users saw Trump supporters as "the enemy".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/The_Donald#Prominence_on_Red...

Also, as this article has reminded me... 'member that time Spez admitted that he invisibly edited users' comments?

https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/5frg1n/tifu_...

[Goronmon]

The reason for deliberately antagonizing them, and eventually banning them, was that /r/The_Donald's moderators were directly telling their membership to upvote specific posts so they'd rocket to the front page.

There would need to be extensive evidence to convince me that the subreddit wasn't just botted. Threads would get thousands of posts extremely quickly, and there would sometimes be only a handful of comments. I don't really believe organic users were spending their free time refreshing "new" just in case a new post was made that required an immediate upvote.

[amiga386]

It doesn't need bots to explain it. And even the Reddit admins were convinced T_D had legitimate traffic, which is why they were reticent to kill it... they just didn't like the manipulation and brigading and so on. If they could show it was bots, they would've killed it much sooner.

https://old.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/4fh8s9/this...

Normal humans tend to upvote things that are already upvoted. But normal humans don't tend to look at the incoming stream of posts.

Ordinary T_D users were refreshing the subreddit's front page. Mods stickied the posts they wanted to rocket to the top. This got them past the hurdle where very few people look at /new to give those all-important first few upvotes. Ordinary T_D users upvoted the stickied posts. The mods then unstickied them less than an hour later, because now they're "organically" at the top of T_D, and the upvotes continued to pile in, rocketing the post to /r/all

Meanwhile, all the other subreddits weren't playing this game, so their users votes were split across multiple posts on their subreddit's front page. And mods of other subs use sticked posts for administrative notices, which are worded as such and tend not to get upvoted much... but if you were to sticky a normal post, users would upvote it. But stickied posts aren't eligible for /r/all... unless you unsticky them. Oops! T_D successfully gamed that oversight.

EDIT1: Also... as the comments in the link above reminds me; it used to be that any post could be stickied, e.g. normal link posts. It wasn't necessarily clear that they were stickied posts. What changed after the T_D manipulation is that sticky posts were renamed "Administrative Notes" and had to be text posts and had to be coloured differently from normal posts. Before that change, they weren't distinguished that way. Now perhaps the subterfuge by mods makes more sense?

EDIT2: WIRED's postmortem on T_D - it was cunning mods, not bots.

https://www.wired.com/story/the-hate-fueled-rise-of-rthe-don...

    T_D’s moderators were looking for a way to game the system and force T_D onto r/all every day.

    The mods realized that a key lay in the “sticky” system, by which moderators could pin a post at the top of their subreddit indefinitely. The system was meant for announcements, rule changes, upcoming events, and other minutia of day-to-day Redditing. But any thread could be stickied, and stickied threads behaved the same way that any other Reddit thread did: They accrued points by vote, and more points boosted the thread closer to the top of the page. This didn’t typically matter, since a stickied thread was by definition artificially held at the top of its subreddit already. But the mods weren’t trying to make threads visible on The_Donald. They wanted to boost them onto r/all.

    T_D’s moderators began to sticky threads unrelated to their rules or announcements. Instead, they promoted especially provocative user-created threads. This tactic quickly proved effective. Before long, T_D was elevating a post or two onto r/all day after day.

    Another T_D mod, Alex, says the team kept in close touch not only with which threads were successful, but also how mods could encourage their users to vote on stickied threads and drive them higher in Reddit’s r/all rankings. “We trained our subscribers to upvote and comment in every thread,” Alex says. “That is how we originally gamed the algorithm.” Jessie, a third mod, says T_D’s mods made “repetitive requests” to the user base to vote and boost threads. They used memes, gifs, and jokes to push users to act. It worked.

[selfmodruntime]

> Reddit's algorithm of what to show you is based in part on what you've chosen to follow and in part on what is most likely to get you to stay on the site and engage with the conten

That's not the whole truth. Subreddit Moderation is the key point that's vulnerable to abuse. I block all political subreddits. My blocklist has 120 entries. 10 of those are of inherent political nature. The rest is just like /r/pics - enshittified rage bait about Trump.

[jayd16]

There was certainly a lot of optimism but I don't think you can really say the mood was a clear blow out. Anyone mentioning such a thing would get many replies of "doesn't matter...vote anyway!"

I think Kamala actually did have the lead in Reddit's demographics.

[hattmall]

I would absolutely get that same feeling from reddit. But like do you not interact in the actual world? Trump would have a rally and areas 45 minutes away are backed up with traffic for 8 hours. Kamala had one and you can't even reliably figure out how to get tickets and other than motorcade closures traffic is nothing.

So much anti-Kamala and pro-Trump stuff in the communities that are supposed to be strong for her.

That Kamala did as well as she did was really shocking to me. I mean it wasn't close, but Kamala couldn't even make past the very first debate in 2020 and her list of accomplishments is basically nothing. I never met anyone in real life with an actual compelling or supportive argument for her. At best it was "she's not Trump".

Taking Biden out and having no primary is probably the worst thing Democrats could have done.

[parineum]

> having no primary is probably the worst thing Democrats could have done.

I'd argue the 15 years of identity politics that both led to Harris as VP and prevented them from being able to commit the faux paux of possibly passing her up by letting their constituents decide if they liked her was their worst decision.

[Suppafly]

Your entire post reads like a bot post on reddit. Not sure if you're trying to prove the point and forgot the /s or actually believe the nonsense you've posted.