[Karunamon]

So Reddit's got this community called "Shit Reddit Says", also known as 'SRS'. It originally started as a group of Something Awful users doing what can be described as a trolling operation.

SRS's stated goal is to highlight people on Reddit saying bad things (casual racism, stuff like that). Someone from the community finds a post somewhere on reddit they feel meets the criterion, and they post it there. Often immediately afterwards, the post, and the user who made it, begin losing karma at a rate that cannot be described as coincidental.

One of the rules in SRS is "don't touch the poop" - you're not supposed to participate in a thread that gets linked there. However, looking at the relation between post time on SRS, and karma over time, there's no other explanation for what happens to the scores of comments that get posted there.

Before you say "meh, racists, who cares?" - two problems. First, SRS's aegis has expanded to cover any criticism of the social justice movement, rather than actual hurtful comments. Second, what's happening is explicitly against the site rules regarding vote manipulation (vote brigading) - other subreddits who engaged in similar behavior had to institute rules that mandate either "no participation" links (a CSS hack that disables the voting buttons), or outright banning of intra-subreddit linking at the urging of site administration staff.

[mikeash]

It's interesting that there's a whole subculture of this stuff now. There's a ton of subreddits starting with "bad," such as badhistory, badlinguistics, and badphilosophy whose purpose is to collect links to comments seen as "bad" in the context of whatever field it's about. This could actually be a valuable service, where you get experts in to correct misconceptions or incorrect claims that are getting a lot of attention. Unfortunately, they're never about that, but are simply about making fun of people behind their backs.

I'm reminded of the Robbers Cave Experiment, wherein all it took to create conflict between two groups of summer campers was the act of dividing them into groups. The subreddit system is genius for allowing one site to serve so many different communities, but it also sets the stage for subreddits to see other subreddits as the enemy.

(And if this comment was on Reddit, I imagine there would pretty quickly be a link to it from /r/badphilosophy talking about how badly I've misunderstood the experiment and how stupid I am, all while not actually educating me or any of the people reading my comment.)

[unbudgingprawn]

Do you have any data that shows that trend? I frequently see threads where people complain about how blatant the effect is and how hard they're being brigaded, usually with 300+ karma

[Karunamon]

Not right now - SRS is blocked at work.

One simple experiment is to look at the front page of the subreddit - each link description has, per the rules, the amount of comment karma it has when it was submitted. Look at relatively new posts, and look at the difference in karma at submission time and then as time goes on.

I tried this a few times months ago, and being linked from SRS led to a significant decline in scores on every post in the top 25.

[unbudgingprawn]

>''I enjoy hating on people who think 'fat acceptance' is a legitimate thing...they're easy targets'' [+1521, gilded] (reddit.com) >[–]RodneyHFarva 1706 points 21 hours ago

>"A bunch of din du nuffins. But when these thugs get killed their mom will cry murder and say he was such a good boy." [+27] (reddit.com) >esiper 50 points 12 hours ago

>"It started with /r/jailbait, but I wasn't a ephebophile so I didn't speak up. Then they came for /r/thefappening, but I didn't speak up because I wasn't into fuzzy pictures of people I don't know. Then /r/gamergate, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a gamer. I'm speaking up now." [+28] (reddit.com) >[–][deleted] 194 points 22 hours ago*

It looks like there's an increase in karma score after it gets linked from SRS

[Karunamon]

Two things I noticed - all of those comments are more than 12 hours old, which is long enough for the communities the comments came from to counter the downvoting.

It also appears that these are copypasted straight from the front page, you'd have to click through and look at the score on the linked subreddit.

[unbudgingprawn]

The second part of each line was the comment score/username after I clicked through link, I'll add a timestamp of when I viewed them

(submitted 33 minutes ago by so_srs) "The modern view on gender: Acceptable: Female and spending most of your time on the celphone, reading literotica, and playing candy crush. Unacceptable: Male and spending most of your time on the computer, watching porn, and playing World of Warcraft." [+25] (reddit.com) -> (at 1:16 CST)[–]comosayllama 68 points an hour ago

(submitted 3 hours ago by cakevodka ) things Hitler did were terrible for sure, but, at the same time, it would be intellectually dishonest to not call him a great politician and orator. The fact that he tried to wipe out a couple races and nationalities does not make his achievements in politics and economics any less significant [+66] (reddit.com) -> (1:17 CST) [–]_Pornosonic_ 144 points 7 hours ago

Those combined with the 3 earlier comments I posted make up the last five submissions to /r/shitredditsays(with the exception of one where the original comment was deleted), the first part is the linked comment and the second is the comment score(now with timestamp!)

I can't actually find a single instance from the front page where the score goes down after being submitted. The opposite is usually the case, where the score increases after being posted to SRS