The Reddit Echo Chamber
With all the corona virus news going around, I'm noticing bot downvoting armies on Reddit supporting the views of incumbent politicians.
Any criticism of their handling is immediately downvoted to oblivion and all praise posts are upvoted.
So what caught the eye was both the speed of the votes and also the magnitude. In a small country or subreddit, getting such moves is definitely not ordinary.
This is where the danger of algorithms and bots lie. Unlike your traditional phpbb forum where all posts are relatively equal, when voting is introduced, more popular posts float to the top.
Those top posts get more visibility and hence more rewards. For better or for worse, I believe that this is the algorithm that is going to define us online for the next decade and beyond.
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We need voteless social media and local communities in general.
Yeah I like the old phpbb model where threads that have a new post float to the top. Not perfect but it reduces echo.
That's currently not viable because everyone wants to be as popular as possible, even when they're not making money out of it. This leads to clutter. We'd need communities that can properly segment the audience without making them feel like they're missing out. Ironically, I think somewhat like the steem communities would be ideal.