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A comment on ‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’. Parent comment

Re:‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the ... by Reedx on Thursday April 19, 2018 @12:06PM (#16877034)
There are some subreddits where they are hidden for a period of time (not sure how long, but it's quite a while). I wonder if anyone has analyzed those?
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Re:‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the ... by minimaxir on Thursday April 19, 2018 @12:18PM (#16877149)
A formal statistical experiment was done in /r/politics about the impact of hiding vote counts temporarily but it did not find statistical evidence that it made an impact on discourse: https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/mitmediala...
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Re:‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the ... by thaumaturgy on Thursday April 19, 2018 @12:29PM (#16877258)
Low-effort comment, but: I really appreciate your content, both here and on Reddit. It's refreshing to see anyone doing any of this sort of analysis, and it takes a lot of effort to do it, and you do it really well and at a rate that's mind-boggling.
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Re:‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the ... by minimaxir on Thursday April 19, 2018 @12:46PM (#16877436)
Thanks! I do have other cool things planned with the Reddit data pipeline too, so stay tuned! ;)

(for clarification, the linked statistical analysis isn't mine)

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Re:‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the ... by sli on Thursday April 19, 2018 @03:22PM (#16879183)
Was /r/politics given a vote-hiding feature that other subreddits didn't have? Votes and downvote buttons are typically hidden with custom CSS that users can disable, which would completely invalidate these results. Votes can be hidden for real for a short time, but cannot be disabled completely.
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Re:‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the ... by cookiecaper on Thursday April 19, 2018 @03:15PM (#16879108)
/r/politics is aggressively left-wing, so much so that I'd doubt anyone interested in real discourse is trying anymore. I'd think an experiment like that would need to be done on a clean subreddit that isn't bringing in any baggage, or a pre-existing ideology-based ban list, to test its validity.
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Re:‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the ... by stochastic_monk on Thursday April 19, 2018 @12:20PM (#16877175)
r/politics said it didn’t make much difference, but they left it that way anyhow. The feedback based ranking implicitly supports echo chambering, but there’s not much of a way around that.
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Re:‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the ... by paulmd on Thursday April 19, 2018 @12:48PM (#16877454)
> The feedback based ranking implicitly supports echo chambering, but there’s not much of a way around that.

Traditional topic-based forums are better, because you can't suppress unpopular-but-correct opinions by downvoting. Even if you don't care about Fake Internet Points (and the reason they exist is because we do, gamification works), if you state something that goes against the prevailing hivemind your opinion will literally be hidden unless users go out of their way to find them.

(and yes, I browse HN with showdead=yes for the same reason)

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Re:‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the ... by CompanionCuuube on Monday April 23, 2018 @12:43PM (#16905064)
Same here. I read all of the gray comments, because it means the comment was something unpopular enough to downvote.
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Re:‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the ... by bhandziuk on Thursday April 19, 2018 @03:59PM (#16879559)
what does showdead do?
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Re:‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the ... by paulmd on Thursday April 19, 2018 @04:31PM (#16879848)
Shows posts that have been flagged from mods, users, or shadowbanning and hidden from the normal display.
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Re:‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the ... by dspillett on Thursday April 19, 2018 @12:36PM (#16877336)
> but they left it that way anyhow

If it makes little difference either way, perhaps they left it on to quiet those who would keep suggesting they try it even though they already have.

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Re:‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the ... by Lionsion on Thursday April 19, 2018 @12:18PM (#16877153)
> There are some subreddits where they are hidden for a period of time (not sure how long, but it's quite a while)

I think there's a subreddit-level setting for that, but the max is only something like a couple of days.

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Re:‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the ... by linker3000 on Thursday April 19, 2018 @12:47PM (#16877447)
0-1440 mins

Just checked - Reddit mod /r/askelectronics

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