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Reddit Software Change: Submissions Starting With Zero Points

Posted by Dharmesh Shah on Sat, Jan 20, 2007 @ 07:26 PM
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I discovered an interesting change in the last few days at reddit.com.

 

Seems there was a software upgrade recently and there’s some “intelligence” going on as to whether or not submission of new articles start with one point (the “classic” behavior) or start with zero points.  

 

I’m not sure yet what the algorithm is based on.  Here are some possibilities that reddit may be using to make this determination:

 

  1. karma level of the submitting user
  2. frequency of posting of the reddit user
  3. frequency of posts from the website for which an article is being submitted (i.e. domain name)
  4. prior “track record” of articles submitted from the website before

 

If you have better theories, please leave them in the comments.  Would love to hear them.  I found this change curious (and there may be other changes that have gone in as well).

 

 

Comments

They are blacklisting certain sites. If your post shows up with 0 points, it isn't even listed in the new submissions queue. I'm starting to like digg better, once I figured out that I could block Apple posts from showing up on the front page. Unfortunately they don't have an option to block stories about digg itself, which also flood the front page.
Posted @ Saturday, January 20, 2007 9:28 PM by read it
Interesting. If this is the case, then there are a lot of mainstream and quality sites that are banned because lots of articles are getting put into zero point status from point of initial submission.
Posted @ Saturday, January 20, 2007 9:35 PM by Dharmesh Shah
The algorithm seems to upvote anything with Haskell, Erlang, Scheme, functional programming.
Posted @ Sunday, January 21, 2007 12:42 AM by dan rather
This happened to me the other day. I submitted the article and had it put in my saved list. I saw zero points. I looked at the details and my vote was there and it said 1 point. Later I did a search for it and it said 1 point. This is not so much discrimination (sorry conspiracy theorists) but rather a bug in the software.
Posted @ Sunday, January 21, 2007 1:25 AM by Eric
Spez has confirmed that it's a bug. It's also only cosmetic, affecting the points that are displayed, but not affecting the points listed in the database and used to generate rankings etc.
Posted @ Sunday, January 21, 2007 12:03 PM by Kamikasei
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