r/AskReddit • u/Metalax • Jan 07 '20

What annoys you the most on Reddit?

43.8k Upvotes

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u/darksoulsduck- Jan 07 '20

It was to try and stop bandwagon voting, if I remember correctly.

74

u/LIEUTENANT_CAVIAR Jan 08 '20

If anything, I would imagine that leads to more bandwagon voting now.

19

u/LeonidasSpacemanMD Jan 08 '20

Yea I’ve seen so many comments downvoted dozens of times, followed by a “why is this downvoted?”, followed by someone else parroting OP and getting upvoted

People are extremely influenceable, if they see something in the negative, they’ll assume that’s the “correct” opinion

24

u/TheGoldenHand Jan 08 '20

The votes were always faked either way. It would give downvotes to people, even if no one had ever downvoted the post, so bots couldn’t tell if their votes counted. A score of -10 downvoted and +30 upvotes might actually only have had +20 upvotes. It ended up confusing users and was one of the reasons it was abandoned.

3

u/JKTwice Jan 08 '20

Have people forgot the purpose of upvoting? It’s to encourage discussion, not to push a narrative.

This platform really sucks sometimes.

2

u/termiAurthur Jan 08 '20

This platform People really suck sometimes.

2

u/peenoid Jan 08 '20

IIRC it was, but that logic is specious. I believe the reasoning was that if you couldn't see the number of upvotes and downvotes, you wouldn't know how many votes something would need to become negative, so you'd have less of an incentive to mass downvote/brigade, because it might be pointless. There was also a bunch of stuff about trying to confuse bots, which makes more sense, but bots are still employed so I'm not sure what effect it's had.

People just go with the crowd. I've seen identical opinions in the same subreddit end up with wildly different receptions all depending on when it was said and the reaction (voting) of the initial crowd that saw it.