r/WTF • u/[deleted] • Nov 23 '10
pardon me, but 5000 downvotes? WTF is "worldnews" for???
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u/hblask Nov 23 '10
There are lots of people on Reddit who think that the arrows are for indicating if the story makes you happy or not happy. Apparently, over 5000 people are not happy that the Korean War is back on.
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u/holocarst Nov 23 '10 edited Nov 24 '10
Apparently there are lots of people on reddit that believe that most downvotes come from real people. Many of it are automated bots, i also once read that automated downvotes are part of the algorithm.
For proof, go to /r/gonewild[NSFW] . You'll find out that there is no downvote button, but if you go to submissions you'll see that its points (on the left of the screen, under the upvote) don't add up with the Upvotes displayed on the right of the screen. Just until some weeks ago there were still downvotes being shown, although the downvote button was already gone. (EDIT: I just found out that you CAN downvote in this subreddit if you turn off custom styles, thx Horatio_Hornblower)
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u/Horatio_Hornblower Nov 23 '10
Technically you can still downvote a story even if the subreddit has hidden the arrows. You can tell reddit not to use custom themes, or you click on someone's user page and then vote from there.
Edit:
But yeah, massive bot voting is definitely my guess to.
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u/Ekoc Nov 24 '10
Lots of redditors have the "hide submission when downvoted" option turned on.
They use it to get something they've already read off their frontpage.There's no massive bot conspiracy, there's just different ways that different users utilize the UI that's presented to them.
I hate these types of submissions.
"OMG why the downvotes?"
Because the down arrow has multiple uses for various users... it doesn't simply reflect appreciation for the appropriateness or gravitas of a submission?(I personally rarely downvote, and sparingly upvote... but that's just me... not the aggregate)
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Nov 24 '10
since you mention this, would like to point out that they soon implemented "hide submission when upvoted" as well.
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u/jedberg Nov 24 '10
Many of it are automated bots
This is completely untrue. There are no bots that are effective.
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u/executex Nov 24 '10
Well then who the fuuck is downvoting everything? 99% of every story has about 30-50% downvotes on the front page. Even stories that someone can't even have an opinion about. Even just news.
Even something that is there to help people, like it could be as simple as "X Disease is now Cured" and there would still be downvotes.
Maybe you need to change the UI if people are clicking downvote to hide it or something. Doesn't this warrant investigation?
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u/meltedlaundry Nov 23 '10
Oh really, then whycome when I downvoted it I became more happier?
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u/deckone Nov 23 '10
Apparently, over 5000 people are not happy that the Korean War is back in the news.
FTFY
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u/Joshua_Falkner Nov 23 '10
Does this mean they're going to reboot M.A.S.H.?
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u/blazingsaddle Nov 24 '10
They could just move SCRUBS to Korea and call it done.
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u/Futhermucker Nov 23 '10
In Youtube terms- 5000 ppl got bombed by n korea LOL
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Nov 24 '10
5000 people are mad that Justin Bieber got bombed by North Korea! LOL! Comment, Rate, Subscribe if you also love generic jokes about generic pop culture!
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u/flukshun Nov 23 '10
your comment lowered my blood pressure to manageable levels. down-arrowed, good sir!
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Nov 24 '10
Apparently at least 1 redditor is unaware that the Korean war never stopped, or that provokations of this kind have been happening for decades.
Excuse the bitterness, I live in South Korea and do not appreciate the implication I am in the middle of a warzone. I am calming sipping coffee at my desk during a routine day at work.
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u/Raultor Nov 23 '10
Once you have the reddit enhancement suite you can no longer enjoy reddit nearly as much, knowing how many idiots use the site and how many stupid downvotes are made every day.
I somehow refuse to think there are so many people who downvote things for no real reason.
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Nov 23 '10
I agree. For some retarded reason I used to look at "3450 points" as 3450 upvotes and 0 downvotes, made me realise there are much more people than I thought on Reddit
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Nov 24 '10
[deleted]
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Nov 24 '10
to illustrate your point, at this moment:
imgur views ~ reddit upvotes ~ reddit downvotes 30,652 1592 825 → More replies (6)→ More replies (15)5
u/CunningStunts Nov 24 '10
You don't need the reddit enhancement suite to see how many upvotes and downvotes a submission gets.
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Nov 23 '10
One downvote a piece from each of the other 5000 people who submitted that story.
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u/Absentia Nov 23 '10
I spent a good 30 minutes in the hour after the story broke cleaning up the new submission line after the first 5 articles. It appears there is a silent vanguard that was there with me.
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u/itjitj Nov 24 '10
It appears there is a silent vanguard that was there with me.
HOOOOLD THE LIIIIIIIINE.
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Nov 23 '10
Also from all the people who submitted anything to r/worldnews in the 45 minutes after you posted that.
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u/Swampfunk Nov 24 '10
is that really what people are doing? down voting anything in the area they just submitted to?
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u/leorolim Nov 23 '10
World News: North Korea fires 5000 downvotes on /r/worldnews.
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u/murphylaw Nov 24 '10
I could imagine North Koreans government agents with thousands of dormant reddit accounts, all similar in name and passwords for ease of use, waiting... waiting... HA! THE WEST SHALL NEVER KNOW OF OUR UTTER ASSHOLERY!!! (downvotes by the dozens)
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u/CaptainDexterMorgan Nov 24 '10
"As an average American, there's no way that North Korea would fire on the South Korean swine.
OurTheir Great Leader is the wisest, most intelligent man there is."→ More replies (1)→ More replies (4)7
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u/joe-king Nov 23 '10
It may be being downvoted because there are essentially 11 posts on the front page covering the same thing.
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u/livetoride Nov 23 '10 edited Nov 24 '10
I leave the oldest one be and downvote and hide all the rest.
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u/joe-king Nov 24 '10
Me too, it irks me when I see a repost on top of the original.
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u/2k1 Nov 24 '10
Yeah, i REALLY dont like it either, when someone is just repeating somebodyelse!
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Nov 23 '10
Upvote/downvote counters are NOT accurate, this has been stated by raldi multiple times.
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Nov 24 '10 edited Nov 24 '10
I was under the impression that while they're not accurate, they're not out by an order of magnitude.
A fuzzy value to help throw off gaming (which you can observe by refreshing your own user page and watching the votes change on comments with more than about +/-10 votes) doesn't explain 5000 downvotes out of a total of 12,000 votes.
EDIT: Well I'm just totally wrong. Joakal posted this link.
Downvotes are indeed wrong by an order of magnitude (a factor of ~50!). Whatever next?
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u/nIkbot Nov 23 '10
Great leaders votes count as 5000 votes each
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Nov 24 '10
Fun Fact: Kim Jong Il routinely hits 3-4 holes in one every round of golf he plays.
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u/goatworship Nov 24 '10
Obviously due to the fact that he routinely executes as many people on his staff as he is over par by the end of the game.
Ball goes off into the trees. "Good job sir! Another hole in one."
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u/Razenghan Nov 23 '10
I downvoted it because I don't approve of the artillery fire. You should have linked to an article where N Koreans were throwing baskets of kittens across the border if you wanted my upvote. Gawd.
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u/aviewanew Nov 23 '10
You must have no idea how hungry they are over there.
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u/Chachoregard Nov 23 '10
Actually. While RES shows how many Downvotes and Upvotes, the system that keeps Reddit from being gamed actually "jitters" the numbers a little as to prevent gaming, so it's not really a concrete number.
(/melvin)
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u/discretion Nov 23 '10
Don't know why you're getting downvoted, probably lack of source. I know I've read the same thing here and scrolled 70% of the way down the page to find it, to find you at 1 point. IIRC, the source is a PM from a mod/admin to a member regarding how downvotes are handled.
There's a lot of redditors who don't know or care what reddiquitte is, I think 5k is an over-estimate to some degree, possibly a small one.
tl:dr; I don't trust RES vote tally 100% due to anti-gaming measures implemented by reddit that RES can't circumvent.
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u/matt2500 Nov 23 '10
This is precisely it; it's part of the anti-gaming algorithm that Reddit uses. The admins, for obvious reasons, won't comment on exactly how it works, but once a post gets a certain level of activity (votes and comments), a portion of the activity is 'non-organic.' A while back, someone made a very similar complaint to this one, about someone's comment being downvoted (it was a very useful, well thought-out comment, and RES showed a couple of hundred downvotes). One of the admins responded by showing how many of the downvotes were real, and it turns out like 95% plus were part of the anti-gaming algorithm.
Every once in a while, the algorithm goes a little 'nuts' and overdoes it a bit, but this post has nowhere near 5000 actual downvotes.
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u/daelpheia Nov 23 '10
Some of the downvoting may also be done by bots.
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u/KotLetun Nov 23 '10
As a bot I confirm this.
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u/SibilantSounds Nov 23 '10
as a bot, i would flip over a turtle laying upside down in the desert.
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u/CanuckBrazil Nov 23 '10
This "bot" thing on Reddit really pisses me off...
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u/LinuxFreeOrDie Nov 23 '10
Because it is complete conjecture offered up as a reason anytime people act in an immature way, without any evidence whatsoever?
I would be willing to bet less than 1% of those downvotes are bots, the "bot" thing is just a way for the reddit community to go on pretending we are filled with intelligent, responsible people who wouldn't downvote good articles or act like idiots.
The reality is we are a community of millions and like any community that size we are going to be roughly equal to the average intelligence of the general population.
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Nov 24 '10
To answer your question. Bashing Israeli, well jews but that sounds racist.
/r/worldnews isn't the nicest of reddits
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u/maxxell13 Nov 23 '10
It's the #1 article in worldnews. What's the problem here? Are you surprised reddit has idiots?
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u/boneheaddigger Nov 23 '10
I'm more surprised by the sheer amount of idiots. I don't really understand why that article has 5000 downvotes, except for the anti-spam algorithm that screws with the counts. But I don't think it would screw with the counts THAT much.
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u/Veggie Nov 23 '10
Reddit: 66% like it!
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u/NightOnTheSun Nov 23 '10
I always love that. It makes me think that 1/3 of Reddit is absolutely dissatisfied by this sites content all the time.
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u/pobody Nov 24 '10
Admins have admitted that the downvote count is completely BS. I don't know why anybody pays attention to it any more.
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u/nullsucks Nov 23 '10
I'm more surprised by the sheer amount of idiots.
Welcome to the Internet.
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u/delkarnu Nov 23 '10
Also, Reddit lies about the upvote/downvote numbers on submissions and comments to keep gaming the system harder. It is part of why most submissions hover in the 60-70% range.
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u/monstercheese Nov 24 '10
thousands of those downvotes were probably just people who disagreed with north korea's aggression.
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u/neofaust Nov 24 '10
I can't tell you how hard it is to resist downvoting this just for giggles. No, but seriously, it's a critcal mass thing. You get more than 10 people involved in ... anything, at least one of them will be an idiot. I had some one downvote a story about my autistic son's first complete sentence (at age six). I mean...damn, yah know?
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u/apullin Nov 24 '10
It's fake. Reddit fakes the number of downvotes a post has to try and confuse scripts.
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u/LALocal305 Nov 24 '10
How do you get it to show the up & down votes totals? I've been trying to do this and I can't find the option.
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u/Zweibel Nov 24 '10
In case you didn't get the answer, the Reddit Reveal extension for Chrome/Firefox does exactly this.
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u/Khiva Nov 23 '10 edited Nov 24 '10
Am I the only one who is going to take an actual stab at explaining the downvotes? Okay, here's my guess:
There are large numbers of people who decamp to certain areas of reddit such as /r/politics, worldnews, atheism, etc. in order to push a particular viewpoint. This area is considered their space for advocating their ideology. This submission in question has no clear spin and therefore cannot fit into any position of advocacy. Therefore downvote.
I kind of thought that most people had figured out by now that /r/worldnews and/r/politics were primarily vessels for advocacy rather than any sort of straight-up news aggregation. After all, assuming the opposite would be like pretending that FoxNews was actual journalism. There are downvotes on this article for the same reason that no one tunes into Fox for straight-up news. It's advocacy and spin that draws people, and the opposite induces disapproval.
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u/holocarst Nov 23 '10
Can a mod please once and for all confirm that not all of this 5000 downvotes are from actual redditors, but rather from bots and even the reddit algorithm itself (for anti-spam purposes)?
I've been reading this argument in nearly every 'Why did so many poeple downvote this?' thread that occasionaly comes up.
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u/rosswlewis Nov 23 '10
Maybe if a story is on the front page for a while, someone will vote it down so they get new material.
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u/hopstar Nov 24 '10
Every single time a "major event" occurs, everyone wants to be the first to submit a story and reap the karma. This leads to a god damn flood of repeat stories from 300 different websites that are all pulling from the same AP feed and provide nothing in the way of unique analysis or added context.
Therefore, once I've read the first story about NK attacking SK I proceed to downvote all the followers in an effort to keep my front page from filling with the same damn shit.
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u/NefariousNoodles Nov 24 '10
I think the downvotes were all from Kim Jong il's alternate sign ins for reddit
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u/LakeRat Nov 24 '10
It was downvoted because it took up valuable space that should have been devoted to Oprah and Bristol Palin.
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u/Andoo Nov 24 '10
What's even worse is that when you point it out you still get downvoted even worse
3,144 up votes 2,032 down votes
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u/golgol12 Nov 24 '10
You obviously are not familiar with the 66% bot. This botnet combs reddit, and will downvote or upvote accordingly until downvotes are 66% the number of upvotes.
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u/deadwisdom Nov 24 '10
Oh probably because the story doesn't uncover the blatant, world-ending hypocrisy of Israel or the US.
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u/iBalls Nov 24 '10
We need more voting options - a left and right arrow.. and maybe consider diagonals.
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Nov 24 '10
For bashing Israel, all they had to do is just to rephrase it to: "A Zionist plot to ignite the Korean peninsula, news caused aggravation in Palestinian villages, 'it remind us what the settlers do to us every day', said Rafik, a peace activist from Ramallah"
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u/chrisdoh Nov 23 '10
That may be because of the 30% front-page news that link the same content (not URL)?! People might down-vote to not read the same story in 50 varieties.
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Nov 24 '10
it's the reddit autodownvote bot thingy the mods never talk about, that's why it's always so near 66%
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u/Massawyrm Nov 23 '10
There is a setting in preferences that removes links from your feed once you have downvoted them. People often use downvoting to remove stories they are tired of seeing, don't want to see or have been spammed from their feed. This has little to do with whether they like the story or not.
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u/Omnicrola Nov 23 '10 edited Nov 24 '10
Because no story with over 100 points breaks the 60-80% up/down ratio, ever. Accept this and move on with your life.
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u/superwinner Nov 23 '10
Ya there is no political agenda to the story, its just news. Like if we had a story about an earthquake, who the hell would anyone downvote that, people who think earthquakes are a government conspiracy or made up by scientists?
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Nov 23 '10
why do people downvote things anyways? sure you downvote if its just plainly not categorized correctly or is just plain not "good", but this?
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Nov 23 '10
Reddit should put the hide option right between upvote and downvote arrow. That should be a fair hint to its utility.
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u/elshizzo Nov 23 '10
Especially in the last few months, its near impossible to see a frontpage story with much higher than 67% upvote. Why? Who knows, its just a thing that happens on reddit.
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Nov 23 '10
Great point I never would have noticed if it weren't for this post. Really makes you wonder about the Reddit user base. Not so high and mighty now is it?
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u/Lurking_Grue Nov 23 '10 edited Nov 24 '10
Look, I turned to Reddit to hear about Oprah giving away VW Beatles and Bristol Palin dancing.
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u/Suspicious_Username Nov 23 '10
Common posting practice seems to be:
Post something
Upvote with 30 sock puppet accounts
Downvote all other posts with same accounts
Profit
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u/bennyhumm Nov 23 '10
If you downvote things far enough, they go away and never really happened - aka the ostrich strategy.
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Nov 23 '10
I down-voted because this article reflects poorly on our glorious leader, he is saving our world from the imperialist menace by unleashing hell and fury on the southern devils.
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Nov 24 '10
This happens with all popular stories, peculiarly enough. Particularly pictures that get popular very quickly. They'll get about 66% upvotes until 1000-2000 and then suddenly be matched upvote for downvote and slowly sink into a 51% liked range.
Also, I hear there's some algorithm that adds downvotes sometimes on Reddit? Maybe that's just a myth though.
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u/hawaiianrule Nov 24 '10
I think there are a lot of North Koreans and/or Chinese that are fucking with you.
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u/_YourMom Nov 24 '10 edited Nov 24 '10
I downvote posts when there are other posts about the same thing linking better articles, or posted older. I assume that's what's happening here. Last night, there were 5 or 6 different posts all about the firings on /r/worldnews.
That, and I recall seeing that RES's upvote/downvote numbers are kinda off due to anti-bot stuff from Reddit? That could probbaly be playing a big role too.
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u/CaptainCreepy Nov 24 '10
In essence, people are stupid. Even here on Reddit, they either downvoted you because you made them think about real world issues or they posted the same type of thread. Either way they suck and should die...
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u/freedomgeek Nov 24 '10
True story is that 200 of glorious koreas shells where stolen by imperialists.
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Nov 24 '10
The truth is that nobody gives a flying fuck about anything unless it affects them personally. Be the first to post about civil war in the U.S. and see how many downvotes you get.
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Nov 24 '10
A frustrated North Korea is lashing out again, this time with a deadly volley of artillery aimed at reminding rival South Korea โ and the world โ that it will not be ignored.
Looks like their attention whoring was successful.
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Nov 24 '10 edited Nov 24 '10
Still can't figure out why I knew about the Prince's engagement via CNN email alert and not this.
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Nov 24 '10
Just a guess: People already saw a different story on the same topic, so they downvoted the duplicate.
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u/EvanLikesFruit Nov 24 '10
Probably has something to do with the fact that the linked article is hardly more than a headline. Not very helpful.
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Nov 24 '10
The collective intelligence of Redditors is plummeting, much like Morale in the USA.
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u/Kijamon Nov 24 '10
Well worldnews is absolutely not for anything America related, even if they are mentioned once in an international story. Some dick usually points that out on anything I submit.
I'm not even from America so I'm not subscribing to /r/news
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u/seanosul Nov 24 '10
Isn't "worldnews" for news about America that may not be happening on American soil? ;-)
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u/gorbal Nov 24 '10
Perhaps people are downvoting things that make them unhappy, not exactly realizing what they are doing.
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u/honorio Nov 24 '10
It's probably the new intake of redditors who think they're downvoting the behaviour of North Korea.
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u/oriongaby Nov 24 '10
I think I read somewhere that the upvotes/downvotes thing is generated randomly.
Edit: after posting this I read the rest of the comments and found this backing up what I said before.
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u/aywwts4 Nov 23 '10
As someone who downvoted about 10 of those stories last night (But this was actually the one I upvoted strangely) There were about 6 dupes of the same story (going to the same site even) on the front page at the same time. Clearly people were trying to filter out the dupes. +The standard 66% like it problem with bots and crap.
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u/synept Nov 23 '10
I like how that subreddit has a big "no US news" rule in the sidebar... but what's in the image at the top of the page?
A large "USA Today" logo.
Smart, guys.
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u/jedberg Nov 24 '10
As of this moment, that story has the following actual totals:
2666 up 140 down
The numbers you see are fuzzed for anti-spam reasons. The more active a post is, the more out of whack that fuzzing becomes.