how reddit encourages mediocrity.

i remember reading a statistic like this once:

"in 1926, charlie chaplin was voted the best actor in hollywood. he was also voted the worst actor in hollywood."

I don't know what year it was. i don't know what the competition was. Point is that he was both first and last.

The same thing happens all over the place. I've seen people listed as both the "best" and "worst" dressed in the same dumb competition.

This pattern is known as "You either love it or you hate it!" and a lot of the good stuff fits this pattern.

(continues...)

At the website Reddit, you can give a positive vote, or a negative vote. Negative votes cancel out positive votes.

If the reddit system was used everywhere, charlie chaplin would've been a nobody. each of his 'worst actor' votes would've cancelled out one of the best actor votes.

Due to the flawed voting system at reddit, the highest rated articles are not the most popular, but something more obscure and bland. They're the ones which have the highest ratio of love to hate. Reddit promotes the kind of articles that you either love, or don't care about.

Take Paul Graham for example. He's a middle of the road easy listenin kind of guy. Either you love him or, shrug, who cares? And he's very popular at reddit.

Enough of this. Here's a quote that says it so much better than I could:

if you're not doing something that someone hates, it's probably mediocre.

from: Death by Risk Aversion at Creating Passionate Users.

The only ironic thing, and which threatens to derail my whole idea, is that the article 'Death by Risk Aversion', is one I stumbled across on Reddit.

'Carlin' on Thu, 27 Apr 2006 05:44:36 GMT, sez:

Immagine if the same system was used in elections; It wouldn't be the most popular person who won, it would be the person who no one wanted to waste negative votes on.
Or if a system like that was introduced to decide the words most popular internet browser; Everyone would be so busy hating IE and FF that those obscure browsers that no one has heard of (like Opera) would win.

'Arjan Zuidhof' on Thu, 27 Apr 2006 11:23:27 GMT, sez:

That's completely my line of view. At first I thought it a good idea, because something bubbles up as long as enough people think something is interesting. But the whole point is when loads of people like something and loads of people think it's crap it gets 0 points on reddit. On the other hand, Digg works only with positive votes. You can report something or whatever, but you cannot vote something down. The funny thing is, SecurityMonkey posted one of his articles on Digg (Geeks Take Down Dirty C-Level Executives - With Email - http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/security/investigator/archives/008976.asp, which went to the Frontpage within the hour. I thought Reddit readers should not be left out of the fun and submitted it. After two days the article only received 2 points...

'anon' on Mon, 01 May 2006 19:11:33 GMT, sez:

Actually, I hate paul graham with a passion.

'Max' on Tue, 17 Apr 2007 03:18:16 GMT, sez:

I don't really consider Reddit... competitive. It's social, and the stories submitted are somehow meant to go along with that society. If I decide to submit a site, it's because I "think it would be popular at Reddit" or I'm interested in seeing how popular it is or I think it will spur interesting discussion or whatever. It's not that I think it's "the best" article. It might very well not be. As a competitive system, no, Reddit doesn't work. It's not the point; it wouldn't work for competitive things.

'Jamie' on Tue, 17 Apr 2007 12:34:39 GMT, sez:

I don't know about you, but I don't vote down things that I don't agree with. I vote down things that are stupid, and vote up things that are interesting, whether or not I agree with them.

'Peter Crabtree' on Tue, 17 Apr 2007 12:41:30 GMT, sez:

Actually, last I checked, Reddit doesn't use down votes when calculating position in the default, "hot" sorting, but that was a while ago. They could've changed it back.

'Momus' on Tue, 17 Apr 2007 18:27:12 GMT, sez:

My hunch is that people who are passionate about an issue are more likely to upvote than people who don't like something are to downvote it. Your assumption that people vote the same amount up and down is without factual basis.

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