For quite a while I thought the voting on Reddit was a fairly random affair. One makes a post, those who are randomly browsing or who subscribe to a subreddit see it and choose to read it, and either up vote or down vote it.
However I have come to realize that only constitues one aspect of the voting system and another phenomena actually poses a larger contribution.
Alliances and adversaries.
When one get's the attention of another user by replying to a post, and the reply is of note to that user or those following that thread for some reason, those users are inclined to look up one's posting history and vote on one's posts.
So by giving many positive replies, one accumulates a secret "posse" and they will upvote one's posts, and down vote the posts of one's adversaries in the same thread.
This is why some posts seem to attract large numbers of certain types of people while they are seemingly ignored by other groups who theoretically should take interest in them. It has attracted the attention of a single person with a large, like minded following. The very same post, at some point, might attract another person if the opposite perspectives, and their following, and the votes will flip.
It's very similar to tribal warfare, only the persob leading the tribe is not aware of their following and the tribe members are not aware of each other.
21 Oct 2018, 4:40 pm
