Upvoting and the hidden hand
summary
Origins: Reddit starts with interesting/boring and a five‑star trial before settling on up/down arrows; Product Hunt intentionally uses no downvote to avoid competitors gaming downloads. Both combine votes with scoring code — Reddit’s open-source hotness algorithm and Product Hunt’s evolving anti‑fraud filters — to surface content. Gaming shows up via fake accounts (early Product Hunt required manual deletion), algorithms constantly change, and scale matters: Reddit cites ~250M monthly users while Product Hunt’s global feed and daily emails reach hundreds of thousands.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (7)
- 0:00Introduction and welcome
- 0:49History of the upvote feature
- 2:57Upvote vs like in community design
- 8:19Content discovery and algorithms
- 11:07Responsibility in community moderation
- 13:54Gaming the system and fraud
- 15:17Are we media companies?
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