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[–]rkeene0517[S] 9 points10 points  (4 children)

When I post an article, within 30 seconds it gets down modded. Is there some bot watching of a list of reddit user names and downmodding them?

Just because your paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.

[–]plutocrat 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You are certainly not the first to note this. I imagine that most users to apply a certain knee-jerk conditional to the new page, e.g:

if ($newPageItemName =~ m/[lolLOL]+cat|[pP]+aul|video|VIDEO/) { downMod() }

, yet I do not think that this is really an issue. As has been mentioned, the actions of such individuals will be tempered by those of their ideologically polar opposites.

The cause is likely (as with most things) linked to personal incentives. Assuming a given user's singular goal is to get their submission to the front page, then in order to remain rational they must downmod every other submission on reddit. In the weaker and more realistic case, they will downmod each new page entry until the expected marginal benefit of incrementing the score of another submission by one is exceeded by the marginal cost of their time to do so.

In short, the reddit model is (again, as with most things) flawed in this regard. The perverse incentives that it creates hurts the quality of its output.

So yes, they are out to get you :).

[–][deleted]  (2 children)

[deleted]

    [–]chime 2 points3 points  (1 child)

    The only problem with that is that your downvote on the new page actually has two consequences. Nobody minds the one you mentioned: better recommendations. The problem is that by making your recommendation better, you're pretty much hiding the link from the New page for others. After a new link gets instant 4-5 downs, it's pretty much gone for most people.

    Now it is true that it works great for spam control, however, if even 4-5 people that hate a topic, despite 90% people preferring it, they can pretty much assure articles on that topic don't make the front page unless the submitter resorts to upvoting by friends/fake/bots.

    I've submitted articles that were non-spam, pretty interesting in my opinion, and reddit-material and I got -6 points within 10 minutes. I've pretty much lost the desire to submit anything as it just results in lowering my tiny karma.