Reddit's Numbers Are a Big Lie

submitted by FThumbStay thirsty, my friends from self.WayOfTheBern

So as most of you know, we've begun a serious migration from our Reddit WotB.

Splitting time between the two for the last week, and being a numbers guy, I've started to notice something - the numbers don't add up.

WotB (there) has regularly shown 400 Here Now (+/-) while WotB (here) has shown 15 Here Now (+/-). But the numbers of posts, comments, and votes are much, much closer to each other than these "here now" suggest.

Now I understand Reddit still has a significantly larger user base, and maybe there are just that many more lurkers here than there, but with all that's happened, and considering our Here Now used to be closer to 250 (+/-) and after something of an exodus/boycott, our numbers are 70% *higher.

My theory: More than half of Reddit's "stats" are bots. I'd wager that as much as 75% of what we see in Here Now are bots and AI accounts, and I think this is solely to sell advertising. On top of this, I also believe the post-blackout "surge" in Here Now is Reddit ramping up the bots to creaqte the appearance of "winning" the standoff so they can show investors that their stunt didn't actually blow a hole in the side of the Good Ship IPO.

It's all a lie, first to pump up the numbers for ad revenue, and now to pump up the numbers even further to assuage the fears of twitchy investors, "showing" that they didn't actually kill their hopes of cashing in on an IPO by going to war against their users and free-labor moderators.

I'm not buying it, and I suspect neither will investors.

all 20 comments
sorted by:
new (suggested)
topinsightfulfun

[–]NetweaselContinuing the struggle 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

One thing to keep in mind here...

There are probably a lot of entities that would be curious about the Top One Thousand Subs In All of Reddit.

And according to the data that Pushshift lifted from Reddit, WotB(Reddit) actually IS one of the Top One Thousand Subs in the over ten million subs that is All Of Reddit.

Remember that thing about "fight the enemy long enough, and you will become them"?

WotB(Reddit) is currently in the top one percent of the top one percent.
Until next time <Skeletor runs away>

[–]NetweaselContinuing the struggle 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

In the only Saidit ranking that I could find, WotB(Saidit) is currently ranked as #126 out of....

How many, exactly? Does anyone know?

[–]RandomCollection 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

One consideration is that Reddit may be trying to drive traffic back by inflating their numbers.

They may be trying to persuade those who have taken part in the protest to return and maybe they will be fishing for "mods that will shill for Reddit".

At the end of the day, I think that if the core user base has migrated, then Reddit is in for a shock and ongoing profitability challenges.

[–]therazorx👹🧹🥇 The road to truth is often messy. 👹📜🕵️🎖️ 7 insightful - 1 fun7 insightful - 0 fun8 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

On top of this, I also believe the post-blackout "surge" in Here Now is Reddit ramping up the bots to creaqte the appearance of "winning" the standoff so they can show investors that their stunt didn't actually blow a hole in the side of the Good Ship IPO.

Yes.

Edit: To be clear, I don't know of a social media site that DIDN'T do this, including Reddit itself when Digg was burning itself down.

Facebook videos? Fake numbers.

Twitter "engagement"? Fake numbers And also.

Reddit users early on? Fake Numbers.

TikTok "views"? Fake numbers.

Snapchat? same

...etc.

They get away with it because all they have to do is say "whoopsie, it was an accident", and we don't have lawmakers that care are willing to bite the hand that feeds them.

Spez got away with it before, why in the world would we assume he's not doing it again?

Edit 2: Links.

Edit 3: Not just social media apps either

[–]captainramen🇺🇸🛠️ MAGA Communist 🛠️🇺🇸 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

There's no reason to assume the number on the sidebar is the number they report to advertisers. Not scientific, but I just opened up a bunch of tabs here in incognito mode, the number increased by 4.

Public information about their tech stack indicates to me that it's at least partially event driven. And it would have to be because they couldn't scale up otherwise.

To accomplish this you have to sacrifice consistency or availability. For reading data, it's more important to be available; i.e. it's better for ~ n users here now to be fast and wrong stale than slow and 100% accurate.

[–]NetweaselContinuing the struggle 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Not scientific, but I just opened up a bunch of tabs here in incognito mode, the number increased by 4.

Good job. If you can find an easy way to test it, test it.

[–]BlackhaloPurity Pony: Pусский бот 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

to pump up the numbers even further to assuage the fears of twitchy investors, "showing" that they didn't actually kill their hopes of cashing in on an IPO by going to war against their users and free-labor moderators.

That is literally fraud. Buyer beware.

[–]NetweaselContinuing the struggle 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

I have found that a much better indicator of "herenowishness" is "number of comments" or "number of unique commenters."

In the past, say two hours, X unique individuals have actually said something in [location.] There is an unknown multiplier (L) such that for every person commenting, there are L lurkers who have not. Assume L to be an unknown constant.

That makes it a lot more difficult for pingbots to drive the numbers up.

A quicker, easier, fuzzier measurement for actual sub activity is, obviously "number of comments."

For quite a long time at WotB(Reddit) the previously made 25 comments (Reddit default setting on the "comments" page) took less than an hour, oftentimes about 45 minutes. Sometimes as much as three hours, but that was rare.

Currently... <goes to look>
the 100th most recent comment in WotB(Saidit) (Saidit default setting on the "comments" page) was 13 hours ago.

Currently on the WotB(reddit) comment page,,,
<goes to look>

OMG you guys, you need to go look! Until you scroll down, the comments page has one word on it: "kyle"
Dangit! Tried to get an archive, missed it by 2 minutes. https://archive.is/8aNAg
(just picture the comments above the word "kyle" as not being there)

But anyway.. <goes to look again>...
25th comment on WotB(Reddit): two hours ago.

That's not a good thing, that's not a bad thing... that's a thing. Data is data.

[–]FThumbStay thirsty, my friends[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

So, by your analysis, what are you seeing?

[–]NetweaselContinuing the struggle 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

There is another tidbit that has been discovered during recent events, assuming that Reddit's "here now" numbers are accurate....

A "here now" occurs when data is requested, not if/when it is received.
If the "here now" only happened on receipt of data, and not by any blocked accounts that do not receive data, the number would be lower, and much more useful.

What we have now is "Tried to Be Here Now, Whether or Not They Succeeded"
assuming that Reddit's "here now" numbers are accurate....

[–]NetweaselContinuing the struggle 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Well, there was a point in this in which there were no comments made for over a day, with fewer than two dozen people (including mods) even having access to any part of the sub... with over 200 "here now."

If you look at old, old, ollllld automobile odometers, the ones that mechanically record how many miles an automobile has traveled over its lifetime...

Some people would like that recording device to not be accurate, because with fewer miles on it, they can get a better price when selling the automobile.

They had (at the time) two main options.

1) crack the thing open and change the numbers to what they wanted the numbers to be, then put it back together.
2) attach a drill and run the device backwards (I said old) such that the device still thinks it is accurate, while it is not.

Same thing here. Either Reddit is not showing the correct numbers, or somebody is throwing a shitload of Reddit accounts at the WotB(Reddit) part of the database, and the "here now" numbers are technically accurate, but are not giving any useful information.

From out here, we can't tell, except for looking at related information.

[–]NetweaselContinuing the struggle 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Saidit Code is reputed to be "what Reddit code used to be."

Saidit code is available for download. https://github.com/libertysoft3/saidit

In theory, Saidit code is readable, to find out at least what "here now" used to be.

What "here now" actually is in today's Reddit is anybody's guess.

[–]FThumbStay thirsty, my friends[S] 5 insightful - 2 fun5 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

What "here now" actually is in today's Reddit is...

...infested with bots.

[–]CaelianPost No Toasties 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (7 children)

I wonder how each site calculates "here now". I would think that the page detects when you enter, but may not detect when you leave. So it would have to time out after a while. Perhaps there's a difference in that "persistence"?

[–]FThumbStay thirsty, my friends[S] 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (5 children)

I recall it's, at least it used to be, a tally of the number of unique visits within the prior 15 minutes.

[–]NetweaselContinuing the struggle 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

it used to be, a tally of the number of unique visits within the prior 15 minutes.

Easiest way to get the "here now" numbers up would be to change that 15 to a 45 and not tell anybody.

[–]FThumbStay thirsty, my friends[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Could that account for the 200-250 Here Now while the sub was closed to all but 25 (+/-) users?

[–]NetweaselContinuing the struggle 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I was going to examine that question with the "but they're ReAl PeOpLe" guy whom you were conversing with over in Reddit, but he ran away....

Imagine you are a real person. You decide to go to a specific subreddit. You type in the URL, and are subsequently facing a banner saying "This Sub Is Private."

Below that is a notice saying "We're locked up tight, and plan to be locked up for the duration." (We have archives)

My question is: How much time do you, a real person, wait before checking again to see if that subreddit had suddenly de-privatized?

15 minutes?
A couple of hours?
A day?
The end of "the duration"?

Allegedly, if you do not check again within [amount of time], after that [amount of time] you are no longer "here now."
And regularly, 200-300 real people all are checking during each [amount of time]?

Whatever that [amount of time] turns out to be?

[–][deleted]  (1 child)

[deleted]

    [–]NetweaselContinuing the struggle 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

    both accountholders and non-account-holding lurkers?

    There might be a problem with that, if they cannot get a unique identifier for each of those "non-account-holding lurkers."

    Ten "hits" come in. Is that ten people with one hit each, or one person with ten hits?

    [–]NetweaselContinuing the struggle 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

    That's one of the questions that I have been trying to formulate, so that I will have it if I can find where it goes:

    • What specifically causes a sub's "here now" number to go up by one?
    • What specifically causes a sub's "here now" number to go down by one?

    My assumption is this:

    If a Reddit/Saidit Account asks for information from the sub's section of the Big Database, and that account is currently not in the "list of accounts that have done that," then that account is added to the "list of accounts that have done that," along with the time that it did it.

    If it was already on that list, its "time that it did it" gets updated.

    Every so often, if the "time that it did it" is more than [amount of time] ago, that account is removed from the list.

    "Here Now" = Number of accounts on the list.

    Let's say that the RemindMeBot goes looking to see if anybody wanted it to remind them of something. And does so every 20 minutes.

    And that the "here now" list expires after 15 minutes.

    RemindMeBot goes a-lookin'. "here now" goes up by one. Fifteen minutes or so later, "here now" goes down by one because RemindMeBot is no longer "here now."

    If the RemindMeBot checks every five minutes, however, they are always "here now."

    Under my assumptions of how it probably is supposed to work.

    What would really be nice for the Mods would be to have the ability to get a peek at that list -- "who actually IS 'here now'?"<click>

    At Saidit, at any particular moment, that's not too many people [Saidit Accounts].