r/OutOfTheLoop • u/starpeak • Oct 28 '16
Megathread What is going on with r/all?
All I can see on r/all is r/the_donald. I'm on mobile. What gives?
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u/ABACUS2007AC1 Oct 28 '16
Looks like Reddit messed up on a new algorithm. Probably the opposite effect of what they were intending.
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u/BrokenBowBastard Oct 28 '16
ohh they fucked up their own algorithm. edit: did they fix it? the Trump 0 posts are gone now from the front page for me...
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u/whatthefizzle Oct 28 '16
Yup, seems to me the_donald was part of the new algorithm change, possibly to reduce the amount of posts from this sub hitting the front page of /all.
That or it was just a coincidence that of all the thousands of subs, it happened to the one that's most against Clinton.
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Oct 28 '16
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u/IronSeagull Oct 28 '16
It certainly could be. Look at https://www.reddit.com/r/all/rising/ - mostly r/the_donald posts. Their subreddit experiences this unique phenomenon where every post that isn't deleted by the mods is upvoted way out of proportion to the size of the sub or the number of active users. So yes, some code appears to have only affected r/the_donald, but r/the_donald is unique in more ways than just its name.
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u/InZomnia365 Oct 28 '16
That sub has some of the highest vote participation site-wide. As in, large portion of its community actively upvotes the posts. Thats why theyre constantly on the frontpage anyway.
If I were to guess, it sounds reasonable to me that reddit was trying to adjust the algorithm a little bit for there to be less r/the_donald on r/all - not "because censorship", but because most people on r/all dont really give a shit about it, and its annoying to see it pop up all the time. Seriously, theres always like 3 r/the_donald posts on the frontpage or r/all... A lot of the posts are mainly information posts targeted at their own users, not something someone just casually browsing r/all would care about / click on.
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Oct 28 '16
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u/IronSeagull Oct 28 '16
When posts have 100x more upvotes than comments, I guess you all must be conserving your energy, eh?
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u/DifficultApple Oct 28 '16
If you hate them then try considering that they are working on the algorithm that effects "hot" posts.
The Donald has been constant NEET spam for months so naturally it would see the largest effect. The vast majority of users don't want their page filled with that spam so they are changing things so random brigades can't weasel into relevancy and instead stay in their little echo chamber.
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u/GAforTrump Oct 28 '16
You hate Trump supporters so much that you can't reply without trying to bully them in your response. What's going on here?
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u/thecatgoesmoo Oct 28 '16
Let's be honest, no one at the Donald is smart enough to hack their way out of a wet paper bag.
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Oct 28 '16
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u/Phrodo_00 Oct 28 '16
Well, Reddit is written mostly in python, so both of those were inside of the if to begin with, the parenthesis are unnecessary and against most style guides and you're missing a colon after it.
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Oct 28 '16
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u/Etonet Oct 28 '16
does it work if it's not a boolean?
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u/The_Potato_God99 Oct 28 '16
(allpost = "The_Donald") returns the value of allpost. Since it's neither true nor false, I don't know what would happen. But I don't think there would be an error, depending on the language
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u/bradishungry Oct 28 '16
I mean, you probably shouldn't compare a string variable as a boolean operation in the first place for one.
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u/eggpl4nt Oct 28 '16
I'm just a beginner at programming, but as far as I know an if statement has to return true or false, so it has to be a boolean, otherwise it doesn't work. Just because if (allpost == "The_Donald") has a string, doesn't mean it returns a string. It's just checking if it's true that allpost's value is equivalent to the string value "The_Donald."
So if allpost's value was "OutOfTheLoop" or "aww" or anything that isn't "The_Donald," then it would return false, if it was "The_Donald," it would return true.
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Oct 28 '16
Either the algorithm broke when they were trying to adjust it, or a hack of some kind.
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u/content_gator Oct 28 '16
Man's greatest hubris lies in that he thinks he is in control of the memes, and not the other way around. He wrote code to reign in the memes, and the memes took control of his code.
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u/CyberDagger Oct 28 '16
Free will is a myth. Religion is a joke. We are all pawns, controlled by something greater. Memes.
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u/ButtercupColfax Oct 28 '16
Man's greatest hubris lies in that he thinks he is in control of the memes, and not the other way around. He wrote code to reign in the memes, and the memes took control of his code.
Abraham Lincoln
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u/content_gator Oct 28 '16
Don't believe everything you read on the internet.
Marcus Licinius Crassus
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u/m0nde Oct 28 '16
It looks like their algorithm singles out r/the_donald for some reason. I wonder why?
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Oct 28 '16
Pretty clearly an algorithm adjustment - which makes it very clear that there is, as was suspected for a while now, an r/the_donald specific set of parameters which are different to all the other subs.
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u/simjanes2k Oct 28 '16
That seems... odd. I know the last time they played with the algorithm, it was to remove The_Donald from the front page, since according to "fair" rules they were dominating it.
Now they play with it again, and that's the sub that pops to the top? That can't be coincidence, are they actually filtering individual subs to have their number count less than others?
Isn't that like dodgy political stance kinda stuff?
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Oct 28 '16
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u/finder787 Oct 28 '16
It's CTR!
Or more likely, the hacker that is known to us as, Four Chan.
Or some 400lb dude living in his parents basement.
We may never know.
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u/Pithong Oct 28 '16 edited Oct 28 '16
It's explained in "edit 12":
KeyserSosa: This is pretty close to our guess as to what was happening. It wouldn't have been a stack overflow in this case, but there was an index in postgres that turned out to be load bearing and without it postgres was: 1. taking an extra super long time to do something that should be simple 2. returning really weird results. That subreddit is very active, and I suspect that means those rows were extra hot and see (2).
DEATH-BY-CIRCLEJERK: Extra hot? They were sitting at the top of r/all with a negative score lol
KeyserSosa: Poor choice of words! Probably more like "being constantly voted on, and therefore most recently changed in postgres and the top of it's cache if it was going to return things completely unsorted."
As he says, "completely unsorted". r/the_donald is very active in terms of votes per second, probably 5,000 to one when compared to the average. So the top 30 pages are all t_d because the sorting algorithm broke and stopped sorting, and the thing that makes the front page just grabs whatever is on top. In terms of votes per second, r/politics appears to be the next highest one at that time of day, then r/funny, etc..
That's my take on what he said, anyway.
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u/alexmikli Oct 28 '16
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u/verywidebutthole Oct 28 '16
That CTR thing was pretty funny though. Here's a link: /img/hsiqf222uutx.jpg
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u/albinobluesheep Oct 28 '16 edited Oct 28 '16
Only one screen? Clearly not being as productive as they could be.
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u/sheffy55 Oct 28 '16
Pc placement is a fantastic idea, i actually consider this. CMV
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Oct 28 '16
This was supposed to be a WoW player, they just slapped on the CTR stuff. Originally from 2011 before all this shit
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Oct 28 '16
That's actually fucking hilarious, because the podesta emails show that its actually accurate.
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u/Foxtrot56 Oct 28 '16
Isn't this more the average donald user? While browing their multireddit td, red pill and mensrights.
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u/tremulo Oct 28 '16
For posterity (and context in case this post blows up after the problem is fixed), this is what the top of r/all looks like right now. All r/the_donald, and mostly posts with a score of 0.
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u/TaintedSquirrel Oct 28 '16
Night mode master race.
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u/Konraden Oct 28 '16
Apparently not filter master race though. Blocking The_Donald was the best thing RES ever did for me.
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u/Eduel80 Oct 28 '16 edited Oct 28 '16
HAHA So now it's even more evident that they are force hiding TD pages and probably messed up the code on an update and reversed what they intended to do. I'm no advocate for TD but it's hilarious when people surpress others and then it backfires.
Edit: funny how people think you're condescending when you aren't. But their users spamming and vote brigading still doesn't mean the admins didn't surpress them either ;)
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u/DifficultApple Oct 28 '16
They're changing the algorithm that effects quickly rising posts. The Donald is only affected by this because all of it's users spam and upvote brigade every single misinformed headline they read on there.
It's funny how you're condescending about something you don't understand!
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u/ezcz Oct 28 '16
In the screenshot provided by the OP of this comment thread it literally shows the top post is over 12 hours old with 0 upvotes displayed. How is that quickly rising? Talk about not understanding something..
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u/DifficultApple Oct 28 '16
It's being heavily voted on. It's just getting as many downvotes because most redditors aren't interested in the spam
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u/weltallic Oct 28 '16 edited Oct 28 '16
It's funny how you're condescending about something you don't understand!
So, by your own words, more people are voting on the_D than other subs are. That's why they're on top.
And this is... NOT democracy in it's purest?
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u/quink Oct 28 '16 edited Oct 28 '16
I think it's more that something on the reddit end went wrong. Not necessarily a hack.
It's not specifically excluding r/the_donald. It's just looks like a manually generated (or very integer heavy) list with several tiers, the highest having the most shitposts.
The order is:
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r/pics, r/me_irl and r/overwatch
And that's as far as I got before they fixed it. I may have gotten one of these wrong, but that's pretty much it.
I think this list is pretty damn reasonable and pretty neutral. If you're going to have a bias to weigh down the shitposts on r/all, this is pretty much an ideal list.
I think it's really just the weighting they're using to stop single subreddits from having too many entries on r/all. This is a pretty fair list. Yes, r/the_donald is getting pushed down. But so are the others in that list. (to a lesser extent, but they probably make up for it in count and proportionally less vote manipulation)
I generated this list by going to r/all, then blocking the relevant reddits depending on what showed up, all the way up to r/all-EnoughTrumpSpam-Overwatch-The_Donald-aww-funny-hillaryclinton-me_irl-pics-politics (reddit gold only feature)
I've been pretty sure that reddit has been doing this for a number of months now, it's good to see confirmation and it's nice to see the list and see what's in that list and be assured that it's pretty damn reasonable and pretty much ideal for ensuring that the quality of r/all is better than it otherwise would be.
Persecution complex > /dev/null
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u/sonny_sailor Oct 28 '16 edited Oct 28 '16
If subs are popular why is it reddit's job to suppress their popularity? Isn't that insanely counter intuitive to how a vote based system is supposed to work?
Edit: damn people are polite here. That's refreshing.
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u/R_Sholes Oct 28 '16
Front page and r/all are the way to discover new content on Reddit. It's meant to show a snapshot of popular topics from across the Reddit.
Letting any default or default-sized sub completely flood it out would be counterproductive.
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u/sonny_sailor Oct 28 '16
You mean like r/sandersforpresident last year?
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u/R_Sholes Oct 28 '16 edited Oct 28 '16
Like any sub capable of doing that.
Increasing discoverability is a common problem for all sites with user-generated content.
Reddit pretty much sucks in that regard. For example, most of the means to discover new subs are word-of-mouth and mod controlled sidebars, if they decide to list related subs. Wouldn't it make Reddit better if, say, there were "related subs" section everywhere on the site?
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Oct 28 '16
I must've forgotten when r/sandersforpresident constantly dominated nearly every post on r/all/rising, regardless of time of day :(
Let's be real, r/sandersforpresident was never as bad as T_D, and regardless, the admins stated that they started development while r/sandersforpresident was still a thing.
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u/Kadexe Oct 28 '16
It's not really suppressing popularity, it's more like forcing variety.
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u/DifficultApple Oct 28 '16
The Donald isn't even popular, it's just the same users and vote manipulators spamming it up because they think that will effect the election. Nobody else is interested in their circle jerk so it's nice to finally have quality content instead.
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u/quink Oct 28 '16
Remember this reddit? https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/
After a certain size, the inherent quality or value of the sub to the community at large drags down. r/pics and r/funny are in the list too. r/reddit.com/ would be very high on it too.
It's reddit's job to make not only the popularity but also the breadth of their content discoverable - and r/all sounds like a good place to do that. And this seems like a good way to do it.
If any of these communities don't like it, they can split - as has happened, in effect, countless times to r/pics and r/funny.
And as for me, I don't live in the US, I don't care about r/pics or r/funny and I will never play Overwatch, couldn't care less about it. This algorithm works for me and the likes of me.
In fact, it's not even strong enough for me, I exclude 100 or so subreddits from my r/all entirely (gold only feature).
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u/sonny_sailor Oct 28 '16
but why suddenly change? Bernie Sanders was equally extreme in his own spectrum and normal Redditors spent months tolerating that rhetoric.
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u/SC2Sycophant Oct 28 '16
Rather change late than never and let's be real here, the amount of shitposts that reach r/all from The_Donald was way more than Sanders was.
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u/quink Oct 28 '16
There's no sudden change, it's been like this for I think a number of months now.
They may not have had the algorithm or at least not in that strength during the Sanders days. The need for this kind of thing is in general going to increase over time, r/the_donald or not and a presidential election looming closer only makes it more important.
Be happy, this is the best compromise one could hope for.
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Oct 28 '16
Because TD is literally the most obnoxious thing ever generated in the ten year history of reddit, and you can be sure as shit their parent company is pissed that their target demographic of young, white, liberal, tech-savvy men is frustrated and possibly leaving/decreasing use of reddit over TD being such an overwhelmingly retarded shithole overrunning all of reddit.
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u/sonny_sailor Oct 28 '16
Probably shouldn't have been so overtly intolerant to that one guy on r/politics who had a different opinion from you.
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u/BigTimStrangeX Oct 28 '16
If subs are popular why is it reddit's job to suppress their popularity?
Because this website requires money to stay in business.
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u/adeadhead Oct 28 '16
Posts in my own sub get upwards of 70,000 upvotes apiece (according to admins) without softcapping, non default subs would never make the front page.
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Oct 28 '16
Just a shame that a reasonable explanation had to come from $random_user instead of the admins, who have consistently denied that they do things like that.
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u/DifficultApple Oct 28 '16
They literally just held an open announcement yesterday explaining that they would be working on getting relevant information to r/all which requires lowering the weight of shitposters.
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u/Baby_Turtle_AMA Oct 28 '16
Of all the comments I've read so far this seems to be the only one that makes the most logical sense. Claiming that T_D as an entire community has figured out a way around the voting system to get all of their posts to the front page is just ridiculous. T_D should definitely be first on the list of suppressed subs though as it is the most passionate large group on Reddit right now. It has been for months hence the original changes to the algorithm.. If Hillary's sub had as many passionate subscribers(or subscribers at all) as T_Ds it would be suppressed as well.
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u/quink Oct 28 '16
If Hillary's sub had as many passionate subscribers(or subscribers at all) as T_Ds it would be suppressed as well.
It is, quite a bit, just not as strongly. Why? Because r/the_donald is naturally stronger (be it through vote manipulation or all natural, doesn't matter in this area at least, it matters on a different level). It's pretty fair.
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u/DifficultApple Oct 28 '16
You can still visit The Donald. Now everyone else doesn't have to see the obnoxious spam.
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u/nliausacmmv Oct 28 '16
I don't know about r/overwatch, but most of the rest of the things on that list have a reputation for heavy reposting/spamming with bots. Maybe this was an attempt to counter spam and it just went wrong?
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Oct 28 '16
Best and most reasonable explanation here so far. I'm glad someone dug far enough to see the full list of subs.
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u/quink Oct 28 '16
It's not a full list, that's only how far I got before they fixed it. Every reddit may have a score for all I know.
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Oct 28 '16
Not necessarily a hack.
No it's definitely a hack.
And they're definitely gonna blame the Russians.
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Oct 28 '16
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u/PitchforkAssistant Oct 28 '16
https://np.reddit.com/r/shittychangelog/comments/59s3ao/reddit_change_rall_algorithm_changes/
It appears it was caused by a change to the algorithm that caused too much server load.
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Oct 28 '16
That reads like a joke. Not sure how serious they are there lol
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u/PitchforkAssistant Oct 28 '16
I don't know but I didn't even know r/shittychangelog even existed prior to today.
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Oct 28 '16
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Oct 28 '16 edited Oct 28 '16
Oh man is that ever cringey.
Certified Ethical Hacker who works in cyber security (we have to get very, very tough on the cyber:)
Now, here's the thing about reddit's algorithm is that nobody knows exactly what it is. Since we don't know what it is, even a "leet haxxor" wouldn't know how to manipulate it once they managed to break in
That would be in /r2/r2/lib/db/_sorts.pyx, sport. I have provided you exclusive access through the hacker known as GitHub, which is sort of like WikiLeaks:
cpdef double _hot(long ups, long downs, double date): """The hot formula. Should match the equivalent function in postgres.""" s = score(ups, downs) order = log10(max(abs(s), 1)) if s > 0: sign = 1 elif s < 0: sign = -1 else: sign = 0 seconds = date - 1134028003 return round(sign * order + seconds / 45000, 7)21
u/aluvus Oct 28 '16
Now, here's the thing about reddit's algorithm is that nobody knows exactly what it is. Since we don't know what it is, even a "leet haxxor" wouldn't know how to manipulate it once they managed to break into reddit.
I doubt it is so magically complex that someone couldn't figure it out given a reasonable amount of time. Also worth noting that a lot of Reddit's code (though not the ranking algorithm, AFAIK) is open source, so a potential attacker would have the opportunity to "get his sea legs" with how Reddit's code generally works on his own timeline.
I'm not saying that's what happened, but I honestly doubt that the ranking algorithm itself would be the most challenging aspect of an attack to pull off.
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Oct 28 '16 edited Oct 28 '16
That's actually not cringy at all and to be fair, he really does seem to know what he's talking about.
edit - For people saying he went all conspiracy I give you this:
Many people will ask if this is related to r/the_donald. The short answer is no, we have been working on this change for a while, but I cannot deny their behavior hastened its deployment. We have seen many communities like r/the_donald over the years—ones that attempt to dominate the conversation on Reddit at the expense of everyone else. This undermines Reddit, and we are not going to allow it. - u/spez
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u/PitchforkAssistant Oct 28 '16
I have most political subreddits filtered. I scrolled all the way down to page 31 and only started seeing some other content starting to bleed in there.
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Oct 28 '16
Updating momentarily with those screenshots. Anyone with other (useful) related screenshots can feel free to send them my way.
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u/moeburn Oct 28 '16
I also had them filtered, but all I saw was a perfectly normal r/all feed, except every post only had 20-30 upvotes, and no comments. I didn't even notice until a few cat gifs in. Thought it was a new algorithm random test, didn't think much of it, hit F5, and r/all was back to normal.
But I definitely didn't see nothing or error messages like you guys are seeing. And I definitely didn't see any Trump stuff, because I have r/the_donald filtered using RES.
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Oct 28 '16
r/the_donald has taken over the whole site it looks like. WTF. I had a custom filter to block that subreddit, and I don't get any posts showing up when it's on.
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u/BedlingtonTerrier Oct 28 '16 edited Oct 28 '16
My r/all with the filter looked like this
EDIT: Got to page 38, /r/politics is here.
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u/Violently_Altruistic Oct 28 '16
It can't have purposely. Many posts are sitting at 0 points and are more than 10 hours old.
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u/Lorevi Oct 28 '16
Oh my god it's ridiculous. I also had a custom filter.
As a not American, I don't care about that country's political propaganda. Just let me have my r/funny, r/videos and the rest of r/all. r/the_donald can piss off.
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u/tizorres Oct 28 '16
[megathread]
This thread will be acting as a megathread. All new threads regarding this will be directed here.
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u/Steelalloy Oct 28 '16
The best possible thing I can say is either the algorithm messed up so bad that it filtered to this one sub or there has been some serious case of botting that went haywire.
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u/aaron403 Oct 28 '16
4chan poster is claiming to have hacked reddit:
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Oct 28 '16
I'm guessing some idiot saw r/all and decided to take credit for a bug, but I'm leaving your comment up just in case.
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u/PitchforkAssistant Oct 28 '16
It seems like the content is all r/The_Donald stuff for like 30 pages and then you start seeing content from other subreddits.
For a minute there r/all was displaying a "this page is temporarily in read-only mode due to heavy traffic" message.