Reclaim Reddit: Greasemonkey script to remove Ron Paul stories

by pc • 19 years ago

15 48 19 years ago

pg10• 19 years ago

Prediction: Ten years from now Ron Paul will be remembered mainly as someone whose supporters exposed a flaw in the naive implementation of vote-driven news sites.

trekker7• 19 years ago

He did raise a ton of money through the Web in a short amount of time... for better or for worse, all that upvoting has some power to it.

JulianMorrison7• 19 years ago

That's not a flaw - that's grassroots democracy. It looks messy because it is. You should worry more about the tidy politicians who seem to just coast silently into first place. Why do they not need to engage with the public or stir up any passion?

staunch• 19 years ago

He definitely has a lot of legitimate supporters. They're still a minority though and yet they dominate Reddit as if no one else existed. That's a flaw in the system. The entire group of people who support him are acting as a blindly loyal voting bloc and upvoting anything with his name in it. This is essentially how the neocons were able to game their way into control of the USA. A small group of blindly loyal fanatics working together can have a disproportionately large effect (just look at 9/11), especially when the system is highly flawed.

I think it's quite possible that in 10 years most of us internet geeks will primarily remember Ron Paul as "that libertarian guy who was always upvoted on social news sites". Unless he wins ;-)

pg10• 19 years ago

It's the opposite of grassroots democracy. Grassroots = spontaneous and decentralized. That would not naturally produce the tidily regular stream of Ron Paul stories we see on reddit. This seems to be an organized campaign. This is not a groundswell of support; it's an attempt to exploit the vulnerabilities of social news sites in order to give the appearance of one.

Goladus• 19 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing

rms• 19 years ago

The only people who will remember Ron Paul for dominating social news sites are the small percentage of people that use social news sites right now. Among the mainstream, he'll be mentioned as a candidate who was very successful in marketing himself and raising money over the internet.

I expect he will run as a Libertarian after he doesn't get the Republican nomination; he'll probably do much better than your average Libertarian candidate.

mynameishere• 19 years ago

I think the flaw is pretty well-known.

Frankly, I'm encouraged by any non-standard candidates who actually get noticed one way or the other.

byrneseyeview7• 19 years ago

Do you worry about that being the case with, say, you or Joel Spolsky or, uh, Lisp? To an outsider, these phenomena all look the same: a pretty obscure person or technology getting lots of attention from a certain kind of website.

When you're outside of a popularity bubble, you have pretty good odds of identifying it as such -- but that doesn't mean you can't be inside another popularity bubble, too.

(I don't actually think this is true. As far as I know, support for Spolsky, Paul, and Lisp is genuine, and its concentration at reddit is just a typical network effect. I don't see why this has to be any more complicated than "People who like Ron Paul news will read it at reddit and vote it up at reddit, attracting more people who like Ron Paul news")

pg10• 19 years ago

No. The topics reddit has focused on so far have generally been the topics hackers are interested in. That's why the Ron Paul stories stand out so much. I know a huge cross section of hackers of all different types, and Ron Paul doesn't figure anything near as large in their conversation as he does on reddit.

It would be easy to astroturf reddit. And I don't think even Ron Paul suppporters would deny that the campaign most likely to do it would be that of an outsider candidate whose supporters were renowned for their effective use of the Internet.

But you know, I am done talking about this. Whenever I even mention Ron Paul I end up wasting hours in arguments isomorphic to arguments with trolls. I'm not claiming Ron Paul supporters are trolls, just that trying to reason with fanatics tend to produce the same sort of threads as trying to reason with trolls.

The discussion on this thread is precisely why politics is off limits on news.yc. In this case it crept in through a point about the design of news aggregators. But politics is like floating point contagion. If you make a point that's even partly about politics, that's the part everyone will focus on, and the discussion becomes a political one.

samwise• 19 years ago

There is a simple reddit fix. Rather then hosting crappy parties in different cities they should work on story filtering. So that users can filter ANY news title. there a simple work around for Ron Raul supporters, They can misspell r0n p@ul.

jgrahamc• 19 years ago

Just adding tagging plus tag filtering would do a lot.

John.

mechanical_fish• 19 years ago

His running mate's name will be "vi4gr4 ci4li5".

michaelneale• 19 years ago

Its too late for him. There is no good left in him. Darth Vader betrayed and killed, your reddit.

davidw• 19 years ago

Yeah, Ron Paul is a symptom, not the root cause.

tocomment• 19 years ago

I like the Ron Paul stories on Reddit. I agree with others, this is grass roots democracy.

bigtoga• 19 years ago

I'll post the same thing here that I did at reddit: there's no use for this script since the Reddit Content Filter, another GM script, is already out there (and way superior - no offense meant). the RDF includes filtering by title, user, and/or site as well as RegEx...

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/8751

Reclaim Reddit: Greasemonkey script to remove Ron Paul stories

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