Godly Reddit Sweeps Atheist Users Under Rug - 08-27-2009, 01:26 AM 08-27-2009, 01:26 AM



Reddit is different from Digg in two respects: It’s possible to downvote a story, and it’s possible to create a “subreddit”. In a subreddit, stories may be submitted geared to a particular subject.



The ten most active subreddits get promoted to the front page. For some reason, the “atheism” subreddit, though active, has not been showing up. Today, Skip to the second half if you don’t care about how we got to this point.



First, a little history: When we first allowed users to create their own reddits, every link from every reddit had an equal chance at being seen on our front page. We had to tweak this slightly with the rise in popularity of the nsfw reddit and put some reddits behind an “are you over 18?” barrier, a change that was welcomed by most users. Next, we allowed users to choose which reddits appear on their front page, but it wasn’t until we started normalizing the front page that we ran into issues.

When the front page is normalized, a link that is #1 in a small reddit is basically equal in hotness to a link that is #1 in a large reddit. This helps prevent small reddits from being washed out by the larger ones. Because of this change we had to also limit the number of reddits that make up the front page, otherwise things would jump around wildly (a user could create a new reddit, submit one link, and since that link was #1 in its reddit, it could appear on the front page). For quite some time we maintained this list of front page reddits by hand.



Maintaining the list of front page reddits became tedious after a while, so we added a new algorithm to find the most active reddits automatically. This algorithm purposefully ignores the number of subscribers when choosing reddits since that number is so easy to game. The popularity of a reddit is based on the number of submissions, votes, and general level of activity of the reddit. The algorithm changes from time to time, and we don’t describe it fully to mitigate gaming it. We use the top ten reddits returned by this algorithm to make up the default non-logged-in front page.



Here’s the explanation part you’re looking for:



A couple of weeks ago the moviecritic reddit popped into the top ten reddits, causing quite a stir. The reddit isn’t used for new and interesting links, but rather for links to movies: sometimes old and sometimes new. Users were upset that moviecritic was taking up front-page space and started attacking the reddit by downvoting everything in sight. Users of the atheism reddit had been under attacks like this for weeks. Unfortunately, attacking a reddit generates a lot of activity on that reddit and makes our algorithm think the reddit is more popular than it really is, making the problem even worse.



Seeing as this might become an ongoing problem, we added the ability to prevent certain reddits from appearing in the top ten. We flagged moviecritic and atheism as two such reddits, hopefully allowing these reddits to grow in peace. I should have posted this explanation then instead of waiting until now, and for that I apologize.



Given the nature and somtimes polarizing tone of the content on the atheism reddit, it will likely always garner the ire of many other users. Showcasing religious flame-wars only serves to lower the level of discourse on the site as a whole, and unknowingly walking into such a flame-war isn’t the first-time experience we’d like new users to have here, which is why we think it best to leave things the way they are.



There are thousands of communities on reddit covering a wide range of topics. Most are for sharing new and interesting content from around the web, and others are strictly for discussion. We hope there is a place for everyone on reddit, and we also hope you realize not everything found on reddit is appropriate for the front page.

That’s right, folks. Atheism, much like the NSFW reddit (pornography!), isn’t appropriate for the front page. Thank God they finally realized this basic truth! It could encourage children to abandon God!



As one might expect, God-haters aren’t too happy. Hundreds of comments have appeared in the couple of hours since “spez” posted his admission of Godliness.



Reddit.com is a subsidiary of Conde Naste Digital, a subsidiary of Conde Naste Publications. Reddit, a social news-sharing website, works much like the larger site Digg. Users submit stories, pictures, etc., and then other users can vote for the stories.Reddit is different from Digg in two respects: It’s possible to downvote a story, and it’s possible to create a “subreddit”. In a subreddit, stories may be submitted geared to a particular subject.The ten most active subreddits get promoted to the front page. For some reason, the “atheism” subreddit, though active, has not been showing up. Today, admin “spez” explained why That’s right, folks. Atheism, much like the NSFW reddit (pornography!), isn’t appropriate for the front page. Thank God they finally realized this basic truth! It could encourage children to abandon God!As one might expect, God-haters aren’t too happy. Hundreds of comments have appeared in the couple of hours since “spez” posted his admission of Godliness.Reddit.com is a subsidiary of Conde Naste Digital, a subsidiary of Conde Naste Publications.

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