“In proportion” to what, though? We get the same problem here that one gets with many voting systems: if voting is voluntary, then some groups are more politically active (i.e. vote more) than others, and so some voting blocs (here, subreddits) are over- or under-represented compared to their user-base size.
That’s not a problem with the way the algorithm counts votes. That’s just a mathematical voting-theory problem with comparing votes between disparate populations that are each motivated-to-vote for different reasons, and thus using “one vote” to mean something different within each community.
Or, to put that more simply: “karma” is non-fungible. It works fine to rank posts within a subreddit, but it’s entirely meaningless for ranking posts between different subreddits.
———
But that still ignores the greater issue. Things wouldn’t be “fine” even if some ideal inter-subreddit karma exchange-rate was reached. Keep in mind that some subreddits are “quarantined”, which essentially means that their weighting for appearing in /r/all is forced to 0.
In other words, /r/all isn’t just sorting badly; it also requires a bunch of manual overrides to its computed weights, in order to function.
IMHO, that’s not really a satisfactory algorithm. Maybe it’s practical for serving some purpose (e.g. making money), but that kludge-factor means that it isn’t actually doing what it claims to do: telling you about the activity happening across “all of Reddit.”
A “real” /r/all wouldn’t take quarantines into account. It’d just be the view that any third party would compute by scraping every subreddit, throwing all the posts into a table, and ordering by score descending. And that view is the one I mean when I say “soul-destroying.”
Let me restate my premise: a proper /r/all—one that truly delivers on the use-case it claims to deliver on—is just... not something anyone wants.
That’s not a problem with the way the algorithm counts votes. That’s just a mathematical voting-theory problem with comparing votes between disparate populations that are each motivated-to-vote for different reasons, and thus using “one vote” to mean something different within each community.
Or, to put that more simply: “karma” is non-fungible. It works fine to rank posts within a subreddit, but it’s entirely meaningless for ranking posts between different subreddits.
———
But that still ignores the greater issue. Things wouldn’t be “fine” even if some ideal inter-subreddit karma exchange-rate was reached. Keep in mind that some subreddits are “quarantined”, which essentially means that their weighting for appearing in /r/all is forced to 0.
In other words, /r/all isn’t just sorting badly; it also requires a bunch of manual overrides to its computed weights, in order to function.
IMHO, that’s not really a satisfactory algorithm. Maybe it’s practical for serving some purpose (e.g. making money), but that kludge-factor means that it isn’t actually doing what it claims to do: telling you about the activity happening across “all of Reddit.”
A “real” /r/all wouldn’t take quarantines into account. It’d just be the view that any third party would compute by scraping every subreddit, throwing all the posts into a table, and ordering by score descending. And that view is the one I mean when I say “soul-destroying.”
Let me restate my premise: a proper /r/all—one that truly delivers on the use-case it claims to deliver on—is just... not something anyone wants.