The original post: /r/music by /u/MedalsNScars on 2024-09-21 20:51:15.
TL;DR: Posts mentioning one of the above topics are substantially more likely to reach the top of this subreddit than other posts. Here are some charts comparing those topics to others.
If the title of this post sounds vaguely familiar, you may have visited this subreddit sometime in the past month. Over that period, 17 of the 18 top posts are about 1 of those 4 topics.
And I get it. It's US election season, naturally people are going to talk politics. What is very much not natural is how much traction posts with one of these topics get compared to posts about, well, literally any other topic.
I took a snapshot of the top 1000 posts from the past month, which is anything with more than 12 upvotes - all posts that have garnered some amount of traction.
As you can see, there are tons of posts in here that don't fall into one of those topics - in fact over 90% of all posts don't, so what's the problem? When we look at the top 50 posts, the story changes dramatically, with only 40% of top posts not falling into one of those 4 categories.
In fact, posts mentioning Harris get on average 40x as many upvotes, get 20x as many comments, and are 25x more likely to become top-50 posts, when compared to posts that aren't about one of these 4 topics.
Now you may flip through those top 1000 posts as I did and say "hey, a lot of those are songs/music videos, which aren't really as popular on this subreddit, so the comparison isn't fair." Since I had the same thought, I went ahead and made the same views excluding any post with the "music" flair (see album in TL;DR at top), which roughly halves the multipliers above, but we still see abnormally high representation of the mentioned topics after excluding those.
Why do I care about this? Why should you?
I like music. I like political music (see my username - listen to Hero of War by Rise Against if you haven't.) I even like Kamala Harris and dislike Trump. So what's so wrong about a political post here or there on this subreddit?
The issue I take with these posts is their inorganic nature.
If you catch one of these posts early in its life, in the first 10 minutes or so, it'll probably have 0 points and a sub-50% upvote rate. About 30 minutes later, they'll pick up 100 or so upvotes and their upvote rate will skyrocket, and from there natural users will continue to upvote because "hey, I agree with it" and it's popping up on their front page now.
The idea of political early-upvote manipulation is not new, being used by the Trump campaign on the_donald back in the 2016 election.
I don't want outside interests to control the discussion on this website.
I like Reddit. I like having authentic discussion with strangers from around the world. I don't want to have to sift through dozens of "top" posts pushed by outside interests to do this, and I suspect many of you don't either.
What can we do about this?
Unfortunately, not much. Strong moderation can remove rule-breaking posts, but aside from that the only thing we can do is try to combat inorganic upvotes in the early phases.
Note: I initially did include a few other topics that had multiple top-50 posts: Jane's Addiction, Dave Grohl, Linkin Park, Chappell Roan. Linkin Park posts had unusually high comment activity (in line with Harris posts), but otherwise none of them seemed to have much unusual activity beyond being the story of the week, and including them made the charts a pain to read without adding much to the story.
