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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3303 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 11, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Rings of Power doesn't inspire much passion in people who dislike it.

Personally I watched a few episodes, decided it wasn't for me, and ignored it. If I had a job reviewing shows then I would have given it a negative review.

Assuming my reaction it typical, you'd expect mostly positive reviews on Reddit. People who like it, like it a lot. People who don't like it don't feel like writing a long post about it.

Now "best" sorts by a combination of total votes and upvote ratio. Top is just net positive votes.

So for some reason those 2k comment votes were attracting a lot of downvotes.

Perhaps Amazon PR people posted a bunch of fawning reviews, mass upvoted them, then people in the subreddit voted those comments down. The "best" comments were just some fans opinion and they didn't attract detractors.

As for Google, a few years ago they bent to pressure to promote "reliable sources". In practice that means established corporate press. I'm guessing that no one bothered to exclude tv show reviews from that.

I was a fairly early reddit user and I remember the day they announced "now we've got search working pretty much the way we want it to".

Everyone's reaction was like "Wait, really? Are you sure?"

Reddit search makes perfect sense if you assume that the goal is to keep people posting, and reposts are always going to be the majority of posts. Whether it's the same five jokes or memes getting reposted, or the same obvious beginner questions in /r/trucks or /r/kettlebell cut off reposts and a sub dies. Reddit with a search function that makes reposting unnecessary makes Reddit less active, less money coming in.

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