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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3261 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.

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Posting in the small questions thread because I need independent confirmation on this. Are search engines manipulating results and discussions on Rings of Power? I know I’m late on this.

I was searching for reviews online and was surprised that on YouTube, almost every major entertainment reviewer and LOTR enthusiast shat on the series, whereas on Reddit, many of the top comments in posts said the series was great.

On closer inspection, though, search engines appear to only want to show me certain review content. First by googling “rings of power review” it takes me to two positive posts that don’t even have review in the title (???). Same with if I search “rings of power bad”, with no quotes, it shows me posts with positive top comments in threads that don’t have “bad” or any synonym in the title.

More importantly, when I search Rings of Power on Reddit search and sort by top, or if I search “lord rings of power” and sort by top, or even “LOTR rings of power”, it refuses to show me the top narrowed results. It literally refuses to search for it. Instead I see the top Reddit posts total (no narrowing to search query). To make sure this wasn’t a mistake I tried various searches queries, some for illegal drugs like fentanyl, all of which took me to the requested top searches.

And lastly, in many of the threads I enter, it default sorts to “Best” in the most wild way, where 30 or 200 upvote comments consistently appear before 1.5k or 2k comments in a way that was clearly tailored specifically to show positives comments. Usually Best and Top are pretty similar, in this case they were the opposite.

Has anyone noticed similar? Or can independently verify one of these for me?

With what we now know about Twitter, it would be surprising if Reddit was not actively supressing certain kinds of content and rewarding others.

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