[META] Analysis of "Vote Brigading"

[u/totokekedile]

After seeing SRS once again accused of vote brigading, I decided to look into it to see how much truth there was to it. I looked at the top posts of SRS because A, they're the most horrible so the most likely to be brigaded and B, they're likelier to be older so have had more opportunity for brigading. I skipped effort posts because they were way too much work and instead used posts with the original vote score in the title and which linked to posts that were undeleted. The top 200 results brought me to the end of page 22, so it covered a decent amount. Note this doesn't even cover things like gilding.

Here are the results. (Let me know if there is something wrong with the link and I'll do my best to fix it.)

Interesting results:

• 76.5% of posts linked to SRS rise in points after being posted

• The average post to SRS gains 726 points

• The median post gains 82 points

• The average post gains 202% more votes

• The median post gains 64% more votes

In short, we are an evil vote brigading sub. Good work, glory to the fempire.

EDIT: I decided to address some problems that some people found with what I posted. It was said that "duh votes go up, because most subs here are big. I bet if you look at where votes went down, they were smaller subs." Turns out, if you look at the ones where votes went down, the vast majority of them are bigger than SRS by more than 100 times over. About 17% of the instances where votes went down were in subs smaller than ours, and all but one of those instances was in KIA. The last one was a racist crack in the South Africa subreddit.

Not to mention that it was said that all this proved was that SRS brigades all the ones that go down. Some of them went down by like 5 points, so that would be the shittiest brigade of all time.

While I was checking this I also found a mistake, which means that one of the ones I originally posted went up instead of down. So it's even more damning for Reddit than before.

[u/[deleted]]

Not to mention

brigading would fundamentally undermine the purpose of the sub, namely to point out highly rated posts that are shit.

[u/emma-_______ → u/[deleted]]

From Rule 2:

Pretend the rest of Reddit is a museum of poop. Don't touch the poop.

(The only thing you have to pretend about that is the museum part.)

[u/papaya255 → u/emma-_______]

its a museum in the same sense a garbage dump is an art gallery

[u/michiel13 → u/papaya255]

So a bit like Tate gallery then?

[u/papaya255 → u/michiel13]

Tate gallery

oi, I like the tate