I noticed a very odd comment voting pattern when looking at this thread, where the top couple of comments have received substantially more upvotes than the actual thread itself.
To form a baseline of what could be considered a "normal" voting pattern in the subreddit, let's look at the top posts of the month, the amount of upvotes the topic receives, the approval rate of the post and the top few comments' scores.
Title | Post upvotes | Post approval | Top comment scores |
---|---|---|---|
I witnessed some "casual" using a black lotus today. | 4,062 | 98% | 2295, 836, 638, 516, 306 |
Congrats to 7-year-old Dana Fischer for going 5-4 yesterday at GP Portland | 3,714 | 89% | 786, 329, 196, 118, 64 |
Well then | 3,636 | 98% | 714, 478, 104, 81, 70 |
When Real Estate Agents Find the Legacy Lands Facebook Group | 3316 | 98% | 770, 554, 377, 359, 171 |
Definitely up there with one of the best comments I've ever seen. | 3208 | 98% | 499, 208, 78, 77, 61 |
Basically, The top comment of any given thread gets at most half the upvotes the initial post gets (usually much lower, around a quarter the upvotes) and the comments scores form a very similar nonlinear scale every time.
Then we have this thread that "warns" about fake reviews that have clearly been done with NLP spam algorithms (a technique of influencing the popular opinion which saw a lot of use during the 2016 presidential election by organisations like ShareBlue and during this years Net Neutrality kerfuffle by some anti-net neutrality organisations).
Title | Post upvotes | Post approval | Top comment scores |
---|---|---|---|
Be aware people are calling LGSs and asking if they "Support WOTC's anti-white, anti-male, SJW policies" then leaving bad reviews | 693 | 86% | 992, 649, 254, 167, 106 |
With the post approval of 86%, we can deduce that the "actual" amount of upvotes this subject has gotten is around 814 upvotes. The comments also follow a nonlinear plot that is somewhat similar but not as similar as the rest of the plots that we've inspected in this thread.
None of the upvoted comments seem to point out that these "reviews" are done algorithmically, which means that a mass reviewbombing like this is usually done by one or two people. Instead, they're trying to enforce a narrative that people who think there is currently an anti-white or anti-male atmosphere are wrong, are trash and are taking themselves out of the community.
What I conclude from this very anecdotal and very limited inspection is that someone in /r/MagicTCG might be using dummy accounts for enforcing a narrative in the comment section, which results in anomalous comment scores.
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- 7 years ago
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