I'm not so concerned with Quickmeme et. al, (because I don't follow default subreddits) but rather I'm concerned with voting rings against personal accounts. I had an account for a substantial time where I posted good, useful comments frequently (for which I was upvoted frequently). Once, maybe twice in response to other commenters I disagreed with them, like 0.1% of my time on the site. Afterwards I found myself downvoted to hell no matter what I did, how long I waited between writing comments (ie, 6 months). Everything (quality comments) would go rather quickly to a 0 or a -1/-2. I had to make a new account, there's no way around it.
Perhaps equally concerning is how cliquey the moderators of many of the reddits are. This might not be a problem if not for their apparent line of thinking that reddit should not be a democracy, but rather a collection of little monarchies where the mods ultimately decide the content.
There are certainly still parts of reddit that are "run by the community", but the group of mods with an anti-democratic bent has gained a great amount of influence site-wide.
One recent event where a long standing minimally moderated subreddit was overtaken by this group really brought the clique to light. Someone even made a graph or two about it:
Many of these mods frequent the "meta" subreddits which are often accused of exactly the sort of vote manipulation you are descrbing. The response by these groups is always a cheeky "oh hey, it's not us, we don't encourage that!" Speculation is rampant regarding the truth since people outside of reddit itself have limited abilities to look at the data needed to determine what's going on.
Perhaps reddit is going the way of digg with power users running and gaming the site. There are lots of rules about users manipulating voting patterns, but none for moderators. Once in control, they can influence a subreddit however they see fit.
The short story is that many users still see reddit as a democracy when it is increasingly not.
One thing that virtually every Reddit power user (e.g., the type of person who would want to go around down-voting everything you comment) has is an extension called Reddit Enhancement Suite[1]. One of its features is the ability to tag usernames with custom messages. It's plausible that during your various disagreements, you were tagged by various users with something that indicated why they disliked you.
So if you continued to haunt the same places those people frequented, it wouldn't matter how long you waited to comment: as soon as you did, they'd see the tag, remember whatever it is they disliked about you, and down-vote.
That's all to say I think the problem you describe is less about coordinated vote rings against individuals and more about a community with individuals who hold grudges and have the tools available to enable them. I'm not sure it's systemic at Reddit, but just from what I've seen, people flying off the handle at the slightest provocation seems to happen far more frequently on Reddit than anywhere else.
Hmm, I've heard of the RES but didn't know about the specifics. When I say one or two disagreements, I really mean 1-2, and small ones at that, all things considered. I just mentioned it cause it's the only thing I could think of that might explain the systematic downvoting. As far as the subreddit, I subscribe(d) to several quite different ones so that wouldn't explain why my comments in all of those would be downvoted.
Also, thought it'd be good to add, when I mentioned before that I was upvoted frequently, it took about a year to get to 1,000 points, so it's not like I was a power-user.
> As far as the subreddit, I subscribe(d) to several quite different ones so that wouldn't explain why my comments in all of those would be downvoted.
Your comment history across all subreddits is one click away.
To give you an example of how quickly it can escalate, I once saw a comment that was completely incorrect, of the form "Wow, it's interesting that X is caused by Y!" I left a simple comment, "X is caused by Z, not Y." and left it at that.
The original comment subsequently received a single down-vote, and not from me. Likely someone who saw their comment and saw that it was wrong.
The original commenter replied to my comment, "Thanks for the reply, but it the down-vote was totally uncalled for." A few minutes later, before I could even respond, they deleted their comment and then every one of my 100+ comments were down-voted. Most of my comments prior to that had zero down-votes at all.
That's just my anecdote, and it's still possible you were subjected to coordinated down-vote ring, but you said this was the result of an isolated incident of 1-2 small disagreements. It seems more plausible that you were just tagged by a vindictive Reddit user than something particularly sophisticated.
Most likely it's the kind of bot you've mentioned. It makes the most sense, more than "stick-up-the-butt" users combing my comments in the past and as they happen in order to downvote them.
I think this is one of the biggest concerns for Reddit going forward. Fighting bots can be approached systematically and with relatively decent results. Fighting coordinated groups with an agenda and voting brigades is a much harder beast.
The SRS "fempire" is probably the scariest case study in all of this.
Oh, that's funny. Shit Reddit Says is a sub-reddit that calls out offensive comments on Reddit. They've been called the PC Police and the like, and they appropriated "fempire" after people got sensitive about being called out for sexist comments. The rules say not to downvote the linked comments, but people think they do, or that they upvote stupidity just so they can highlight it. So research was done [1], and no evidence of that sort of misbehavior was found.
On the contrary, SRS is one of the most innovative uses of a subreddit since Reddit's inception. Think back to the days of forums, LiveJournals, mailing lists, IRC, etc. Whenever an issue of discrimination arose, it was always derailed one way or another. Between vocal opponents, concern trolls, and "explain to me how this offends you"-types, it was impossible for someone who experienced discrimination to find a safe space to legitimize their experience.
With SRS, instead of allowing any kind of discourse related to the validity of a claim, every participating member is required to just accept the claim as valid. There is no driving force to change Reddit, and there is no activism involved. It's simply a safe space for people who are offended to express themselves in an environment that won't be questioned, especially when Reddit is known for having a hive mentality.
No offense, the warm and fuzzies are great; but this is the anti-thesis of intelligent and productive discourse.
I wouldn't mind at all if they just wanted to create a safe place for these things to be voiced, but they threaten the integrity of the entire community with the current choice of actions.
