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Ask HN: Has Reddit started inflating their numbers?
1 point by artemonster on Jan 21, 2024 | hide | past | favorite | 3 comments
I am a pretty addicted reddit browser and I frequently visit r/popular and other "big" subreddits. Lately I have started noticing that couple of hours old posts have now thousands of upvotes and comments, each comment having thousands of upvotes too. Before that you could see such numbers only on very big topics like major global news or tragedies. Are there any tools to track these metrics via 3rd party to see if they started artificially inflating theirs user numbers before their IPO?


One way you might be able to determine this is by collecting a large enough sample and run it through Benford's Law to see if the number of leading ones and twos are much higher than other digits.

It's possible they could be inflating and adhering to Benford's explicitly, but if you find the values are nearly even across 1-9 for leading digits, then it's likely they're fake. This is only because the numbers may be varying number of digits and naturally occurring, so it's unlikely you'd get a false positive.


Reddit hasn't been artificially inflating their numbers but they've adjusted the distribution strategy to promote posts which may have gone ignored, such as including less popular posts on the logged-in front page and push notifications.

This isn't inherently wrong but can result in unexpected popularity.


just check for yourself on any relatively fresh r/popular post - 30k upvotes and 3-5k comments is suspiciously high, given that you could rarely see such numbers before




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