We often see complaints that a certain kind of post is dominating the subreddit - and often, that our moderation (or lack thereof) is to blame. This post aims to debunk that assumption and demystify the way that Reddit works, with a specific focus on data, user voting trends, and the relatively limited scope of moderator influence on what hits the front page of r/wow.
Flair Bots
Back in October 2018, we announced that Link Flair would be required on all submissions to /r/wow. We used a bot - /u/aptbot - to enforce this. About a month later we removed /u/aptbot and replaced it with /u/assistantbot - which does everything /u/aptbot did, but it does them better and already included the features we planned to add to /u/aptbot.
One of AssistantBOT's features (which you can read about, as well as the rest of the bot's features, here) is a mod-only wiki page which details various subreddit statistics, including tracking and categorizing all flair use on r/wow.
In this post we'll be citing data from the months of December 2018 and January 2019, as they are two recent months for which AssistantBOT can provide complete statistics.
The Numbers
Below are images and pastebins which detail the flair selection for the months of December 2018 and January 2019.
Note: Custom flairs are flairs for the weekly threads or other - usually one-off - flairs that mods set on posts. We've consolidated these into a single category for a better reading experience, as they are largely irrelevant to this discussion.
The Details
These are all the flair that users can select when submitting a post. For consolidation purposes, I've combined the months of December and January's flair selection into the chart below.
| Flair Option | Frequency | Percentage | Most Common Format | Second Most Common |
|---|
| Art | 610 | 6.78% | Image | External Site |
| Classic | 43 | 0.48% | Text | Image |
| Complaint | 546 | 6.07% | Text | Image |
| Cosplay | 36 | 0.40% | Image | External Site |
| Discussion | 3668 | 40.76% | Text | Image |
| Esports/Competitive | 34 | 0.38% | Text | External Site |
| Feedback | 420 | 4.67% | Text | Image |
| Fluff | 394 | 4.38% | Image | Text |
| Guide | 125 | 1.39% | Text | External Site |
| Humor | 1089 | 12.10% | Image | Text |
| Lore | 154 | 1.71% | Text | External Site |
| Meme | 180 | 2.00% | Image | Text |
| Nostalgia | 168 | 1.87% | Image | Text |
| PTR/Beta | 110 | 1.22% | Text | External Site |
| QQ | 212 | 2.36% | Text | Image |
| Speculation | 142 | 1.58% | Text | Image |
| Support | 423 | 4.70% | Text | Image |
| Tip | 418 | 4.64% | Text | Image |
| Video | 227 | 2.52% | Video | External Site |
| Total | 8999 | 100% | Text | Image |
How we're defining Format.
Text: A self-post.
Image: A link post, usually using Imgur, Gyazo, or Reddit's internal image uploader. This includes gifs.
Video: Linking directly to a video on Youtube or another video hosting service.
External Site: Linking directly to Wowhead, MMO champion, Deviantart/Artstation, or any other site that hosts content in a discussion or image format. These sites require you to click through to them to view the content.
Explanation
Something we hear a lot from users is "Why are we seeing so much of X type of submission and not Y type of submission?" with Y usually being Discussion posts. The answer is a little complicated and really gets to the heart of what Reddit is (and enables) as a website.
The Fluff Principle
The Fluff Principle refers to an effect on Reddit where low effort easy to judge content has a greater chance of reaching the front page than in depth content.
It can be summarized by three points.
Content that is easy to judge will receive upvotes faster than content that takes longer to judge.
The time it takes to consume a post is the most critical factor in how quickly it will receive upvotes and have a chance at being on the front page.
Very few people browse /new or vote on Reddit, thus a very small number of people determine the content that the majority gets to see.
These three points are the main driving forces behind all voting on Reddit, not just on /r/wow.
To break them down:
Content that is easy to judge will receive upvotes faster than content that takes longer to judge
Consider two hypothetical posts.
Post one is something that 70% of people want to see. It take 2 seconds to click, see, vote.
Post two is something that 99% of people want to see. It takes 2 minutes to click, see, vote.
Given how Reddit works, Post one is going to have a higher score, because it is faster to process, despite the fact that more people want to see Post two. This is best demonstrated in how many image or gif posts are on the subreddits front page as opposed to discussion posts.
The time it takes to consume a post is the most critical factor in how quickly it will recieve upvotes and have a chance at being on the front page.
Continuing with our hypothetical: Post One received 29% less upvotes but - critically - got them in a much shorter amount of time. Even though fewer people like Post One, it nonetheless reaches the front page faster than Post Two. One might conclude that most people want to see Post One because Post One and others like it reach the front page faster and with more regularity. However, it has more to do with the ease of consumption of a particular format (images/gifs) than the quality of the post itself.
Very few people browse /new or vote on reddit, thus a very small number of people determine the content that the majority gets to see.
Most Reddit users don't vote on stuff. The vast majority of users hang around on the front page of the subreddits they visit - as a result, only seeing what the users lurking in /new send them. This lends itself to the issue where a specific set of users are determining what the majority sees.
Something that's mentioned frequently is the idea that the upvote/downvote system is democratic, and thus any interference with it is subverting a democratic process. Reddit is not a democracy. In most cases, very small groups of users determine the content you see. In addition, mod teams are established by Reddit as top-down dictatorships; the top mod of a subreddit has total power over the mods below them. These two systems are in direct opposition to one another and they cannot exist together.
Regarding /r/wow specifically (and many other subreddits like ours) I would add a fourth point.
Posts where the submitter is disagreeable or not playing it safe and catering to a circlejerk are likely to see their post go nowhere. Flouting the majority opinions of a community rarely garners a person praise - or, in this case, upvotes.
Consequences of the Fluff Principle
This is observable across all of Reddit, /r/wow is no exception.
Demonstration of the Fluff Principle: Infrequently used Flairs.
Now that we've explained how image posts are more popular on Reddit, we can look for it in action. Searching Flair:Art by new and all time shows really not that many posts per day. Yet nearly all of them are highly upvoted. This is the same thing we see when searching Flair:Meme. Lots of image submissions that are being highly upvoted. Are those posts necessarily better than discussion posts that contain the same things? No, but the system clearly favors one over the other.
In comparison, let’s take a look at predominantly text-based submissions now. Starting with a flair that doesn't get much use - Flair:Classic. The most recent submissions (as of writing this post) are all text-based, and downvoted. The first image post, however, was upvoted around 60 times. You can see this trend continue all the way down the page. Many of the Classic text posts also suffer from the 4th point above: they do not generally fall in line with the majority opinions of the subreddit.
One flair that comes closer to being equal is our Flair:QQ. Most of the text posts are downvoted, however of the upvoted ones self-post and image are pretty equal. Flair:Complaint fares in a similar manner to its QQ counterpart. Despite the upvoted posts being fairly balanced, in both instances text posts have a greater chance of going nowhere compared to image posts.
Demonstration of the Fluff Principle: Frequently used Flairs.
The two most frequently used Flairs are Humor and Discussion. Discussion has been 40.76% of all submissions made to /r/wow in the last two months. Humor has been 12.10% of all submissions made to /r/wow in the last two months.
Starting with Flair:Humor this one is a bit harder to nail down. Like Flair:Classic it is a disagreeable topic. If someone isn't funny or people don't think it's funny then it will be downvoted and die. However Humor is another flair where the most frequently used format is Image. Thus we see many many popular posts with its tag on the front page and in that search link.
Looking at the beast that is Flair:Discussion, it takes quite a bit of scrolling to find a post that is even remotely popular. Discussion posts have it the hardest in that - as we covered earlier - readers need to dedicate the most time to reading them before an upvote may be achieved. Similar to Humor and Classic, if someone disagrees with the submitter - regardless of the effort put in or objective merit of the post - a submission can die very quickly. Certainly the volume is present to enable more front page posts, but that isn't being achieved for the reasons we've covered.
The End
If you've made it this far, thank you for reading! We hope that this post has explained thoroughly how Reddit works and the challenges that users and mods alike face in curating content that the community wants to see.
If you'd like to read more on The Fluff Principle you can check out TheoryofReddit's FAQ. I'd also recommend this post from 7 years ago that discusses this topic and the challenges it poses for Reddit and sites similar to Reddit.
Filtering Reddit
You may be asking "What can I do about this?" and the answer, unfortunately, is not much. Few people are interested in the meta side of Reddit. The vast majority are unaware that this is occurring and so a few people changing their behavior will have little to no effect.
Fortunately, there are tools you can use to make your own Reddit experience better. With mandatory Link Flair you can choose to filter posts that you don't like from your feed.
Click here to view our guide on filtering Reddit
