Skip to main content

Redditors don’t read what they vote on, according to a new study

redditors dont read what they vote on reddit photos
Image used with permission by copyright holder
Reddit, the so-called “front page of the internet,” allows users to upvote and downvote links and other content in order to aggregate the best shareable content on any given day. However, a new study shows that the system might not work as well as it’s intended to.

A paper by students at the University of Notre Dame that was published via IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems suggests that 73 percent of the users that vote on a particular Reddit post haven’t actually clicked through to view the content.

Reddit apparently receives some 234 million visitors per month, but the study honed in on just 309 individuals, according to Motherboard. This allowed the researchers to eschew the site’s own data and collect its own through bespoke browser plugins developed for Google Chrome and Firefox. These tools were able to record a full picture of the users’ behavior.

Most of the participants in the study were designated as “headline browsers” — meaning that they would scroll through page after page without actually clicking on anything. The paper states that 84 percent of the users monitored interacted with content in less than half of their page loads, while 94 percent did so in less than 60 percent of their page loads.

There is a lot that we can glean from this study about the way that people ingest content on the internet. For one, there is the importance of the headline — it seemingly takes something truly special to draw an individual to access the content itself.

Further, there is the fact that so many people are willing to vote on whether a particular piece of content should be placed more or less prominently without having clicked through for themselves. This suggests that such decisions are being made based on assumptions rather than actual experience.

Clicking a link to read an article, watch a video, or listen to some audio doesn’t take a great deal of effort — especially compared to what you would have to do to access the same materials 30 years ago. The sheer breadth of content being shared on Reddit means that our time and attention are at a premium and as a result, we’re becoming more difficult to please.

Editors' Recommendations

Brad Jones
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Brad is an English-born writer currently splitting his time between Edinburgh and Pennsylvania. You can find him on Twitter…
Whatever you do, don’t buy an Nvidia GPU right now
Three RTX 4080 cards sitting on a pink background.

If you're trying to build or upgrade a PC, now is the best time to buy many different components. Black Friday brings huge discounts on parts, making it the best time of the year to stretch your dollar the furthest. But this year, there's one important part you should wait on: a new Nvidia graphics card.

That's not because Nvidia's latest GPUs are bad -- they're some of the best graphics cards you can buy -- but because we're likely on the brink of a major refresh to Nvidia's current lineup of GPUs, and the deals we're seeing now will probably become the norm in just a few months.
A Super refresh incoming?

Read more
Don’t believe the hype — the era of native resolution gaming isn’t over
Alan Wake looking at a projection of himself.

Native resolution is dead, or so the story goes. A string of PC games released this year, with the most recent being Alan Wake 2, have come under fire for basically requiring some form of upscaling to achieve decent performance. Understandably, there's been some backlash from PC gamers, who feel as if the idea of running a game at native resolution is quickly becoming a bygone era.

There's some truth to that, but the idea that games will rely on half-baked upscalers to achieve reasonable performance instead of "optimization" is misguided at best -- and downright inaccurate at worst. Tools like Nvidia's Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) and AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) will continue to be a cornerstone of PC gaming, but here's why they can't replace native resolution entirely.
The outcry
Let's start with why PC gamers have the impression that native resolution is dead. The most recent outcry came over Alan Wake 2 when the system requirements revealed that the game was built around having either DLSS or FSR turned on. That's not a new scenario, either. The developers of Remnant 2 confirmed the game was designed around upscaling, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a AAA release in the last few years that didn't pack in upscaling tech.

Read more
I tested Intel’s Core i5-14600K against its cheaper sibling. Don’t waste your money
Intel Core i5-13600K installed in a motherboard.

Intel's new Core i5-14600K isn't a massive generational leap, as you can read in our Core i5-14600K review. No one expected it to be with Intel's 13th-gen CPUs already sitting among the best processors. The bigger question is if it's worth buying over last-gen's Core i5-13600K considering that both are readily available for around the same price.

I've tested both chips extensively across a range of productivity and gaming scenarios. The Core i5-14600K brings some minor improvements over its last-gen counterpart, but those looking to stretch their dollar the furthest are better off sticking with the Core i5-13600K.
Pricing and availability
An Intel 13th-generation 13600K Jacob Roach / Digital Trends

Read more