Who decides what comments will remain visible and which ones will fall into the "load more comments" category?

Isn't this determined by the number of posts you have it set to display and your sorting method chosen?

I'm not talking about the bottom of the page. Click on the link I provided, do you see all of those little "load more comments" buttons in between replies?

EDIT: I see what you mean now. I'm not sure if there is a setting for this.

There isn't. I just went into preferences and put it on the limit. Nothing changes, just means I can scroll through more comments at once instead of hitting the "load more comments" at the bottom of the page.

I am more concerned about the ones in between the comments. Who is controlling that, they are totally random.

Sometimes you see a comment with only one reply showing and all other replies hidden. And sometimes you see a comment with many replies and maybe only 1 hidden.

Good points. I always assumed that the sorting method you chose carried forward to each child comment but that may not be the case.

Yeah, I didn't know until I tried it just now.

[deleted]

Those are not the comments OP is talking about. He's talking about when they cut off the replies to a top level comment and you have to click load more to get the rest of the child posts.

I don't know how they determine it, I just figured it used your chosen sorting method on the child posts as well.

Or an even more sinister thought, what if various teams of people have figured out the basics of the reddit comment algorithm? So they know that if they make 6 replies within an hour to a particular comment, every reply with be kicked into the "load more comments" filter.

Using this technique, you could essentially make almost any reply invisible.

Reddit is open source and everyone knows the algorithm. There is a popular blog post out there abuot how you can manipulate any post with 5 or 6 bots as long as you get to it early after it was posted.

You're using the "best" sort instead of "top" sort. If you switch to "top" it will show you the highest number of upvotes as the top post.

The "best" sort will put comments with a very high percentage of upvotes towards the top of the thread even if the total vote count is low. If the defense department sees something they don't like, their trolls will all up vote some other comment that is less insightful and be able to pass the post that everyone else likes.

And I would not be surprised if there were a team of people hired to browse reddit and bump those comments out of sight and out of mind.

Reddit is run by the defense department. See here.

I resort by "top" and my point remains the same. There are still plenty of "load more comments" links at seemingly random place.

I noticed it with the 'continue this thread' links. Here is my experience on another thread.

Here is the link to the comment that was replaced with a 'continue this thread' link.

I have to believe that the recent changes to the voting mechanism and the lack of transparency on comment votes only makes it much easier to manipulate the discussion in a large thread.

I've noticed this too, for the record - even something as simple as the top comment in a thread having "40 points" and the one below it having "52 points" despite my sorting everything by "top".

Those load more comments things are pretty shit but they're not exclusive to conspiracy threads. Check this though. I browse on my ps3 mostly because it's easy to read on my tv. When I first joined this sub it worked fine for reddit but after about a month or two reddit killed all functionality. I could still browse reddit but could no longer post or click load more comments. I can't see why they did this because there were no obvious visual changes. This was about 3 months ago so hey reddit if you're reading can you change it back to how it was for me? The only person in the world with the patience to use a shitty broken browser. I'm using my droid atm.

I actually commented a few times on that thread and noticed this same thing. Interesting thing is when I checked it later on the reddit app on my ph, none of the 'load comments' show up at all. I mean, any of those don't appear at all if they are in the 'load comments' category.

I imagine it is for technical and financial reasons. It takes longer and is more resource intensive to generate and serve all of the comments. When the page loads and you click to show more comments, another http request is made, another load of stuff is read from a database, and another chunk of data is sent to your browser. It is better to serve stuff on-demand than to serve everything all at once, every single time.

Nobody reads every comment in a large thread. Knowing that fact, why would an admin choose to create pages that show every comment? There is no benefit to Reddit, in fact there are only negatives in terms of cost, speed and user experience.

To use some algorithm to inspect each comment and judge whether to show it based on some set of criteria other than simple voting numbers would be even more resource intensive and expensive than just showing all of the comments. I don't think your theory is very probable.

Think of the costs associated with running a website like this. The major ones are staffing, hardware, marketing and bandwidth. It would not surprise me if bandwidth were the major cost for Reddit. They served 56 billion webpages to 731 million people last year.

So which is more likely; that Reddit is trying to keep its costs down or that they are trying to stop you from seeing some information?

I understand what you mean but I don't think there is something sinister about it.

This is not about the "load more comments" at the bottom of the page.

This is about all the little "load more comments" links in between the comments and their replies.

The fact that this is WHOOSHING over everyone proves that very few people even notice it.

Why did I waste my time.

*Edit : Sorry that was rude.

Ok, I went back and reread your comment and though you worded it in such a way that it sounded like you were not taking about the "load more comments" links in between the comments, let me give you the benefit of the doubt anyways.

That being said, your theory is sound and it was something I would consider fairly obvious. But what is the pattern? There seems to be almost no detectable pattern when some comments have 1 reply and 13 in the "load more comments" link, and others have 5 replies and 1 in the link, etc...

Now, for arguments sake, lets say that reddit admins did have an agenda, wouldn't it be fairly easy to bump comments and entire reply sections into those links, making them MUCH more likely to never be seen by the general public?

Because if there is no visible pattern to why comments are dumped into those links, then anyone with the power could feasibly disappear any comment reply at will.

And if some asshole like me was smart enough to notice that, why is it a stretch to think that someone who actually works at reddit, and knows the ins and outs like the back of their hand, couldn't think of it?

Thanks.

If you really want to find out what determines which comments are visible and which get hidden behind the more comments link you can do it.

https://github.com/reddit/reddit

Go there, follow the guides, install your own version of Reddit and make some tests. Even if you don't reach a conclusion you'll know more than you do now.

Everything else is speculation.

To reply to your argument, yes it would be trivial for a Reddit admin to do that, assuming such tools or methods exist. But I haven't seen any evidence of that.

My point is that some comments have to be non-visible or the server load and associated costs would be much higher than they are now. Your point is that there is some sinister agenda which decides that process.

I'm looking for technical and financial reasons first because I believe they are more likely motivators than the suppression of information (which is only ever a click away).

See, I think there are financial reasons for reddit to suppress or promote information of their choosing. I think that certain powers are asking reddit to keep certain things framed in certain ways in exchange for X. The same thing happens all the time with Hollywood producers.

Well I will say that I think the low amount of adverts is strange. There is no way this site is solely ad-supported. There is other money from another source. It could be investors, it could be Conde Nast, it could be from datamining companies or it could be from somewhere else entirely.

[deleted]

There is a huge power in being a default setting. BING has a market share of the search engine industry because it's the default for Safari and internet explorer, for instance. If something is default, it's going to get a lot more use than something that takes effort or knowledge to change. Default settings can't be changed when you don't have a login on reddit (people still browse without a login). Many people don't even know they can change them at all. The default settings do support specific forms of manipulation of the comments.

Sorted by "top", nothing changes. Still numerous pockets hidden in a "load more comments" link.

Also, I went into preferences and changed it to show the limit: 500 comments.

Still seeing tons of "load more comments" links in completely random places. All that changed is that amount of comments I can scroll down through at once.

The issue is not the "load more comments" at the bottom of the page. It is the numerous ones peppered at random through every comment section.

[deleted]

I think most of the time, the most innocent things are the ones that can be targeted for manipulation. Because it is obvious to the manipulator that the masses will come out with the "You don't really think they would do that" defense.

The world is a lot more sophisticated than most people give it credit to be.

Am I going to get my theory tattooed on my arm? Of course not. It is just an observation that I happened to make today.

Because it is obvious to the manipulator that the masses will come out with the "You don't really think they would do that" defense.

Ding. Ding. Ding.

I think most of the time, the most innocent things are the ones that can be targeted for manipulation. Because it is obvious to the manipulator that the masses will come out with the "You don't really think they would do that" defense.

The world is a lot more sophisticated than most people give it credit to be.

Am I going to get my theory tattooed on my arm? Of course not. It is just an observation that I happened to make today.