Only about 20% of redditors vote, and only about 20% of voters comment [1].
That doesn't really ring true. If you make a post with a question in the title, you'll often get 5+ answers before a single person votes. Even downvotes.
Maybe it's more accurate to say "Of those people who don't hang out in the new submissions queue, only about 20% of the voters comment."
But, really, Reddit could do anything it wants internally, and we'd have no idea. Only they have access to the stats. They already compress the votes so that it only looks like there are ~10,000 votes maximum, when in fact hundreds of thousands of people have probably voted on certain posts.
> They already compress the votes so that it only looks like there are ~10,000 votes maximum, when in fact hundreds of thousands of people have probably voted on certain posts
Again I'm out of the loop by several years here. But to my knowledge, no that's not true. There are just fewer voters than you think there are.
Just to nitpick, accounts != people. Reddit in particular seems to attract throw away accounts and a large number of posts seem to start with "Throwaway". But otherwise, yes!
Also you don't need an e-mail address to register, and some people don't care about karma, so some people like me just create a new account whenever my saved login info is lost for any reason. Not necessarily using throwaway accounts in the traditional sense, but not overly concerned about maintaining a single account either. I've probably made 6-7 Reddit accounts over a few years [and 2 HN accounts over a longer time frame].
https://www.reddit.com/comments/z1c9z Obama's AMA. According to the sidebar, (upvotes - downvotes) = 14,700, with upvotes/(upvotes+downvotes) = 94%. Reddit recently changed their algorithms so that the 94% figure is very accurate. That means 14,700/0.94 ~= 15,600 people voted, according to the sidebar.
The AMA brought in an extra two million uniques over two days. Also, it was one of the most legendary and historic events thus far on the internet, because it was the first time a sitting US president directly engaged with the public on a social media website.
Reddit has millions of subscribers. They can't really obfuscate the subscriber counts, because the subscriber count for each subreddit is visible every day. If it suddenly slowed down, people would notice. And the info needs to be available to moderators in order to manage their subreddit. Therefore, when /r/funny says it has 7 million subscribers, we can be reasonably certain there are at least 7 million Reddit accounts, many of which are active.
So, assuming there are only about a million active Redditors (there are probably more), and that a large number of those Redditors visit http://www.reddit.com/r/all on a regular basis, and considering that the Obama AMA was one of the most significant events in Reddit history (and indeed all internet history), and considering that over three million people viewed the AMA, it seems hard to believe that only 15,000 people voted on it.
It's possible. Statistics are one of the most counter-intuitive fields. Behaviors emerge at scale which aren't seen in the initial stages. Maybe it's possible people saw that 5,000 people had already upvoted the AMA, and so were less likely to upvote it themselves. But given the nature of politics and the significant historical status of the event, could it be true that the fate of the AMA was influenced by just a few thousand people?
Another observation: Reddit has had steady upward growth, but I remember that as of a few years ago the upvote counts were regularly reaching 3k. That number hasn't gone up too much in the meantime: https://www.reddit.com/r/all/
If the number of voters could be calculated as a simple percentage of total active Reddit accounts, and Reddit's traffic has doubled, then why haven't the vote counts in /r/all also doubled?
That said, I'm not entirely convinced of my position. Reality is weird, and I'm often wrong. All I'm saying is that if it's true that only 15,000 people voted on Obama's AMA, and that a submission on /r/all regularly receives only ~5k votes out of a million active redditors who see it, then I'm surprised.
EDIT: The more I think about it, the more I think I'm mistaken. If it were true that Reddit compresses the vote counters for submissions, then they'd also have to do it for comments, because otherwise the top comment would regularly display a count that's way higher than the submission. They'd also have to compress the added comment karma, etc. This is where it moves from "plausible" to "the simplest explanation is that very few people vote."
> If the number of voters could be calculated as a simple percentage of total active Reddit accounts, and Reddit's traffic has doubled, then why haven't the vote counts in /r/all also doubled?
The people who are joining reddit now are more lurkers than participants, so as the site grows, the percent of people who participate (vote and comment) gets smaller.
I think we can mostly blame (or thank, depending on your view of the average contributor) mobile devices for that. They make it much easier to consume reddit, but much harder to contribute.
I feel like people vote only partly on whether they think something is good or bad; they also (or maybe mostly) vote based on whether they think something has a higher or lower score than they think it deserves. So as a post or comment's score rises, people will stop upvoting when they feel it's got enough.
That doesn't really ring true. If you make a post with a question in the title, you'll often get 5+ answers before a single person votes. Even downvotes.
Maybe it's more accurate to say "Of those people who don't hang out in the new submissions queue, only about 20% of the voters comment."
But, really, Reddit could do anything it wants internally, and we'd have no idea. Only they have access to the stats. They already compress the votes so that it only looks like there are ~10,000 votes maximum, when in fact hundreds of thousands of people have probably voted on certain posts.