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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3678 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 11, 2022

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Posting in the small questions thread because I need independent confirmation on this. Are search engines manipulating results and discussions on Rings of Power? I know I’m late on this.

I was searching for reviews online and was surprised that on YouTube, almost every major entertainment reviewer and LOTR enthusiast shat on the series, whereas on Reddit, many of the top comments in posts said the series was great.

On closer inspection, though, search engines appear to only want to show me certain review content. First by googling “rings of power review” it takes me to two positive posts that don’t even have review in the title (???). Same with if I search “rings of power bad”, with no quotes, it shows me posts with positive top comments in threads that don’t have “bad” or any synonym in the title.

More importantly, when I search Rings of Power on Reddit search and sort by top, or if I search “lord rings of power” and sort by top, or even “LOTR rings of power”, it refuses to show me the top narrowed results. It literally refuses to search for it. Instead I see the top Reddit posts total (no narrowing to search query). To make sure this wasn’t a mistake I tried various searches queries, some for illegal drugs like fentanyl, all of which took me to the requested top searches.

And lastly, in many of the threads I enter, it default sorts to “Best” in the most wild way, where 30 or 200 upvote comments consistently appear before 1.5k or 2k comments in a way that was clearly tailored specifically to show positives comments. Usually Best and Top are pretty similar, in this case they were the opposite.

Has anyone noticed similar? Or can independently verify one of these for me?

With what we now know about Twitter, it would be surprising if Reddit was not actively supressing certain kinds of content and rewarding others.

Rings of Power doesn't inspire much passion in people who dislike it.

Personally I watched a few episodes, decided it wasn't for me, and ignored it. If I had a job reviewing shows then I would have given it a negative review.

Assuming my reaction it typical, you'd expect mostly positive reviews on Reddit. People who like it, like it a lot. People who don't like it don't feel like writing a long post about it.

Now "best" sorts by a combination of total votes and upvote ratio. Top is just net positive votes.

So for some reason those 2k comment votes were attracting a lot of downvotes.

Perhaps Amazon PR people posted a bunch of fawning reviews, mass upvoted them, then people in the subreddit voted those comments down. The "best" comments were just some fans opinion and they didn't attract detractors.

As for Google, a few years ago they bent to pressure to promote "reliable sources". In practice that means established corporate press. I'm guessing that no one bothered to exclude tv show reviews from that.

I was a fairly early reddit user and I remember the day they announced "now we've got search working pretty much the way we want it to".

Everyone's reaction was like "Wait, really? Are you sure?"

Reddit search makes perfect sense if you assume that the goal is to keep people posting, and reposts are always going to be the majority of posts. Whether it's the same five jokes or memes getting reposted, or the same obvious beginner questions in /r/trucks or /r/kettlebell cut off reposts and a sub dies. Reddit with a search function that makes reposting unnecessary makes Reddit less active, less money coming in.

Can't comment on the other ones, but searching on reddit itself just seems to be terrible/nonsensical/godawful, regardless of what you're searching for. I almost always get significantly better results from googling "reddit [whatever I want to search for on reddit]" than actually searching it on reddit.

Reddit search has always given random and dumb results. But I tried searching "Rings of Power" on new reddit, and the posts and comments had a mix of very positive and very negative comments - "Amazon just wants a cash grab" etc

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