Comment by xyzzy4747

17 days ago

It also reminds me how the most upvoted comments on Reddit often reflect the consensus opinion but not necessarily the truth.

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xyzzy4747

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OJFord  17 days ago

How could a voting system anywhere be expected to represent truth rather than consensus?

  • xyzzy4747  17 days ago

    It probably depends if the audience is intelligent and open-minded, but I agree, it will always be biased towards their preconceptions.

    • OJFord  17 days ago

      Even then that's consensus on what the participants believe to be true (whether it's what they believed beforehand or not) - not a method of determining what is actually true.

65  17 days ago

Also, almost always highly emotional if you're on a popular subreddit's post.

I picked a random post on the home page, this one for example:

https://old.reddit.com/r/clevercomebacks/comments/1i1b4tn/i_...

The comments are all

"The oligarchs would never go for it."

or "It’s a cult." and on and on.

I think this is particularly true in rage bait posts on Reddit, which is most of the home page these days.