So, a massively, massively popular site that makes it business by ranking the user generated content on it by importance... is wrong.
> Maybe there is no moral. Reddit screwed up.
...or maybe, they know what they're doing.
Maybe not. ...but when you supply a bugfix, the onus is on the submitter to demonstrate that 1) the fix fixes the problem and 2) that it doesn't break anything else.
It would appear that no effort has been made at (2), to demonstrate that the proposed change would not have an adverse affect on other high-vote rankings.
To be fair, it would have been nice to see the pull request response (https://github.com/reddit/reddit/pull/583) mention that an alternative algorithm choice would have to be demonstrably better in a large scale analysis before they would even dream of changing their core ranking algorithm, but it's not unfair for them to take that stance.
It's like asking Google to change their page rank algorithm because you don't like it.
Google change pagerank all the time, so clearly they aren't terrified of changing it. Presumably they have ways such as testing methods to mitigate the risks. If Reddit don't, then they have a much bigger long term problem on their hands than this one glitch.
> the onus is on the submitter to demonstrate that 1) the fix fixes the problem and 2) that it doesn't break anything else.
No. The onus is on Reddit's test suite which, ostensibly, would cover voting (one of the core features/functionality of the site!) to demonstrate this. Or are you suggesting that he didn't run the full build?
> Maybe there is no moral. Reddit screwed up.
...or maybe, they know what they're doing.
Maybe not. ...but when you supply a bugfix, the onus is on the submitter to demonstrate that 1) the fix fixes the problem and 2) that it doesn't break anything else.
It would appear that no effort has been made at (2), to demonstrate that the proposed change would not have an adverse affect on other high-vote rankings.
To be fair, it would have been nice to see the pull request response (https://github.com/reddit/reddit/pull/583) mention that an alternative algorithm choice would have to be demonstrably better in a large scale analysis before they would even dream of changing their core ranking algorithm, but it's not unfair for them to take that stance.
It's like asking Google to change their page rank algorithm because you don't like it.