Reddit is one of the largest social media platforms, with more than 430 million monthly active users.
What makes it different and unique from other social media platforms is that it provides a vast network of communities where users can freely express their opinions on every niche.
Users on Reddit are always searching for high-quality content. Generally, the scores of any post or comment determine the quality of the content.
This scoring system is not always effective as it leads to snowballing, making some high-quality content get less attention than they deserve.
Even many spammers manipulate users using this tool. To fix this, Reddit has come up with a perfect solution. Moderators can hide those scores.
Moderators of any community can hide comment scores via the “Minutes to hide comment scores” option for a few minutes. You must navigate through the “Community settings” of your Subreddit in your browser to locate this option. Then, allot time to hide the comment for however long you want (you can set the time up to 1440 minutes). This way, nobody can view the comment scores until the allotted time passes.
Let’s dive in to understand how the scoring works on Reddit and how you can stop it from influencing others.
Upvotes and Downvotes on Reddit
If you know your way around Reddit, then you know this web-traffic powerhouse works on the principle of voting (pretty democratic).
The platform allows users to approve any post or comment through their upvotes and disapprove by downvotes.
Any post that gets higher positive votes or upvotes shows on top of the front page. Similarly, any comment with more upvotes shines through other comments and ranks higher in the thread.
This system, in theory, sounds more democratic and perfect. The system encourages high-quality insightful content by boosting it. Naturally, more people strive to create quality content to get featured on the front page of Reddit.
The problem with this system is that it is not a genuine representation of the quality of any content. Many users’ decision to upvote or downvote is just a snowball effect.
When people see any comment or post getting upvotes, they hop on the bandwagon and upvote that submission. Likewise, if more people downvote anything, it influences others’ decisions as well.
On platforms like Reddit, where it is all about voting, any single positive or negative vote can have a significant snowball effect on overall voting.
So, a single upvote can encourage the non-voters to vote and negative voter to even change their decision because of the influence.
According to several pieces of research, “Group thinking” plays a significant role in people’s judgment on Reddit and other online communities. Researchers call it a “hivemind.”
To undermine the effects of herding/snowballing (even for a few minutes) on any comment, Reddit introduced a perfect solution.
The solution is temporary and works for a few minutes, but it does have a significant impact.
Let’s learn how to hide scores on Reddit.
How Does Hiding Scores on Reddit Work?
If you are any Subreddit moderator, you can hide the comment scores for a few minutes.
To do this, you have to work on your desktop. Follow these steps:
- Navigate to Reddit on your favorite web browser.
- Click the “Home” option at the top.
- Select the community you moderate from the drop-down.
- Click on the “MOD TOOLS” option on the right panel.
- Scroll down the left menu for the “Community settings” option under the “OTHER” tab.
- Click “Posts and Comments” from the left panel.
- Scroll down to the “Minutes to hide comment score” tab, and allot the time you want the comments to appear without scores.
- Hit the “Save Changes” button on the top to finish.
In this way, all other users will not be able to view the comment scores until the allotted time passes.
So, if you allot 60 minutes, then for 60 minutes, nobody can see a comment’s score, but after 60 minutes pass, everybody can.
This method does not work Reddit app.
Important Pointers
Down are the essential takeaways for hiding scores on Reddit:
- You can hide comment scores for up to 1440 minutes (24 hours).
- Moderators can still see the scores.
- Scores will not be visible to mobile users, RES users, and others.
- This feature will not affect the page’s voting or any other behavior. Like, top scores sorting will still work using hidden scores, and you can collapse low scores comments too.
After the stipulated time, Reddit users will be able to view the scores of the comment.
Is Hiding Scores a Good Thing?
When you hide scores, it gives every comment a fair shot based on its quality to compete against each other and does not lose its potential due to the herding/snowballing effect.
Users will determine whether the comment is worth their appreciation based on their judgment and not influence.
Similarly, it will prevent manipulative spamming activities where spammers get upvotes via social voting groups to exploit users.
The Takeaway
Herding or snowballing can influence people in their judgment. Many brands have been capitalizing on human abilities to get swayed away by peer pressures, group thinking, and others.
Brands go to extents to influence you by even posting 100 positive fake reviews online to manipulate you.
Since voting scores are the main component of the Reddit mechanism, the bandwagon effect is very prominent here.
To counter that, Reddit introduced this feature of hiding the comment scores for a few minutes to give users a fair shot at thriving on the platform.
