You have to realize that there is a difference between popular posts and quality posts.<p>For example, I am the main moderator on r/robots these days. When I came in, I got feedback from the users to clarify the content that belongs in the subreddit. They indicated that they wanted about equally to post about robotic art as well as real robots. Right now about 70% of posts are about real robots and 30% are about robot art or something called that.<p>But my point is, the posts that get upvotes are generally not the quality posts. The things that determine upvotes are number one, how easy is it to consume? So if it's a GIF rather than a video, it is likely to receive at least 10 times as many upvotes.<p>Maybe tied for number one, does it have some kind of base emotional effect? Most of the time means, is it sexual or vaguely sexual? Sometimes that means, does it look kind of like a cute baby robot?<p>Another one is, is it reductionistic? In other words, headlines or overall posts that tend to over-simplify something tend to be more popular.<p>Another one: randomness affects vote count significantly. Also, vote manipulation seems to be a factor. When we had some seemingly 'professional' redditors come in that really, really wanted to be mods and I let them for a couple of days, it seemed like they must have been willing to do anything to get their posts upvoted. And also to mod any and all subs that would let them. Which is why I kicked them out.<p>But the point of this is that in-depth videos of real robots will get few upvotes just because they are longer, and the ones that do better may just have good thumbnails but aren't actually good videos.<p>Which is to say that I have been watching the judgement of our community closely for months, and the posts that receive upvotes are absolutely not the best posts in general. I mean, sometimes good ones get upvotes. But sometimes they are ignored and utter trash gets upvoted.<p>It's really changed my perspective on democracy. Sometimes I want to quit being a mod there, but I am not sure the other mods care enough to bother remove the ads and spam that pop up every week or so masquerading as normal posts.