Why do I mention The Unidan Affair? Well, I believe it offers several important takeaways for cultural scholars of the web. First, it offers demonstration intoxicating and often nepotistic nature of micro-celebrity in spaces like reddit. While Unidan was the only one who was banned for manipulating votes, it is probable that many of his fans were also guilty of a kind of vote manipulation. By automatically granting Unidan’s comments and submissions more attention simply because he was Unidan, the reddit community often overlooked the contributions of individuals who were more qualified to contribute. It’s likely too, that redditors often came to Unidan’s defense whenever he was embroiled in some sort of argument just because he was Unidan.
Second and relatedly, it reaffirms the power that algorithms have in shaping community discourse in spaces like reddit. Algorithms are “stabilizers of trust” that suggest a kind of automated objectivity (Gillespie, 2014, p. 179). But they are also designed objects and as such have politics embedded in them. By making a choice to weight more heavily the first ten votes over the next 100 and so on, reddit’s algorithm privileges certain members’ votes over others (i.e. those who hang out in the /new queue to upvote/downvote new material vs. those that don’t). Unidan’s vote manipulation is an emblematic example of how algorithms become entangled with user practice, changing, “how users reshape their practices to suit the algorithms they depend on, and how they can turn algorithms into terrains for political contest” (Gillespie, 2014, p. 168).