I'm not sure if my brain is failing me but... "I calculated a less than 0.001% chance of posts (content) making the front page of Reddit. That is a 1/1000 chance."
Surely 1% is a 1 in 100 chance, 0.1% is a 1 in 1,000 chance, 0.001% would be 1 in 100,000 chance. Have I made a critical error here?
I fail to see what value this has other than getting a cheap thrill. It's not that difficult to get images with witty comments onto the front page. What's difficult is being able to promote a message or product.
Reddit adds downvotes to account for spam votes. I don't know how they know they are spam votes though. Also it's curious, if they know a vote is spam, why not just not count it at all instead of adding a downvote?
They fuzz the numbers displayed - everything internally uses the real upvote/downvote count. It's so bots can't figure out if they've been flagged or not.
Not sure what meaningful conclusions you can draw from this. In my experience what makes a post popular is something like 50% content, 25% title and 25% timing. That's a lot of variance, I imagine with different wording and/or timing of the submissions your results might have been dramatically different. I've definitely seen posts that go nowhere the first day but go but the top of the front-page when it's re-posted verbatim or slightly reworded by someone else.
I would say the conclusion is pretty much what you said. 50% content, 40% title and 10% timing makes a successful post. (obviously for break news/trending events timing is everything - my focus was on content that could be leveraged at any time)
About two years ago a friend and myself curled digg and reddit for a couple weeks analyzing trends of submissions. We ended up getting the infographic itself to #1 on reddit and on the frontpage of Digg (during its relevancy).
Surely 1% is a 1 in 100 chance, 0.1% is a 1 in 1,000 chance, 0.001% would be 1 in 100,000 chance. Have I made a critical error here?