Upvoting on social media sites like Reddit and others
This article describes a study on how the concept of groupthink influences post popularity on Reddit, a popular website where members can create posts about certain topics and upvote/downvote other users’ posts/comments. Researchers conducted a voting aggregation experiment on a website very similar to Reddit. They wanted to see whether or not an extra upvote/downvote early in the life of a post could influence other users’ perceptions of the comment. Ultimately, researchers found that increasing a comment’s score by 1 could eventually boost its score by 25 percent, on average. The upvote seemed to encourage more people who would have otherwise voted negatively or have abstained to join in. However, they found that in the case of an artificial downvote, users were more likely to respond positively. The article also discusses some of the drawbacks of this groupthink phenomenon — one of which is potential exploitation on sites such as Amazon or Yelp by purchasing fake reviews to manipulate ratings.
The ideas discussed in this article is deeply connected to many of the topics that we have been recently discussing in class, such as information cascades and the ‘rich-get-richer’ phenomenon. We see that the behavior of a group of people can potentially be influenced by a new initial signals. As the rich-get-richer phenomenon might dictate, a post with many upvotes is likely to gain a number of upvotes proportional to its current number of upvotes; meaning that an initial upvote could be an important factor in the number that a post eventually receives.