The rich getting richer on online forums.
Reddit is an online content aggregation, rating, and discussion website that operates as a network of individualized forums, called ‘subreddits’. Almost all content is user submitted, and the popularity of submissions is voted on by users. Like most social platforms, users can ‘like’ a post, or upvote it, and doing so increases its ‘score’, and in doing so increases the likelihood that other users will see the post. But, unlike sites like Facebook and Instagram, users also have the option to downvote a submission, and decrease the chance that other users will see it. The same system applies to the comments on a post, and if the score drops far enough below 0, the comment will even be hidden from view of the user, and the user has to specifically tap on the hidden comment to view it.
Researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem conducted a study into the effects of a comment’s current score, on how likely a user is to upvote or downvote it. They found that “increasing a comment’s score with a single vote, would boost its final score by an average of 25 percent”. These findings align with the phenomenon of ‘rich-get-richer’ discussed in class, and isn’t particularly surprising. Users alter their own opinion on a comment they read based upon other people’s opinions on the comment. It’s also, of course, true that if two comments say essentially the same thing, that the comment with the higher score will appear higher, and receive upvotes, while the other one is more likely to be ignored; again, none of this is particularly surprising.
What I did find a bit surprising is that the inverse wasn’t true. Comments that had negative scores were not more likely to receive a downvote from a user. In fact, the researchers found that those comments were slightly more likely to receive an upvote (although their final scores wouldn’t necessarily end up positive). The researchers concluded that people will “go along with positive opinions but are more skeptical of the negative opinions of others.” So, although Reddit may operate as a hivemind for popular opinions, where the rich-get-richer, users are much more bipartisan with unpopular opinions, so it isn’t true that the poor-get-poorer.
I would certainly be interested to see if these results would be replicable across social media platforms that allow negative interactions, because the results found here could hold some important implications about how we as humans form opinions. We know that we often choose to like the same things as other people without fully forming our own opinion, but perhaps we aren’t as inclined to dislike the same things as other people, without first deciding for ourselves to dislike it.