Researchers Show How Easy It Is To Manipulate Online Opinions

jcatcw writes "A recent study shows that a single random up-vote, randomly chosen, created a herding behavior in ratings that resulted in a 25% increase in the ratings but the negative manipulation had no effect. An intuitive explanation for this asymmetry is that we tend to go along with the positive opinions of others, but we tend to be skeptical of the negative opinions of others, and so we go in and correct what we think is an injustice. The third major result was that these effects varied by topic. So in business and society, culture, politics, we found substantial susceptibility to positive herding, whereas in general news, economics, IT, we found no such herding effects in the positive or negative direction."

Comments

Listening PS?

[Austrian Anarchy]

There you go Popular Science, a cure for what ails you.

Slashdot members knows this

[themushroom]

Because it's easier to see a +2 comment go to +5 due to people seeing the comment than a 0 comment from an anonymous coward get any altitude at all.

Re:Slashdot members knows this

[girlintraining]

Because it's easier to see a +2 comment go to +5 due to people seeing the comment than a 0 comment from an anonymous coward get any altitude at all.

That's only part of the equation. If you want to karma whore, you do three things; First, post early. Second, attach comments to highly rated ones (or ones you think will be). Third, don't be like me; Always go with the party line. Especially once your karma is 'excellent' because no matter how many upmods you get, it only takes one or two angry moderators to click your page, go into your history, and blow all their points on you to burn your karma out... and several people have multiple accounts here. I've run across them and had my karma croppy-flop from excellent to neutral in just a few minutes because I told an Apple fanboy their god was dead.

Re:Slashdot members knows this

[Anonymous Coward]

sorry girlintraining,

I have read many of your comments. Sometimes they are great and insightful constructed logically such that even if you disagree you can understand it is genuinely constructive, earning you heaps of karma,

Sometimes you say some pretty heavily debated shit. No doubt burning your karma to the ground.

Basically, the reason you flip-flop on karma, is because you flip-flop in the quality of your comments. Not because you told an apple fanboy that apple didn't invent the tablet.

Re:Slashdot members knows this

[mcgrew]

Funny, I was modbombed just last week and my karma's still excellent. Oh, and we're offtopic here... oh, wait, the subjct is manipulating online opinions. I guess we're not offtopic after all.

But that's how we'll be modded just because I used the word "offtopic." Slashdot may be "news for nerds" but a few with limited reasoning abilities still get mod points. Put the word "insightful" somewhere in your post and expect a +5.

Don't people suck?

Re:Slashdot members knows this

[TheRaven64]

Ah, and here we see the most effective way of getting karma. Post, including the phrase 'I'll probably be modded down for this' or some variant...

Re:OK

[Anonymous Coward]

+1

Re:obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

Since the dawn of time. If it isn't objective, it isn't science.

Re:-1

[Jade_Wayfarer]

Witty retort with a thinly veiled strawman.