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

I'll disprove this theory

[bill_mcgonigle]

Nobody will give this post a +1, and therefore it won't be at +5 in two hours.

Debate on the internet = waste of time.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you think otherwise, I challenge you to prove how anything which is
even remotely productive comes from online debate.