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

OK

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with that.

Re:OK

[alphatel]

+1

Re:OK

[QRDeNameland]

+1, begin Stampede.

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?

Why I moderate the way I do

[techno-vampire]

When I have mod points, I look for posts that haven't been moderated at all. I figure that once a post's been modded up, there are lots of people who will mod it up further, if appropriate (or just from the herd instinct) so I save my points for posts that haven't been noticed before.

obvious

[MondoGordo]

People are more easily swayed by opinions in subjective areas, culture, politics, business than in objective ones, news, IT, science. How obvious can a study be?

Brain dump summary

[steelfood]

Is it just me, or has there recently been a rash of poorly-edited summaries that have been nothing more than a brain dump of the submitter? Like dupes, it used to happen occasionally, but now it's at least once or twice a day.

That aside, a story about the psychology of online feedback on Slashdot. What could possibly go wrong...

Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid

[CryptDemon]

Well you've commented, so now you're worthless to us all.

Microsoft and SCO are Good!

[Tablizer]

just testing the theory...