Data Mining Shows How Down-Voting Leads To Vicious Circle of Negative Feedback

KentuckyFC writes: "In behavioral psychology, the theory of operant conditioning is the notion that an individual's future behavior is determined by the punishments and rewards he or she has received in the past. It means that specific patterns of behavior can be induced by punishing unwanted actions while rewarding others. While the theory is more than 80 years old, it is hard at work in the 21st century in the form of up- and down-votes — or likes and dislikes — on social networks. But does this form of reward and punishment actually deter unwanted actions while encouraging good behavior? Now a new study of the way voting influences online behavior has revealed the answer. The conclusion: negative feedback leads to behavioral changes that are hugely detrimental to the community. Not only do authors of negatively-evaluated content contribute more but their future posts are of lower quality and are perceived by the community as such. What's more, these authors are more likely to evaluate fellow users negatively in future, creating a vicious circle of negative feedback. By contrast, positive feedback does not influence authors much at all. That's exactly the opposite of what operant conditioning theory predicts. The researchers have a better suggestion for social networks: 'Given that users who receive no feedback post less frequently, a potentially effective strategy could be to ignore undesired behavior and provide no feedback at all.' Would Slashdotters agree?"

Comments

Re:BS

[the_povinator]

I read TFA, and unfortunately the research is very weak. They did not do a proper randomized study, they merely trained a classifier to figure out how good they thought a post was, and then divided up posts into pairs where their classifier thought they were the same but the feedback was different. They assume that their classifier is accurate, i.e. really reflects the goodness of a post. The rest of their research follows from this assumption.

If it had been a proper randomized study (i.e. roll a dice and up/down vote posts) I could have believed it.

Re:BS

[crossmr]

There is a lot of retaliatory butthurt behaviour on the internet.

You make one comment someone doesn't like and suddenly it's open season on everything you've ever said, regardless of it's worth. Somewhere like Reddit, someone will go through and downvote your last 40+ comments just because you got the better of them in a debate. Downvoting without commenting is the last vestige of the defeated. They know their argument can't hold water, so rather than concede the point, or move on, they go through and downvote anyone who spoke against them. While some comments are generally stupid enough that they need no reply (or further replies than the ones they've already received), someone who just abandons a discussion in favor of downvoting damages a community.

I can remember one exchange over on reddit, something on Korean language, where a native Korean chimes in as a reply to my comment "This guy is totally 100% right why is this being downvoted?" And it was all because of some other topic where a handful of butthurt children couldn't handle being proven wrong on a point so decided to run around downvoting anything else I'd posted within the last few days.

I've had it happen on Slashdot as well. Not in awhile, because I don't comment here as much as I used to (I used to frequently get mod points, but not that much recently). A few times, almost always after a debate with someone, the other party (I can only assume) would get mod points, and then past posts of mine, like ones over a week old, would suddenly all be moderated down as troll or something like that. I think I even made a post a few years ago about vindictive moderation.