Slashdot Mirror
New Study Finds That Most Redditors Don't Actually Read the Articles They Vote On (vice.com)
Michael Byrne, writing for Motherboard: According to a paper published in IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems by researchers at Notre Dame University, some 73 percent of posts on Reddit are voted on by users that haven't actually clicked through to view the content being rated. This is according to a newly released dataset consisting of all Reddit activity of 309 site users for a one year period. In the process, the researchers identified signs of "cognitive fatigue" in Reddit users most likely to vote on content. Online aggregation is then somewhat a function of mental exhaustion.
99% of /.ers don't read the articles posted before commenting.
I mean, that's how it works here too, right?
read it a 1000 times.
top comment to confirm.
why not rely on hivemind to prefilter content?
I'm going to fully support the results of this study, although I have yet to actually click on it.
Now is the time to write your Redditor and let them know exactly what you think. When your letter is received, you can rest assured that it will be voted upon, regardless of whether it was read.
When I use a discussion site like Reddit, or Hacker News, or Slashdot, or Stack Overflow, I want to see all comments by default.
I don't care about what score they've been given by a bunch of arbitrary moderators or other users.
I want to make up my own mind by seeing the comments for myself. I'll judge them on my own.
Sites like those, and this one, would be a lot better without the pointless moderating/voting systems they have.
Those systems just encourage foolish people to babble the accepted group-think in order to collect pointless "karma" points. That's not real discussion. That's just a pathetic form of online communal brown-nosing.
What's worse is when those flawed moderation/voting systems hide the best content, which often features original thoughts and ideas that the mindless masses find too controversial or painful to think about.
To hell with the voting and moderation we see on online discussion sites. They just hurt the discussion more than they help it.
slashdot 3.0?
I upvoted this article.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Upvoted Not Because Girl, But Because It Is Very Cool; However, I Do Concede That I Initially Clicked Because Girl.
Summation 2
Not reading TFA?
Call me shocked.
The author must be a newbie.
Reddit upvotes are heavily botted, and I imagine the publishers of these articles are the prime suspects. Clicks mean cash.
For all intensive porpoises your a bunch of rediculous loosers
I just vote up headlines that confirm my worldview and downvote the ones that don't.
..just saying.
They knew they were being studied (it was done by a voluntary browser plugin) but didnt know what specific habits they were studying.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
How many of the observed users were banned during the study period? Did they start the study with 10,000 users, but only 309 of the accounts survived until the end of the study?
To determine whether or not this is a problem, we have to determine what percentage of articles are actually worth reading over the headlines. If the articles are typically just fleshing out the headline, without anything meaningful added, this is efficient, rational behavior.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Most people on /. don't read the articles before commenting either. This is not a new phenomenon.
And marketing bots don't even care.
...that slashdot is not alone in that phenomena.
Most Slashdot users don't read the article before they comment...this AC included.
This episode of The Orville reminds me of this -- it seems that people just make split decisions because they can't be bothered with hearing and weighing the evidence presented to them. Probably because people aren't being asked to think into the areas of possible ambiguity, we just raise them to pick from a selection of choices. The millennial generation might as well be called the multiple choice generation. So glad I'm from the "Choose your own adventure" generation. ;)
Posters don't click on the article because they are *NOT* commenting on the article, but rather commenting on other poster's comments. So what.
It's only one step from slashdot, were people don't read the article but still post "expert" replies.
I did my third post on reddit sometimes the last month, warning about a bad scheme on Amazon Prime trials, and all I got was banter about not reading the fuking manual and whatnot... I think (most) redditors are septemberists of the internet who have absolutely no idea on argumentation and will instantly vote no on anything that even attempts to bash anything they appreciate (in this case, Amazon Prime). Bu oh well maybe I'm a septemberist myself on reddit so I digress.
One thing I'm sure off - not going to reddit whenever I feel like trying to get relevant info out on anything. I'll just make a facebook share and I'm sure none of my friends will unlike it #egorub
I have never voted on a post on reddit. I very rarely vote on comments. I always read the entire post before I comment.
I am pertty sure reddit bans would not have affected the study, they could have used the data gathered before the bans,
When you cant win, ad hominem.
There were many posts from "fringe thinkers" about the high percentages of down votes coming from China bot farms. Combine this with paid political posters. When governments cannot directly control free speech they use misinformation methods.
It's a widespread phenomenon, not just limited to one site. People don't have time to read articles (or even summaries), which is why headlines generally start and drive discussions. Our brains just can't handle that much information, but we have that silly emotional need to get our opinions out there regardless.
Many don't even read the title of the post, they just sort of get a feel for what the article is about and then kneejerk from there. I'm looking at a front page post on reddit right now where the top rated comment is just that, he even uses a quote from the article but he clearly didn't comprehend the article at all.
You know you can post anonymously when you're signed in, right?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I frequently vote down topics I haven't read due to title gore. If the title of the post spans multiple lines then I can already tell I have no interest in it and never will. So down it goes. Same thing applies to off-topic posts.
I think the most interesting part of this study would be how their findings correlate to other attributes of the voters.
For example, I suspect that they'd discover that the people who upvote/downvote/moderate the most are probably middle-aged male virgins, likely working in some low-paid retail job, with low testosterone levels, likely a case of moderate-to-severe micropenis syndrome, and left wing political views. These are the kind of people who, due to their total failure in reality, feel the need to act "powerful" online by attacking other users through voting and moderating mechanisms. They try to make up for their lack of masculinity by being online tyrants who censor others.
Conversely, we'd likely find that the most successful people offline end up doing the least upvoting/downvoting/moderating online. Truly successful people don't feel the need to censor others. They don't feel the need to create accounts and collect pointless "karma" points in some irrelevant database. Because they're successful they don't need to seek out online ways of feeling a faux sense of authority. They try to share their success by building up a community where information is freely exchanged, without censorship and moderation and tyrannical thought control exerted by moderators.
Remember the numerous times that creimer called an underage mexican girl "Underage sweet thing" and said marrying an underage girl is getting the most band for your retirement dollar? You know how he insists that it's legal for him at 50 to marry underage girls in america.
Golly that's weird.
TL;DR
Besides, I know EVERYTHING.
As someone observed after the "He will not divide us" episode where 4chaners found the flag in a rather clever cunning way - "4chan is smart people pretending to be dumb. Reddit is dumb people pretending to be smart".
https://www.inquisitr.com/4060...
So how did 4chan find and steal the He Will Not Divide Us flag?
It turns out, Shia made one mistake in setting up the camera on the soon-to-be-stolen flag. It was such a simple thing that normal people would never have noticed, but the 4chan trolls sprung into action when they realized the camera was aimed in part at the sky.
According to various users on 4chan, members of the board used jet contrails, flight paths, and astronomy to determine the general location of the He Will Not Divide Us flag installation. After narrowing down the location to somewhere in Tennesee, 4chan sleuths drove around the area honking their horns to see if the sound would show up on the live stream.
And as it turns out, they were successful almost immediately, as 4chan found the flag site less than a couple days after it went live. The trolls replaced the stolen flag with the hat and T-shirt mentioned earlier.
Besides the obvious issues with theft and harassment, 4chan's actions in this incident are merely a part of what has become known to many who study the impact of social media in society as the "Great Meme War."
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Plot twist: gonewild redditor are skewing the result.
Same with voting for president?
I would like to see a site where you have to pass a short test to see if you read the article before you are allowed to post on the article. I think the quality of the discussion would go up.
I just love how the righties try to spin away their own reflection
fyi, the current source for right-wing trolls, now that the russian connection has been exposed, are 4chan neckbeards who have all of the traits that you list, with the single exception to their political leanings
Then why do you post? You're instantly moderated to -1, so the only people who see anything you post here are people who specifically seek you out to make fun of you.
A lot of people use RES to view the OP rather than clicking all the way through and then back, losing their place on the current feed. This has to skew data incorrectly.
They could have "editors" who don't bother to read and correct submissions before publishing them.
/. was supposed to work was that readers vote on submissions (via the firehose), and the most highly voted submissions get promoted to the front page. I'm not sure what the editors are for if they're not reading and correcting submissions. At least Reddit voters have the excuse that they read TFA elsewhere so are voting on it despite not having clicked the link on Reddit.
I thought the way
This article now officially confirms that the only difference between /. and reddit is that reddit doesn't have moderators posting mostly useless articles.
thus altering the outcome and findings of the study?
You're right, if they didn't know they were being tracked, that number would probably be 95%
More important is cause and effect. I read comments first because if there are any red flags, it'll show up top in the comments.
At the risk of being too meta: the clickbait headline here reads like "Redditors are lazy and that's bad."
The study itself is paywalled, the article at Vice most people who DO click on the links are likely to read misses a big point made in the abstract.
From the IEEE study abstract
The sheer volume of new information being produced and consumed only increases the reliance that individuals place on the ability of anonymous others to curate and sort massive amounts of information. Because of the economic and intrinsic value involved, it is important to understand how individuals consume anonymously curated information and contribute to the wisdom of the crowd.
Hi, I'm your curator for this clickbait article: Vice's take-away and headline is stupid. Don't bother reading it. Redditors, slashdotters are simply using a much bigger online base of peers to tell them whether the article is worth reading or not.
The same thing happens in all types of reading. In science, if one of my colleagues tells me a big-sounding paper is trash, I probably won't bother reading it because I have too many other papers to read. It's arguably less logical to trust that one colleague than it is to trust several thousand people online whether it's worth reading or is trash.
I gave up on pointing out the article doesn't say what they think it does. They really don't care.
So much hate...
Have you stopped raping your neighbor's goats yet?
Chris, I only have one dick so feel free to join in!
What requires a study to reveal that a normal adult with the normal amount of wisdom already knows...
Who shit in your cheerios and called them chocolate chunks?
...without having to do study for it
Click-bait headlines, obvious spam, incomprehensible headlines, headlines that violate sub formatting rules, headlines that are already on the front page, headlines with spoilers...
Those are the majority of my post downvotes on reddit.
With Chris, it's a pathological ego condition, he absolutely must interject with something. He obviously loves to hear himself talk, just witness his ridiculous notions of his "author name", his "copyright", his "brand name", his "author blog", his "ebooks".
A quick look will show content on the level of an eight year old child. Complete rubbish.
Then there's his fantasies about all the certifications and business clientele and projects he has on his plate! Not to mention his hilarious "home office" in a 475 sq. ft. bachelor pad.
But yet, he has time to post AC, post as creimer, and sign up half a dozen "cashews" sock puppet accounts.
Such a "busy" man.
And if shadowbans weren't enough now Reddit wants to implement shadow upvotes.
Creimer likes to fuck around with his trolls and watch the daily dumpster fires.
I often don't click through a link, but instead prefer to copy it, paste it, and if needed modify it. It seems anyone doing some basic "link hygiene" like this might not get counted?
Hey creimer!
Here is another one that will repeat itself regularly in the future, although not as often as the shit you post, I have to admit :-)
creimer confuses his Slashdot signature with an animated gif.
--
Balena!
That's true enough!
Creimer came in my cubicle the other day around 1:30 PM to fix my Ethernet connectivity. He had to crawl under my desk to reach the cable and oh my god! While crawling under the desk, he released an unbelievable amount of gas and the whole floor had to be evacuated for the rest of the day.
An HAZMAT team was requested to approve the condition before we could go in again the next day and entrance was delayed until 10:45 AM.
3 workers with respiratory problems had to go to the hospital and 1 is still in critical state.
--
Balena!
Or, you don't like to read them? I'm so confused!
How is repeatedly having them insult you "fucking around with" them? I'm so confused!
You've misspelt "Can't".
Ahh, democracy; we ask so much and you turn it to shit. People assume they don't have a vested interest in the outcome. For instance, what's in a name?
The UK initially refused McBoatFace, then used the moniker on a remote submersible.
Sweden has McTrainFace.
Australia has McFerryFace, although that may be renamed.
I think that was before his trolls made themselves so toxic over the last three weeks.
That's hard to imagine. There are days where it seems like every second story summary is a ghastly abuse of synopsis and common sense.
News for Nerds shouldn't be lightly refried click-bait, but it often is (often larded with fresh wrigglers, free of charge).
Anyways, I have no opinions about the non-commenters. They might as well not exist, as viewed from this side of the fence. I mainly read the comments to see who can process context and who can't. If I have something to say on the subject, I often take that road. Otherwise, I tend to hack on the people who can't/won't process context, who just sit there and contribute the same old speedily-rehydrated boiler-plate dial tone.
Many times after I sing Wake Up Little Susie I add the exchange to my butterfly collection of discourse malfunction (similar to wardrobe malfunction, but 100 times more pervasive).
Nothing in the modern age is more universally on topic than discourse malfunction.
A fat man looks in the mirror
sees that it's everyone else's fault
His name is Chris
Who are you warning, Chris? No one really follows what you say, except for a handful of dedicated psychologists working on your case pro bono.
I always read the article before upvoting or (rarely) downvoting. I never comment or vote on comments if I haven't read the article. I will read just the comment section from time to time and then read the article. Just from doing that it's possible to tell the vast majority of comments are people stating their own opinion of the article based on the title or simply reacting to comments. It's really sad.
I Agree with Technicality!
I didn't read your comment or the article, but it's about cool tech as stuff anyway, right?
Especially not if the articles are from shill millennial uninformed garbage Motherboard / Vice they don't. Last time I read a motherboard article. I contracted cancer, and now I'm dying.
So funny that creimer makes intentionally disruptive and antagonistic posts and then cries about the reaction.
Then the next morning "HAHAH I LOVE ALL MY DUMPSTER FIRES!!!"
then later that evening "slashdot will die if they don't fix the troll issue!"
that afternoon "hahah I am creimer internat brawler!" then later "I AM NOT A PAEDO! let me explain that marriage between an impoverished mexican girl and an obese 50 year old engineer is a beautiful thing. Really the stuff of dreams and fantasies for many Mexican teenagers",
1 hour later, "Stop twisting my words!!" ,
Finally on blog "My trolls think that my virtually undeletable slashdot posting history with my "author name" is some sort of public record that could hurt me! Ha well it's not because of reasons!"
Yeah no way a federal background investigator could ever attach C.D.Reimer with your birth name, they're only human right?
Actually we're the best friends you have.
We could make you aware of your behaviors that no doubt interfere with every faucet of your life: Career, friendships, romance. You're almost certainly autistic which is fine but being a successful aspie means that you have to learn a few things that come naturally to the rest of the world. But you disregard our input, your career will be over the day that an investigator types your name into facebook and instead of finding your profile they find the insane screed about not wanting ladyboys and child brides and that your posts here don't embarrass you at all. Next place they search: Here! With 10,000 messages they'll uncover something uncomfortable to bring up during your next polygraph.
They will too because I know if I was on the clock and I had a choice of checking out some spergs hilarious internet footprint or compiling a list of Joe Normal's college friends to call and see if he has a gambling problem. I know where I'd sink my time. Especially since your bankruptcy are already one red mark against your clearance.
Seriously just go away or at least make a new account and be so reasonable and well behaved that nobody would ever suspect you're you.