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.

Comments

Re:Did these users consent to being tracked?

[thaylin]

They knew they were being studied (it was done by a voluntary browser plugin) but didnt know what specific habits they were studying.

Re:Isn't that what mod points are for?

[AmiMoJo]

Rather, where people don't care about the context or even the facts of what's being said, rather they want self-reinforcement of an opinion even if it's wrong.

Even worse than that is when those people get mod points, and use them to create the echo chamber.