Reddit is purported as being "the front page of the Internet". Viral content on Reddit can get pushed into the larger mainstream media market. With 234 million unique visitors reported last September, Reddit makes for a good field of research.
source
In 2014, Tim Weninger set out to conduct two large-scale experiments with the goal of understanding the consequences of voting behavior and how it impacts what users see and share online. Weninger was especially interested in the malicious voting behavior.
The way content gets propagated on Reddit is through a voting structure where users can up-vote or down-vote any of the posts. This determines the position, ranking, prominence and visibility of posts on Reddit.
"Most people don't vote on Reddit. But those that do become the content editors - that's essentially what they are - and they're the ones who are responsible for what's trending on the site"
Just like on Steemit, those who vote determine the visibility and trending posts. Except on Reddit a vote is a vote, and on Steemit a vote isn't simply a vote, but a vote can be like 10,000x the votes compared to another person who votes. This greatly affects the way things get promoted and become visible compared to "1 vote = 1 vote" on Reddit.
Since anyone can vote on social media, it's very easy for "bad actors" to manipulate the visibility of posts to drive certain topics, opinions or news stories to the top. Not only with up-votes alone, but also with commentary.
The Study
The study included 93,019 posts from a five-month monitoring period. All posts were randomly assigned either an up-vote, down-vote or no-vote to each post. The results were submitted to the journal Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology. Posts that received an up-vote were 24.6% more likely to reach the front page (with a score of at least 2000) than those with no up-vote.
source
Analysis also revealed the lower probability of a comment reaching a high score compared to the higher probability of a post reaching the same high score. This is because posts are generally viewed more than comments, since to even view a comment you need to click on the post to get to it. There are also multiple levels of comments that can be hidden in an ancestor view until a user chooses to view them all.
The research showed that an up-vote on a comment has little effect on the probability of that comment reaching a higher score. However, a down-vote has a dramatic effect instead, where the probability is greatly reduced.
source
Other Studies
The researchers involved in this first in-vivo Reddit experiment are motivated and informed by various fields, such as herding behavior, social influence, collective intelligence and online rating systems.
A similar study done on a small social news site showed results that were the opposite for comments, where liking a comment significantly increased the final tally of likes, and a down-vote on a comment hardly affected the final vote count.
Another study looked at the boost in book sales after a book's popularity was increased from appearing on the New York Times bestsellers list. Salganik and Watts studied the perception of quality and how it comes a "self-fulfilling prophecy". Inverting the actual popularity of songs in an online music marketplace resulted in that perceived but false popularity being accepted and persisting as a reality over time.
Herding Behavior, Group-Think
This demonstrates the herding behavior and social influence of mere perception and appearances without an actual regard or evaluation of the substance that is supposed to support it.
Why would people continue to support inversely popular music? Their perception was that it was popular, so they supported it. A quantity of people liked it, so they jumped onto the bandwagon. There was no honest evaluation of the quality of the music, but only in the popularity and the quantity of people who were alleged to like it and buy it.
There was only an appearance that masqueraded as substance. Motivations to purchase popularized music or books seem to come from being socially influenced by popularism and groupthink conformity. We want to fit in, and have things in common with others so that there is a basis to have something to talk about and form a relational bond around. This increases our cooperative survivability, social standing and assistance from those we network with. If something is popular, many people will adopt it based on that underlying subconscious psychological motivation.
Social Network?
This is important to understand as Reddit is not a social media network like other sites, such as Facebook or Twitter. Why is Reddit not a social network site? Because a social network is composed of what your friends do and say. In an online social network, it's what you're seeing your friends post about or like from your feed that shows the activity of the social network of your friends, not the whole site. On Reddit what you see is an aggregate valuation, or lack thereof, of everyone combined. As Weninger previously said, this valuation only comes from those who do the voting, which is a relatively small percentage of Reddit's thousands of users.
Visiblity
Votes determine visibility, and that drive more votes. Just as has been demonstrated with previous research, the social influence of groupthink and herd mentality effects what people do. Popularity is driven by quantity, not quality for those who are stuck in the herd mentality groupthink and not actually evaluate something themselves. They are just jumping on the bandwagon and following the herd.
And this is being simply demonstrated on a rating system website with no monetary rewards. When talking about Steemit instead of Reddit, this issue of quantity versus quality is even more important. Posts of content are not being evaluated for the content itself.
The Pareto Principle
There's something called the pareto principle that can be applied to social media as a 90-9-1 rule. 90% of users view the content. 9% of users "edit" the content through their voting behavior (up-vote, down-vote). 1% of users actively contribute new content. On all media websites where the votes are driven by social factors, 10% of users are the ones that determine what content becomes visible and circulates the most for the remaining 90% to view.
The active 10% determine and drive the ideas that the rest of the 90% of the users, and everyone else in the public, is exposed to and influenced by.
Those who seek to manipulate the visibility of certain content to generate more up-votes can do so by working with others through vote-based manipulation techniques.
Vote Manipulation
Vote Brigading
A group of people get together to up-vote or down-vote certain posts, topics or ideas. Twitter has this occur as well, through retweet armies that attempt to artificially manipulate and speed up a topic reaching the trending page. Digg also had this issue where the initial visibility of a post in the community was determined by how many friends you had to make it visible to a wider audience.
Vote Nudging
This is the easiest and most common type of vote manipulation on social media. A new post likely has no up-votes, which makes it less visible. People will ask their friends up-vote and comment in order to give the appearance of activity so that the post can get a little boost the popularity starting up. Users can have multiple accounts to engage in this behavior themselves.
Reverse Vote Nudging
Instead of promoting content, reverse vote nudging down-votes posts or comments that are similar and are competing for visibility in the marketplace. The relative ranking of one post will go up if another post is down-voted. People can down-vote all the other posts in order to promote their own.
Conclusions
Weninger has some poignant remarks:
"We're moving away from a dozen editors at major networks to a million editors at home on their cell phone. It's important to remember that what's trending on social media is derived from only those who vote, and may not represent the opinions of the actual, broader population."
"It is critical that we understand the dynamics of how social rating systems curate the media that we all see and hear in our daily lives. That, to me, is essential. I can't think of anything more important."
When our decisions are publicly visible, there is a group conformity factor that comes into play. The Asch conformity experiment from the 1950s demonstrates this power of conformity to the popular opinion around us can greatly affect our perception of the truth and reality.
Instead of evaluating something on its own merits, the quantity of people that like something (i.e. the popularity) will determine many people's decisions or choices at various points in their life due to fear or discomfort from deviating or going against the group consensus. This is called normative conformity, contrasting informational conformity that convinces us the group is right or correct based on information.
Majority decisions, consensus or popularity, don't determine what is correct, right or true. Beware of the pressure to conform and not speak out against things.
In group conformity, reality is not determined by you, and what is actually in reality, but instead "reality" is determined by others and you see the world the way "they" want you to see it.
This can also be called gaslighting.
For those who have followed my work on psychology, consciousness and the manipulation thereof, will know that I have talked about how the manipulators influence, inject, invoke, inculcate and summon ideas into our consciousness for us to accept as "reality". We then live our lives according to these beliefs as "truth", but not the truth of reality. This is the problem of consciousness and subjectively decided whatever we want despite reality showing things are different. We have created an unreality yet accept it as "reality". We are living a way of life that the controllers and manipulators want us to live by. Psychology and consciousness is the "battle ground" for us better our lives and the world.
Social media is no exception to being manipulated by the psychology of the group conformity effect.
Many posts or comments can have a high score yet represent an incorrect fact, or are simply contrary to the established norm. Some people have anxiety and discomfort when they are in a contrary position to what a post or comment says. If that is perceived as the prevailing popular acceptance within that social structure, they can change their position and conform to the group.
The research paper concludes saying that there is a need for countermeasures against vote chaining and social engineering strategies. They create artificial votes that tend to increase the group conformity herding effect. This doesn't provide an honest realistic evaluation of the post or content.
More Closing Remarks
I have notes I have been writing about this that need collecting and editing. Coincidently, this study demonstrates part of my point that I have mentioned here-and-there in other post or comments: quality vs. quantity as a psychological understanding so that we can get out of blindly following popularism and create something better for society; and that attention from consciousness needs to evaluate content in order for the content to have a more reality-based valuation metric on the site. Otherwise, the site isn't worth much as a place for reliable editing or curation of content that people actually value, because they aren't doing the valuing of the content themselves with their own consciousness. I have yet to make a post itself for this topic.
The responsibility to bring value to content by the organization/community that takes on that task, is not being taken as a responsibility by most people on any social media site. Except possibly to a greater degree for the actual social networking sites that are valuing the posts that come from their social network of friends. They aren't necessarily being pressure into herd mentality or groupthink conformity behavior, or to manipulate the evaluation of content to get rewards (since there are no monetary extrinsic incentives to undermine intrinsic motivations).
The social networking and friends aspect is not so much of a problem when there is no user rating system in place like Reddit or Steemit, nor rewards being given for up-voted content. Otherwise, that type of "clique"-ness will result in favoritism that again doesn't engage in honest evaluation of content for the content. If your social network are your friends, then you won't simply be favoring a like of one post, and no-like for another, just to get one post promoted more. When there is competition for ranking or rewards, and quality doesn't factor in as a primary motivator to evaluate content, but instead "connections", "friends" and favoritism are the motivators to up-vote certain posts or content, then the editor-curator system has broken down and there is a break from an honest evaluation of content for content itself.
Upvoting, liking or rewarding content is supposed to be based on the content itself, not who it comes from, who they are "networked" or "connected" with, or how popular it is. Valuing, or not valuing, and adding likes or up-votes to posts based on those deceptive psychological motivations, is a self-deception on our own part from a lack of self-knowledge. My main work tries to get to the understanding of the importance of truth in our lives to determine the condition and quality of the lives we have.
This post deals with this understanding as well through the aspect of being an editor or curator of content. There is a responsibility in that task, if you care for what you're doing, or how that reflects on the organization/community doing it, and the public visibility of what you're doing. If you're not doing the evaluating with your own consciousness and attention, then it's not actually being evaluated or valued.
How do you think the outside public would view a site that is supposed to value content, but the community that takes part in the evaluating and valuing (~10% of users) isn't actually doing the valuing? You might get some people who are ignorant of how the flawed system works and join it, but after a while they will notice things don't work right and leave if they aren't getting what they expected to get out of it, or if they don't get something else to replace it.
I didn't think the post would be this long, but when I read the research paper there was a lot of good stuff in it :)
Thank you for your time and attention! I appreciate the knowledge reaching more people. Take care. Peace.
References:
- Your (social media) votes matter
- Rating Effects on Social News Posts and Comments
- Asch Conformity Experiment
- Asch conformity experiments
If you appreciate and value the content, please consider:
Upvoting 
, Sharing 
or Reblogging 
below.
me for more content to come!
@krnel
2017-01-25, 5pm
Hello @krnel,
Congratulations! Your post has been chosen by the communities of SteemTrail as one of our top picks today.
Also, as a selection for being a top pick today, you have been awarded a TRAIL token for your participation on our innovative platform...STEEM.
Please visit SteemTrail to get instructions on how to claim your TRAIL token today.
If you wish to not receive comments from SteemTrail, please reply with "Stop" to opt out.
Happy TRAIL!
I couldn't have said it better myself. Blogs like these make me regret giving other Steemians 100% upvotes. This is one of those occasions I wish I could crank the dial up to 11.
Congratulations on the excellent post @krnel. Regarding the debate about whether or not it brings value to SteemIt. Of course, it does as proven by the number of comments and people reading it.
If we want to go mainstream we are going to need to have all different types of content. For some it may be TL:TR, but for others it was obviously interesting.
Indeed. For 600 upvotes, 462 views is damn good! I think the most viewed post I've had, and the most per upvotes certainly. Might be the most upvotes I've gotten too hehe. Thanks for the feedback.
Someone told me I shouldn't do posts that don't accept rewards because people don't earn curation rewards so they won't vote on it. Just because you don't earn curation rewards will determine if that content should be voted on? Something is off about that behavior no?
Yeah, I agree. I begrudgingly programmed my bot to stop voting for payout-witheld articles when I realized they'd earn no rewards.
So what's the answer: stop paying curation rewards on all posts? Start paying curation rewards to payout-witheld posts? I think both ideas have merit...
Just not use bots. Read the posts and decide to vote on or not. You don't have to vote on every post. You do it for the curation rewards. Not saying that's wrong. It's something we can change by the majority to just not use bots.
I could choose to outsource food that I buy to save money but buying local produce helps the local economy in farming. It's not illegal to outsource things in most cases but there's pros and cons. Ultimately if we just buy local produce, our local farmers would not be struggling.
It all starts with us as an individual
I'd argue the exact opposite, that it has absolutely nothing to do with the individual and everything to do with the incentives. In Steemit, the incentives are a design choice. Let's make them incentivize the right thing!
Is it the right thing to incentivize to do the right thing? Can't you choose to do the right thing, without an incentive?
I think there's at least some fallacy of composition in that. An individual can choose to do the right thing, but when society is composed of many individuals, a single choice may not make any difference at all. This is because as soon as I make a choice to stop doing the wrong thing, someone else will chase the money that I've left on the table and take my place doing the wrong thing.
Why would we want to continue offering people incentives to do that?
Something is off indeed. Intrinsic authentic motivation to engage in evaluation is being overridden by the extrinsic motivator for monetary rewards.
The same reason people refuse to upvote a post after the initial 24 hour window just because there won't be a curation reward, despite the fact that they appreciate the post.
This actions, knowingly or otherwise, can discourage the people who take their time to create quality content.
Imagine all the work put into this post and it ends up earning less than a dollar.
Among other things, this research brings to light an interesting question for Steemit. If Steemit has both downvotes and upvotes like Reddit does, should they make votes less transparent? Particularly downvotes? Perhaps you'd be able to see how many downvotes a post received, but be unable to see who downvoted you without the use of a third-party tool.
If downvotes are highly-visible, like flags are now, I believe Steemit users will be far less likely than Reddit users to use the downvote. It's much easier to use a downvote when hiding behind the veil of anonymity.
Bonus question: Is it possible to build in anonymity for downvotes at a blockchain level?
The site could not show it, but the blockchain see all ;) So anyone could go get it if they wanted, like we do with steemd in a URL instead of steemit and we can see who flagged. Hiding it would alleviate the aversion to openly objecting to something, but that doesn't resolve the issue of the psychology in ourselves of others that creates this apprehension to go against the flow. Thanks for the feedback.
After reading I remembered a quote from Herman Hesse
"The spirit can't fight against force, neither quality against quantity."
Thank you, @krnel, for a very instructive and thought provoking piece...
As one of "the 1%" (in the context of your article), I truly long for an actual readership that will, more or less, regularly read, and, more often than not, truly benefit from my writing.
I would also, of course, love to have a "magic formula" that might aid in making the articles that I feel to be of particular value "go viral." I have actually been working on an article about virality...
I'd love to hear your thoughts and ideas on how the "problems" you describe in the way voting actually works might be addressed... if such is even possible. Especially in the context of Steemit, where I have been expending much of my efforts of late. ;) 😄😇😄
I would like to know the magic formula as well :P It doesn't exist, I don't think.
Can you mention a specific problem for me to address? Thanks.
I of course realize there's no "magic formula." However, the very existence of the internet makes such a thing as "virality" at least possible for the first time in recorded history.
I guess the "problem" that I most wonder about is this:
And, I further surmise, that it is likely inherently insoluble... It is, in effect, the "advertising" problem; i.e. the answer to the perennial question "How do I get the attention of the largest portion of the set of people who would truly benefit from what I have to offer?" When that set of people decline to participate, the problem may be an intractable one...
90% are just the viewers. They aren't interested in creating or building the organization, social media or otherwise in society. Many ways things are structured, result in some people having more power than others, more influence in what gets decided, or liked, or upvoted, etc. When we feel powerless to affect change, we adopt learned helplessness and don't seek to do anything about it anymore.
The way to correct the problem is to understand and raise awareness of self-knowledge to understand how we are being fooled, and are fooling ourselves. It's going to take a long time to take time to learn and let go of falsity we are attached to in society, so that things can get on a better track/direction. This is a lot of work for each individual, and that's why some people don't think it's even possible, so they don't try, and nothing will indeed change that way since learned helplessness is adopted ;)
This was an interesting read @krnel. Great job breaking down the article, from within your description we can see a few of reddit's flaws. The question remains what can we do differently here to not fall into similar traps? Are we not still susceptible to vote manipulation or is the weighted voting here protective against such things? If it is protective, will it always be protective or is a significantly larger user base enough to swing things differently?
Code and algorithms to create a ruleset for operation, or corrections to deceptive behavior, can be employed to a certain extent. The real solution is what all my main work is about pretty much: evolving consciousness in awareness of self-knowledge. Know the fallacies and biases that have us fool ourselves and others or them fool us.
We have government to do what code does, it's just that one is reality codes/rules, and the other is programming computer codes and rules for a virtual reality's functionality. Both externalize our self-governance because we don't have self-knowledge to self-govern ourselves correctly. Lack of self-control, self-master, self-governance or sovereignty in each individual that makes up society. Learning about important truths that will break barriers of awareness of ourselves and reality is required, and that takes a lot of time and work. If people don't do the work, then we won't likely move in that self-governing more responsibly direction. This applies in real society, as well as Steemit virtual society. Thanks for the feedback. Not sure if that covers it for you though ;) hehe
This is a noble goal, however its likely not practical once steemit reaches a mass audience. I would wager that most people don't want to spend the time necessary to learn and understand the fallacies and biases that influence us (through no fault of the quality of your posts...a lot of people are just lazy), as you said:
perhaps I am a bit cynical in that regard.
I suppose clever coding and algorithms are the best answer to my question in the broadest sense. Anyway this topic is something that we should all take time to think about, as its certainly something that Steemit will need to deal with.
Coding and rules imposed by a central authority is always easier. But no raising in consciousness is done. Not a real solution. Practical has nothing to do with the real solution. I'm giving the answer that few understand because of the enormity of the task and it is dismissed as inviable because people often want "fixes" in the "now" and they don't have a long perspective on the past history and vision and imagination for how things can be different and what it takes to get there. The solution is for us to raise ourselves up and lead ourselves through knowledge of reality, what is going on, and that includes ourselves.
People don't want to do the work, that's why it's not "practical", I understand. It would be practical if people understood this. And people aren't going to do this unless it's explained, unless they want to hear it, and unless they want to learn. This is a problem that has been here for centuries and millennia, where we make small strides in collective understandings of things due to illiteracy and an inability to understand ourselves to greater degrees. Now that has changed. We have more chance to get people to be aware of things, if we choose to spread that awareness. My purpose on Steemit is to do this. Popularity is another avenue for me to interject the quality content that matters more for people who would normally never even access it. Laziness, and lazy thinking, is a big factor in why people don't engage in this work to learn how to resolve our problems. It took me years to develop the understanding I have. Time, energy, dedication, determination, persistence.
Anyways, thanks for the feedback ;)
Always a pleasure chatting with you @krnel. :)
This is an important study, and post. Thanks for sharing.
Very informative post. I'm wondering what the solution would be though?
Flagged as disagreement on rewards. This is heavily overrewarded by whale and trail votes. There is very little original here, it not only does little more than summarize existing research and well-understood (and well-described not only on wikipedia but on countless existing psychology web sites and blogs) concepts, but does so in an overly-verbose, poorly-presented, and poorly-edited form. Not only is the content not indicative of the sort of organic contributions that will lead to community growth, but it in the form presented, it would be rejected by my professional publications as well. @krnel, I would suggest you focus more on High Quality and less on producing a High Quantity of both words and posts. The latter does not imply the former, in fact it implies the opposite.
The fact that this post is trending is detrimental to the growth of the platform. If somebody wanders onto the trending page of steemit from the outside, posts like this are nothing but a turn off.
I can't show this to any of my friends or family, for example. I don't know a single person outside of Steemit who has any interest in something like this. If any case can be made for content driving growth (and I'm very skeptical), it is going to have to have some kind of broad appeal. Or at the very least, appeal to some segment of the outside world.
What a critical piece of information, especially for us all here on this revolutionary platform! Thank you so very much for sharing the fruit of such research with us. As I was driving to school yesterday an "information" doctorate was presenting the results of her research as well. she might very well have been one of the ones included in here.
"It is critical that we understand the dynamics of how social rating systems curate the media that we all see and hear in our daily lives." How can we underline this enough for us all to understand our power as a communities, human beings working together to expose the seeds of the mind, the idea.
As much as there's a phenomena of corrosion from conformity brings about the "gaslighting", to quote you where "reality is determined by others and you see the world the way "they" want you to see it.", it is imperative for us to create groups and groups of groups to curate as objectively as possible, when possible. From there, specific target groups can deal with the matter in regards to the domain in which they are respected for their conscientious and responsible manners in regards to the groups they are affected to. This way "attention from consciousness needs to evaluate content in order for the content to have a more reality-based valuation metric on the site.". Though the problem of what "is reality" will arise, it is not the most common problem we'll have to deal with most of the time, I believe, as long as we refer the curating to open minded, logical, involved and responsible individuals willing to go the extra miles to challenges even themselves in the evaluation of their curation. the grouping and subgrouping will become paramount in order to deal with this matter and the authorship might need to stay as secret as possible in order to keep the human side of many of us from indulging in its darker side of conformity. The double-blind exercise would prove itself extremely valuable here for all of us.
Thanks again for this amazing piece really worth reading thoroughly. All for one and one for all! Namaste :)
Food for the brain indeed. Interesting stuff.
A very interesting read, thank you.
Made a very interesting read. :)
This is a great piece. Will be very useful to social marketers and technically provide an insight into how consumers think. Great work.
Yikes- I just may have accidentally hit the flag when going for the X to close the post. Can that be reversed and if so how? Should the flag option be located somewhere else rather than an area where unintentional fingers may strike?
Yeah, you can just click on it again, and then accept the dialog box. No prob ;) It is sorta close isnt it hehe.
thank you . Pls let me know if I need to do anything else- unsure if there is a problem
No nothing happened ;)