
The Majority Illusion in Social Networks - kurren
http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.03022
======
zach
High-engagement obsessives are another key to this. In a community where it's
nobody's actual job to spread knowledge and values of the community, the
highest-volume interactors – the most engaged – become standard-bearers of the
community. Since they are often more obsessive and dedicated yet visible, this
raises the stakes of the community to greater obsessiveness and dedication.

In online scenarios, the result is that many can say, well, I am dedicated to
X, but I'm not as extremely dedicated as Y... where Y may be literally one of
the most X-dedicated people in the entire world.

When you have this majority illusion, some high-engagement obsessives, and
throw in some producers of writings (news, documents, popular literature and
orientation literature such as FAQs), you have an engine for converting
dedication into social goods such as a sense of belonging, friendship, and
most of all, self-identification.

The ability to create and sustain these communities in many forms, for any
topic, worldwide, is the miracle of the internet.

~~~
whack
I've always wondered why social networks like Reddit make no attempt to
throttle their loudest members. If you have a small minority who
upvote/downvote an extremely high number of posts, they will easily drown out
any votes cast by people who are more measured in their voting behavior.

It seems like there are so many fundamental ways in which the most popular
social networks and discussion forums are flawed.

[http://www.thecaucus.net/#/content/caucus/community_blog/103](http://www.thecaucus.net/#/content/caucus/community_blog/103)

~~~
MagnumOpus
Because Reddit was written by young undergrads in their college dorm who
haven't had the decade of experience with vote manipulation that Slashdot had
by that time, let alone experienced the rise and decline of Usenet.

Indeed by 2006 the mature Slashdot moderation system - after a deluge of
invasions by trolls and agenda-pushers - already had a lot of the tools that
Reddit is still missing or eventually reinvented badly - limited number of
upvote points, meta-moderation etc.

------
edraferi
We need a social network designed from the ground up to be a public square for
civic discussion between people who disagree. We need mechanisms to agree on
facts, and tools to create arguments supported by those facts.

~~~
sievebrain
A nice ideal, but likely to be very difficult in practice, because in reality
almost nobody disagrees on actual provable, scientific facts. The toughest
disagreements usually arise around things which are _not_ facts, but are
presented as if they were.

All human subcultures carry with them a large baggage of "facts" which the
group accepts in order to promote social cohesion, avoid conflict or sometimes
simply to advertise membership of the group. Try convincing a highly religious
person that their religion is entirely fact-free, or that God doesn't exist
using logic, and you will get nowhere: they prefer to believe things that
other people don't because believing these things grants membership to a group
and the benefits of that membership are perceived to outweigh the benefits of
being a person of pure rationality.

Indeed, a genuine belief that you are entirely rational is simply another form
of group membership signalling: probably that you want to be seen as a member
of the group "intellectuals" or "scientists" or possibly "educated people".
Being unable to recognise the difficulty people have in being entirely
rational is itself a form of irrationality.

So to get back to your proposed social network, here's what would happen: it
would very quickly become dominated by a particular _pre-existing_ social
subculture, probably "male internet geeks who believe themselves to be
supremely rational" and their baggage of pseudo-facts would come along for the
ride.

This is NOT an argument against doing what you want to do. Even if the goal is
unattainable, creating better discussion forums with better tools for raising
the level of discussion is never a bad thing. Just don't think it'd solve the
'friendship paradox' discussed in the paper.

~~~
reitanqild
> Try convincing a highly religious person that their religion is entirely
> fact-free, or that God doesn't exist using logic, and you will get nowhere

Lets keep religion out of HN, shall we?

A lot of us actually seems to believe in some kind of deity/ies, we just dont
mention it because we value HN as a common ground for technical and business
discussions.

If not I could tell you some stories about stupid, stubborn evil ateists as
well :-P

~~~
humanrebar
> Lets keep religion out of HN, shall we?

As a religious person, I find keeping religion out of normal discourse has
been very counterproductive for both religious and non-religious people. I
understand that the discussions are more prone to conflict and uncomfortable
feelings, but they're nonetheless key to understanding other people and
diversity of thought.

Keeping religion (and agnosticism and atheism) out of things produces the same
problems we see with the 'Majority Illusion'.

~~~
hueving
The arguments get very tiresome quickly. There are a million other places
online to beat the same dead horse of 'what is evidence, etc'. Keep it out of
HN.

~~~
humanrebar
Equally tiresome political issues are on here all the time. There are also
fairly regular (and equally redundant) back-and-forths about programming
languages.

~~~
steve-howard
At the very least, the political issues and programming language fads have
changed in the last few centuries.

~~~
humanrebar
As have particular religious movements, but most people don't know about that
because they are considered off topic in the news, at work, and in polite
company.

------
n72
My biggest fear about FB isn't regarding privacy, but its enormous ability to
spread misinformation.

~~~
pizza
Pamphlet, newspaper, telegram, radio, telephone, television..

~~~
adrianratnapala
Indeed, I think the problem with Facebook, is that like Television it is _not
anarchic enough_.

A society with free speech is supposed to tolerate the expression of really
bad ideas partly because nothing other than the consent of human minds lets
society distnguish good ideas from bad.

But no particular organisation has a duty to be a forum for all ideas. And
that's why it's OK to kick a racist out of your dinner party, and OK for
reddit to try and censor its worst users. But when such organisations are main
forum for conversion, then the censorship starts to look total.

------
syats
TL;DR: if highly connected nodes tend to have a given attribute, most nodes
have the illusion that the majority has that attribute.

It's an interesting statement, but not terribly insightful. I hope more
research follows.

------
Dowwie
arxiv postings should feature warning sign iconography. On one hand, it offers
open access to research -- awesome. On the other hand, it offers us a chance
to waste our time and energy studying material that may never survive peer
review.

I get excited whenever I see what appears to be a really interesting, valuable
piece of information gleamed through rigorous research. My immediate first
emotion is excitement. However, that excitement casts a long shadow of doubt
as my system 2 mode of reason kicks in and alerts me that the content of
interest is the result of an arxiv posting that may fail to survive peer
review. Of course, death-through-peer-review may not imply bunk science but I
assume that it more often is the case (experts, please chime in).

This leads me to ask whether the HN community would be better without knowing
of bleeding edge research on arxiv until it's graduated peer review --What do
you think: Is it better to front page bleeding edge, unverified research?

I think the world would benefit by a service that indexes arxiv postings that
have survived peer review. Is this feasible?

~~~
sievebrain
Surely the act of people reading it _is_ peer review? Unless you assume that
nobody on Hacker News is qualified to read scientific papers, which seems like
a stretch.

~~~
argonaut
For any given arxiv article, I'd wager 98% of people on HN are unqualified to
critically review the article. They're not aware of prior work that might
contradict the article. They're not aware of the limitations of prior work
that the article cites. They've never tried the experimental or theoretical
methods the article uses, and so on. Yet these are the people upvoting and
commenting on implications.

~~~
sievebrain
98% sounds like a made up stat, so if you grant me the same privilege then
let's say HN has 1 million readers. So 2% of that would be 20,000 people
qualified to judge the article, which is plenty of people.

~~~
argonaut
1) HN has 300k daily uniques
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9219581](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9219581)).
Of those readers, _nearly all_ do not comment (we don't have 300k comments, do
we?). Of those commentors, only a fraction comment on a given article.

2) Of those commenters, most are not actual researchers, who are, IMO, much,
much busier with real work (you know... _research_ ) than your average HN
commenter.

~~~
sievebrain
Of course most don't comment, but commenting is not required for a paper to be
peer reviewed, only reviewing it is. If someone were to see the paper here,
and review it, and find an error, presumably they would contact the author.

300k * 0.02 = 6000 people who may be qualified. How many people are typically
asked to peer review a paper? A handful? The odds are still good.

~~~
argonaut
The original poster was talking about what would be better for the HN
community. The HN community is a discussion forum, not a system of people
privately emailing.

