
How online ratings affect your judgment - X4
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/how-online-ratings-affect-your-judgment-0808.html
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NhanH
The news wasn't clear, and I couldn't find the actual papers. But what does
"positive" and "negative" mean? Does "positive" means "similar to one's
belief", just positivity in general (in tone, wording of a comment etc)? Or
does "positive" = positive amount of karma/ comment ratings (which seems to be
the case, by my understanding)?

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vwinsyee
I couldn't find the article without passing through a paywall. But this
article [1] summarizes the methodology decently:

 _" We used a site very similar to Reddit," Aral says. Here's how it worked:
The researchers convinced an anonymous website–under the promise it would
remain nameless–to allow them to test slight manipulations in online voting.
Over six months, the research team took a small percentage of more than
100,000 written comments and slightly altered their vote rating as they were
submitted. Four percent of the comments were given a positive edge (a single
upvote) while another 2 percent were struck with an immediate disadvantage (a
lonely downvote)._

[1]
[http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/nueroscience/...](http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/nueroscience/upvotes-
downvotes-and-the-science-of-the-reddit-hivemind-15784871)

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bobbydavid
my wild theory: what if the site in the study was HN!?

disclaimer: I have no idea and tldr

~~~
jbri
Come to think of it, at one point in the not-too-distant past I did see a fair
few new-ish comments with zero points instead of one, where I couldn't see
anything about the comment that was objectionable enough to be worth
downvoting.

I don't remember what my response to those was - probably I just figured that
someone was having a bad day or read something into the comment that I wasn't
seeing or something.

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X4
Here is more info about the paper's background and ramblings on twitter.

[http://tjm.org/2013/08/08/proposal-experiment-to-compare-
ope...](http://tjm.org/2013/08/08/proposal-experiment-to-compare-open-vs-
paywall-publishing/#more-5516)

DOI:10.1126/science.1240466

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jared314
I usually like to read the methodologies on studies that cover online behavior
before I consider their results, but I can't in this case because of a
paywall. Does anyone have a link to the full text of the study?

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fsckin
I can't find this one, but there are similar papers floating around.

Social Bias in Online Product Ratings: A Quasi-Experimental Analysis:
[http://misrc.umn.edu/wise/papers/4b-2.pdf](http://misrc.umn.edu/wise/papers/4b-2.pdf)

Social Bias in Online Product Ratings:
[http://www.econ.sdu.edu.cn/advance/uploadfile/20120409081915...](http://www.econ.sdu.edu.cn/advance/uploadfile/2012040908191596.pdf)

~~~
enjo
Here's one that draws pretty much the opposite conclusion of the study in OP's
article. It focused on stock message boards, which might not be quite the
same.

[http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc5130/](http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc5130/)

I should note that I'm pretty close to the author. She'd be happy to answer
questions I imagine.

~~~
vwinsyee
Is there access to the full dissertation (i.e., not just the
description/abstract)?

For those interested, the key statement in this study: _Using an experiment,
message board influence on an investment decision and attitude was tested. The
results indicated that individuals that received negative message board
postings did have a significantly higher change in investment amount as
compared to a control group that did not receive any message postings. The
positive message board group and the control group were not significantly
different in their amount of investment change._

The methodology of the experiment isn't detailed in the description. But it
seems that one major difference between this study and the study in the OP
article is the action taken by the user: change in monetary investment, and
upvote/downvote. People behave differently when their personal money's on the
line, so this is an important difference. So I'm very curious as to how this
study ran its experiment.

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mjs
The fiddled with the ratings of which "major news-aggregation web site"?

