
The End Of History, Part II - atularora
http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/13/the-end-of-history-part-ii/
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6ren
Upvoting turns out to be a political act. Conformity is a powerful pressure on
humans beings. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments>
Believing that no one shares your views can dis-empower those views; but
seeing that you are not alone, or in the majority can reverse this pressure.

I'm a non-conformist in general, but, as a small illustration, I've noticed
that my interpretation of a post/submission can be influenced by how many
votes it has.

It certainly opens up the possibility of social sites gaming their votes, for
various reasons, and this propaganda would be more effective than outright
censorship. It seems likely that the state-approved social sites in China
already do this. I don't see any measures to guarantee that the voting scores
on reddit, facebook etc. are legitimate, and of course they're not, being
easily gamed. But there's also no guarantee against deliberate manipulation -
and it seems to be quite common to do so, at least in the early stages of a
social site startup.

tl;dr guaranteeing the legitimacy of upvotes on social sites may become more
important

~~~
Qz
I've noticed myself upvoting comments based on other upvotes, then finishing
reading the comment only to realize that I wouldn't have upvoted it if I'd
read the whole thing...

