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)?
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).
On an unrelated note, I guess someone at Popular Mechanics misspelled the "neuroscience" category label. The correct "neuroscience" spelling redirects to "nueroscience"...
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.
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?
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.
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.
