I commented something that I later found out was false. No one corrected me until after I googled what I had written to find out it had a logical fallacy. Not only did it get almost 100 replies, but it is growing in the thousands of upvotes. It’s also a comment that got the most attention in a while, for me.
I understand concepts like The Cunningham Effect/Law where to get the right answer propose something false instead of just asking a question. That states that people behaviorally are more likely to correct you giving you the answer you want. However, this was more of an idea/conclusion that had a false premise. Over the course of a day, it grew in popularity. I thought it would get downvoted but as people criticized, belittled and corrected me, they also upvoted it greatly. No one agreed my idea was good, nor that it was funny.
Despite the controversy, the comments and upvotes make me feel like the idea was “successful” in a way as it was light hearted and a kidding tone.
What causes this to be a success on many social media platforms when other examples of this type just get down voted and buried? Is there an applicable name for this type of phenomenon? Has anyone had a similar experience?
Outrage breeds engagement
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-00550-7
Also stupid questions are useful in all fields of study/research.
https://journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/121/11/1771/30038/The-importance-of-stupidity-in-scientific-research
I agree with the first part, but the second while I also agree, my comment wasn’t a “stupid question” that would apply to this benefit. It was simply an observation with a false premise and an opinion expressed as a lame joke I made. I expected it to go south but it went well.
What I was asking was not why this phenomenon can be a good thing but why it would get nearly an exponentially larger amount of likes/upvotes than other posts and not downvotes instead. If they disagreed or were correcting/criticizing me, wouldn’t it follow for the comment to be down voted? I know some people view down ones as agree/disagree or like/dislike, or whether it fits the community, but logically it would seem since they expressed they didn’t like why I said in the comments, they or other readers would have downvoted me.
Unless people just wanted to bring it to everyone else’s attention, idk . The entire comment in question was a faux pas that I left unchecked and then somehow a success. Don’t really care about the “points” but it just sparked my curiosity why all of a sudden, compared to other countless times that I make similar comments, that this one was an outlier.