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?
Timing plays a big role.
Well, sometimes, you’ll get votes just for being on topic, no matter what the content of the comment is.
Thousands seems out of line for that kind of thing though.
But shit, my highest upvoted post on reddit ever was a one line quip. It was funny, but not that good. I’d make detailed, sourced mini essays and get negative votes.
Lemmy is a bit better about voting up for both topicality and effort to be sure. But we’re also all human, so not everyone fact checks everything they come across before voting. They’ll often vote based on “truthiness” as much as anything else. I say they, but I catch myself doing it too. I’ll run across someone that put good effort in, was on topic, and at least tried to be useful, and that’s worth the up vote. Could be wrong as hell, and I’d still think that. But I don’t have the inclination to fact check everything. And I don’t always have the stamina to respond even when I know there’s something off or outright wrong, but I’m not going to down vote unless I suspect they were wrong with ill intent.
So, I think you may have run across something that, while fallacious, is not egregiously so, and/or still nestles into the community’s specific bias even if they’re aware it’s fallacious.
Which, btw, sometimes something can have logical fallacies and not be bad. Doesn’t even have to be wrong, though it’s like math class where if you did the work wrong, if shouldn’t matter if you got the right answer. But on a multiple choice test, you can end up acing a test by accident as long as you’re making the same mistakes the right way.
I dunno, forums with voting out vote like functions are weird. As soon as you think you’ve figured things out, you’ll run into things that make no sense again.
There is a very fine, very subjective line, between lame and funny.
You really want to bake your noodle?
Make the same post twice only add one small typo the 2nd time.
Watch which one gets more up otes.
Make a technical mistake like saying windmill, people will come correct you with wind turbine.
You dropped a v… Oh. You little shirt
Zilch!
Ragebait.
People are more likely to correct someone else on incorrect information or call them out on low effort content because it satisfies an innate human need for validation.
In this case validating one’s own intelligence. People like to feel smart and the easiest way to achieve that feeling is to make someone else look less smart.- Short attention span.
- Outrage farming.
So something controversial sparking outrage should get upvotes instead of down votes? Statistically? Because when I disagree or dislike something I downvote, dislike etc. Is the opposite more common?
Outrage breeds engagement
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-00550-7
Also stupid questions are useful in all fields of study/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.
there’s a person who always comments half correct stuff with some error in it about linux or programming and i got somehow blocked from seeing their comments, because someone probably thought i downvoted them out of a feud or something.
i imagine, if that also happened to others, that person will only ever get upvotes and agreement on their partially wrong comments.
