Herd Mentality in this Community
Herd Mentality in this Community
Hi. I recently had some issues with my lemmy client which made me accidentally post the exact same thing here twice. The posts were about privacy on my school issued computer. I could have made it more clear, but I wanted privacy from the companies that make their spyware not from the school that owns the computer. Anyway, as of now one post has more than 40 upvotes and less than 5 down. The other has 10 up and 5 down as well as significantly less helpful and more critical comments. My hypothesis is whether the early comments were helpful or critical determined what other people said. I am curios to see what everyone thinks of this.
I am not sure about that. Just like I did on Reddit, when I see double post I'll downvote the second post and comment that it was posted twice. If I have something for the discussion, I'll put it under the first one.
I definitely believe there is some truth to this. How much? I don't know. But definitely some. Same with scores biasing people's initial opinions. Hopefully this positive first reply helps set the tone. We'll see I guess!
It used to be the same on the old site, where there was a wider distribution of opinions. It's interesting to see it here, too, where most opinions seemee bias to one side.
I can't explain the differences in comment tone, but the differences in votes are understandable. People don't like to see duplicate posts in their feed.
Personally, if I want to upvote a particular that has a duplicate I'll always upvote the one with more upvotes. And I'll usually downvote the other, too. I don't want to have to open both posts to read the comments, so I'd like the community to align behind one of the two posts as the "real" one.
I have had similar thoughts about early posts and upvotes and downvotes making people more unlikely to post even slightly differing opinions for fear of getting a negative number or something silly like that, but this seems like an issue with the platform in general and is only worse because we have a smaller community on Lemmy.
I was thinking it was subconscious but now I am wondering how many of them are just trying to get upvotes / likes / whatever lemmy calls them. Still my 2 posts make an interesting example of it but I want to figure out what causes this. I also think it is possible that people with differing opinions may just want to leave something alone to be non confrontational leading to a mini echo chamber.
I believe most people would have seen that it has been post twice and reacted only with the first one they saw or the one with most reactions. Beside I guess the post with most comments could have been more promoted when using active / hot sort on home.
Permanently Deleted
I did see something similar with two posts of the gnome tiling feature in the same community. The first one had mostly positive comments, while the second one had mostly negative comments. (It seems it did get a few positive comments since I first saw it, but overall it's still more negative)
The articles the posts link to are different, so that could influence things. Still though, it's the exact same feature being talked about so it's weird to see such a strong difference in the majority opinion under the posts.