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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/opinion/sunday/this-story-stinks.html?_r=0

Interesting article about how comments on news stories have an affect on the views of the users.

Simply including an ad hominem attack in a reader comment was enough to make study participants think the downside of the reported technology was greater than they’d previously thought.

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Never. Read. Comments!

Even the comments here?

sixpackshaker said:

Even the comments here?

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Well, it depends. The study shows the effect of negative comments on perceptions. So while I am not saying to not READ negative comments, it should be a wake-up for those who WRITE them. Of course, in some instances, this study will make trolls MORE likely to post crap because they know it works.

I can't go into a lot of detail, because some day it may be part of my Masters or Doctoral thesis, but my experimental research would appear to lend support to this.

Dave said:

Well, it depends. The study shows the effect of negative comments on perceptions. So while I am not saying to not READ negative comments, it should be a wake-up for those who WRITE them. Of course, in some instances, this study will make trolls MORE likely to post crap because they know it works.

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You're an idiot if you don't think this already happens.

Bubble181 said:

You're an idiot if you don't think this already happens.

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Hm, weird. I no longer trust the study Dave linked.

y u believe this. fuck fuck fuck fuck shit racial slur. Jesus will come down from hebin and personally kick your ASS FOR SAYING THIS. LOL science. If u so EVOLVED y don't u just evolve some faith in JESUS who loves everyone, but u WIL BRN LOL!

Man, this is just because we elected Nobama

thanks obama

fade said:

y u believe this. fuck fuck fuck fuck shit racial slur. Jesus will come down from hebin and personally kick your ASS FOR SAYING THIS. LOL science. If u so EVOLVED y don't u just evolve some faith in JESUS who loves everyone, but u WIL BRN LOL!

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I totally know you're totally joking, but seriously, there is research to back up this type of attitude change.

In other news water is wet.

Espy said:

In other news water is wet.

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Actually, I disagree that this assessment is that obvious. I mean, when you read comments you know for the most part which ones are being trolls and which ones have legitimate bitches. But this study shows that even those obvious ones have an effect. And that's real news.

Espy said:

In other news water is wet.

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anyone that does not know that is a complete....

There's a big distinction between the title of the thread and the content of the article. Obviously, you should never read the comments, but the article actually is really good. Sorry, I'm extremely nerdy about this because all my research for the past 2 years has centered around attitude change and this is kind of fascinating to me and falls in line with both the research I've read about and the experiments I've conducted.

Dave said:

Actually, I disagree that this assessment is that obvious. I mean, when you read comments you know for the most part which ones are being trolls and which ones have legitimate bitches. But this study shows that even those obvious ones have an effect. And that's real news.

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I guess I assumed given the sheer number of them that they had an effect, I mean, they must since there seem to be so many of them.

Even one negative comment can cause someone to re-evaluate their thoughts on a subject and put them in a position to be more or less susceptible to attitude change based on whether the comment generally supports or contradicts their existing attitude.

Espy said:

In other news water is wet.

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There are people in comments sections that would dispute that.

We all tend to think we're smart enough to be immune to subconscious manipulation from the comments. Problem is, not all of us are.

Also, water is dry you dumb fucks. Have none of you ever read a book?

Given that political parties, large companies and lobby groups have been actively employing people for years to post comments/"discussion" topics/etc on news pages, just like game developers and such have been "seeding" their message boards and such, I'm not terribly surprised.

I mean, it may seem unobvious or counterintuitive that even the obvious trolls work - as in "I'm smart enough to see this is nonsense" - but in the end, that's what most marketing is based on. A commercial is nothing but an extremely-obviously-biased "user comment" about a product, after all.
It's fascinating to observe and to see how this sort of process works, of course, and it's a good thing that we can tryy to qualify and quantify it. It's also horribly dangerous, in my eyes: with the advent of the internet, people seem more free but are, in fact, exposed to less contrary opinions than before: everybody tends to gravitate to groups/sites/... which conform (mostly) to their ideas. Combined with the fact that even obvious extreme trolls have an actual effect, seems to indicate people are more and more being reaffirmed into preconceived notions and polarized more and more...Which is a bad thing.

You can already see this at work in some ways with specific population groups amongst the youth these days. Where the political center is can change by country, but everybody is more and more convinced that their positions are "normal" and "centrist with a slight lean" and any opposition is far more extreme than it actually is. I'm not sure what political public debate will look like 20 years from now, but newspaper article comments and twitter don't point in the right direction, and there's unfortunately no clear and easy way to change that, without either limiting freedoms or pushing an agenda.

Bowielee said:

Even one negative comment can cause someone to re-evaluate their thoughts on a subject and put them in a position to be more or less susceptible to attitude change based on whether the comment generally supports or contradicts their existing attitude.

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This feels related to what I was told when I was hired back in high school at Safeway. If a customer has an exceptionally great experience, they might tell 1 or 2 people (maybe). If they have an OK experience, nobody will hear anything. If they have even a bit of a bad one, they'll tell 10 people about it.

From my own experiences being a customer of places, I think that holds up as well, but this seems to be a related aspect to it.

Dave said:

Never. Read. Comments!

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My wife has an app that changes all the comments on YouTube to say "Herp Derp".