If you want to make internet friends, according to a recent British study, you should be as much of an asshole as humanly possible when posting content to the web.
Anyone who ever had a LiveJournal is probably familiar with the correlation of hating and comments (remember Fandom Wank?) but researchers on the study specifically say that member of online communities rally together in moments where the opportunity to mock, ridicule or otherwise hate on a person or group presents. Using algorithms based on sentiment analysis, the Slavic and British researchers say it was determined that positive content garnered less interest than negative stuff. Witness:
The team’s algorithms look for features such as keywords, emoticons, and subtle linguistic markers such as misspellings, and use the results to calculate a “happiness score” for each post.
They have found that long conversation threads are overwhelmingly more emotionally negative than short ones, with happiness scores decreasing logarithmically with the number of messages. What’s more, long conversations almost always start with negative comments.
Newscientist.com consulted a shrink , who said that the results of the study actually perfectly reflect what we know about how people behave, and it’s not like the internet made us trollier:
“There is evidence that group cohesiveness may be related to negative feelings about others,” agrees Tom Buchanan, a psychologist at the University of Westminster in London. “Members of an online community might unite around a perceived attack on them or some aspect of their identity.”
Are you or have you been a participating member of a forum or news aggregating site? Do you notice this phenomenon in your day to day browsing?
