New Study Finds That Most Redditors Don’t Actually Read the Articles They Vote On

[Jared]

New Study Finds That Most Redditors Don’t Actually Read the Articles They Vote On

According to a paper published in IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems by researchers at Notre Dame University, some 73 percent of posts on Reddit are voted on by users that haven’t actually clicked through to view the content being rated. This is according to a newly released dataset consisting of all Reddit activity of 309 site users for a one year period. In the process, the researchers identified signs of “cognitive fatigue” in Reddit users most likely to vote on content. Online aggregation is then somewhat a function of mental exhaustion.

Some masochists have actually published a 200-page research paper on this.

 

[c4yrslf12]

Some masochists have actually published a 200-page research paper on this.

That sweet, sweet karma at the top of /r/all though..

 

[darkzerothree]

Online aggregation is then somewhat a function of mental exhaustion.

LOL

Things rank because you are too tired to give a...

 

[Tiberian]

I wouldn't be surprised if it was also because of how many Reddit accounts are just upvoting bots.

So many popular things on Reddit are just functions of who has bought what.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Half of it, I'd say, is due to Reddit becoming a cultural warfare battleground. Upvoting and downvoting is now becoming an agree / disagree button. That's part of what you can exploit as you post yourself, where you can get virtue-signallers to catapult you to the top. If you post something that lets all of those insecure people feel morally superior by upvoting, they will upvote, especially when the double implication is that it'll push something they disagree with down further.

But I agree that it's about mental exhaustion. We want to quickly consume all that Reddit has to offer that half-day or day, so we can't visit all of the stories. Especially when most of them don't have a pay off. It's usually clickbait. And half are pictures and videos anyways. Most thread titles give away the entire story and there's usually no reason to click through. That's another part of getting visitors to your site. Don't give away the goods before the click.