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.
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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.
Remember that many of the people here are ex-redditors and their first instinct is to be a shitty reply guy instead of Assuming Good Faith.
That is true. I am an ex redditor but only used Reddit because lemmy didn’t have enough users yet.