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Also, since most users tend to post little, active trolls can dominate a conversation in a group where they're the vast minority: 3% of people being trolls post
by ObviousScience 12y ago
Also, since most users tend to post little, active trolls can dominate a conversation in a group where they're the vast minority: 3% of people being trolls posting with 30x the average frequency of other people will cause as much traffic as everyone else together.
- anigbrowl 12y agoI've noticed time and again that a small group of pushy users in an online community can establish or preserve a 'center of social gravity' that pretty much guarantees a pile-on attack on anybody who expresses opinions that are at odds with the group consensus. Doubtless this is a special case of a pre-existing social phenomenon, but I wonder if anyone knowns of systematic research into this behavior, which ought to be easy to study given the proliferation of online fora with persistent messaging and so on. The closest thing I can think of is a RAND corporation study suggesting that recruiting ~10% of a social population to a particular viewpoint was enough to get it entrenched, but that's several years old.