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Is it not reasonable in many cases to infer that the promoter isn't intending people to up vote if they're not interested in the article?
by baddox 11y ago
Is it not reasonable in many cases to infer that the promoter isn't intending people to up vote if they're not interested in the article?
- minimaxir 11y agoThat is not a reasonable inference, even if there wasn't an explicit call-to-action. (Otherwise, why make the comment?) This is the reason for the infamous IF YOU LIKE THIS VIDEO LIKE/SUBSCRIBE/COMMENT! phrasing that has plagued modern YouTube.
- baddox 11y ago> Otherwise, why make the comment? The comment is a tweet, which ordinarily is only seen by the user's Twitter followers.
- Bjartr 11y agoOnly if we assume all submitters only submit because of how interesting / important / relevant an the submission is, and are not influenced in their decisions by imaginary internet points, pride in getting to the front page, etc. For a sufficiently small community this assumption is fairly safe though even then not always true. As communities grow their population trends towards the average (for many characteristics) and the average human is more likely to be driven by the latter motivations than the former, at least as I understand psychology, though I would be very interested to learn otherwise. tl;dr: I think the assumption that a submitter is motivated more by wanting to make a good contribution over having their HN submission 'win' is shortsighted.