Skip to content

Comment on Crowds vs. Herdsparent

Comments

Independence: People's opinions aren't determined by the opinions of those around them.

Haven't you ever noticed on Reddit: foo makes a comment, and then foo's comment karma drops to 0. All of a sudden, it goes way down to -3. Then bar makes a positive reply and gets a large karma score, and all of a sudden foo's comment shoots back up to 10 karma or more.

Well, people really are influenced by the opinions of others. If someone's downvoting someone, the majority of people are going to agree that downvoting that someone is a good idea. If a group of people are beating up someone, more people join in and beat up that someone.

Did you hear about the Juneteenth mob that pulled someone out of their car and beat them? Someone thought that was a good idea, and all of a sudden hundreds of people thought that was a good idea.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.