New Study Finds That Most Redditors Don’t Actually Read the Articles They Vote On - Motherboard
▻https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/vbz49j/new-study-finds-that-most-redditors-dont-actually-read-the-article
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.
As of 2017, reddit sees 234 million unique monthly users, according to Alexa. It’s the fourth most trafficked website in the United States.
I think we can mostly agree that this is bad. As those of us that click through to the articles know well enough, headlines are very often poor representations of the substance of the content within. Moreover, it adds an interesting twist to discussions of fake news sites. We’re often befuddled by the traction that obvious, malignant bullshit gets online, but that obviousness—including literal satire disclaimers—doesn’t often percolate upward to headlines. One might even say that headline browsers are in some part responsible for giving the US its headline president.
