This week, Rosanna talked about the comment collection, analysis and some clustering models. As we all know, comments are very important to social network analysis, but how about “Like”? Does it has the same effectiveness?
When we analyzes comments, we can select the comments that have some effective information. But how can we select the effective “Like” since they all look the same. That is the most difficult problem.
A new study reported in “New York Times” shows that around these problem: the user’s “Like” of a article on Facebook can often lead to other users to follow a “Like”, even if the article actually written was not so good. However, “Dislike” will not lead other users to follow. That is, the “Like” is contagious.
Researchers with a website has cooperated to conduct an experiment. During the five months research, users can give ”Like” or “Dislike” to the articles. They divided the users into two groups, experimental group and control group. The experimental group members will give a “Like” or “Dislike” randomly by the system, when the article published. At the same time, the control group members will have no changes by system. As a result, the number of the “Like” of the experimental group was almost twice than the the control group.
Through this experiment, we can find out that “Like” is a kind of group behavior, and users may be affected by herd mentality, and then click “Like” or leave some active comments rather than depending on theirs own judgments or feelings.
Maybe that is why some websites will hide the score or “Like” numbers for some time.
Well,your point in the blog actually inspires me.“Like” is a kind of group behavior.However,I am not quite understand why 'Dislike' is not a group behavior.Maybe I need to find more articles about this topic to figure it out.
回复删除You present a great topic here, is the extend of like worth mentioning?Moreover,sometimes,the likes is only a kind of social cognition.Friends are likely to clicked on the likes of the same sharing information and Matthew effect actually exists here.So the study or statistics of likes,however,may be less promising than you think.Thanks for sharing and I like it very much!
回复删除I would like to " like" your post also. It is really a close example of what is really happening on the social media. Besides asking how we distinguish the meaning of those "LIKE"s, i am also interested in knowing how this "Likes" changes the people's interaction on social media. I believe that the spread of "like" may indicated some kind of concern towards things happen around people that we love. Especially for people who have to deal with infinite amount of information everyday like us. However, i agree that comments and words embedded much more sincere emotion that shouldn't be hidden. More comments and tell people what you think may transform our cold-virtual world into a better world.
回复删除I think also that the spread of "like" might indicate some concern towards the people. It's difficult to change a cold-virtual world, and if it becomes too warm, what will happen ? Is people will stay more and more on their mobile / computer / tablet ?
回复删除A very interesting topic! In WeChat, "Like" sometimes do not really mean we like the content, but mean we have read the content and express our notice on the message. Thanks for your very nice post. :D
回复删除I think social networking website should add more buttons other than "like". Maybe "disagree" button can help us to judge a well-written article but with different opinion.
回复删除