HOW TO MAKE FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE ON THE INTERNET: A DISSERTATION ON POPULAR COMMENTS ON BLOGS

Abstract

Blogs, specifically special-interest blogs, generate in-depth discussions. These discussions offer a new window for researching emerging trends in both consumer behavior and social-political attitudes. Many people try to influence these discussions and trends via participation, but making an impact is not guaranteed. Not all comments have the same degree of influence, since certain comments garner more visibility and generate more replies and discussion due to various website moderations. In essence, some comments become “shouts” in the midst of countless whispers in online communities. Discovering the circumstances in which a given comment is more likely to become a shout provides insight into how popular comments are made. Understanding these comments lead to improved site design as we can discover the content of the most popular comments. Through investigating a particular blog, several factors were found which have significant influence on the creation of “shouts”. This study uses the term “memetic primers” for those styles that most often cause readers to take notice of a particular comment and remember information included in it. The memetic primers were derived in a two-phase study. The first phase discovered the memetic primers using a discourse analysis of an online community. These memetic primers were then verified quantitatively in a field test. While evidence indicated that the usefulness of some primers was low, it emerged that negatively written comments had the strongest impact on a comment’s volume.

 1.

Introduction

The Internet offers us with many ways to communicate, greatly influencing the way we produce and consume information. The way we use the Internet has gradually changed, as the analogies carried over from older forms of media have given way to the interaction and mixed modes of communication that computers make possible. This is changing traditional concepts of authorship, readership, validity, and relevance. As the use of hyperlinks and web communities permits presentation of information at close to zero cost, consumption of information from online sources has exploded. The need to understand the construction and social framing of these communications is ever more urgent. Comments on message boards can sway popular opinions, and certain specific postings can become so popular that they themselves become part of the culture of the Internet. Such especially popular utterances are referred to as “memes” on community boards such as 4chan, Reddit, and Fark. Eventually, these memes filter into the mainstream culture, as seen, for example, in the meme phenomenon of amusing pictures of cats with captions, referred to as “LOLcats” (Blackmore 1999). Since memes are transferred from the Internet to individuals, can an author prime his or her readers to make them more susceptible to their message?

 

These messages that are more prevalent and easy to read within online communities are referred to in this study as “shouts”. The idea of shouts grew from a PricewaterhouseCoopers white paper, which was aimed at gauging a client’s reputation on the Internet, as well as from various studies analyzing popular opinion as expressed on blogs (Adamic and Glance 2005; Chi, Tseng et al. 2006; Conrad and Schilder 2007; PricewaterhouseCoopers 2008). The white paper suggested that whispers of customer interaction gradually grew in volume into shouts as they proliferated across blogs and other forms of media (PricewaterhouseCoopers 2008). This concept can be applied on a smaller scale. The mixture of popular opinion, memes, and shouts combine to create what this study will refer to as “memetic primers”. When a particular comment acts as a memetic primer, it gains attention and causes those reading the comment to remember the conversation.

 

“Memetic priming” is the style of a post or other form of user contribution that helps to influence the community to absorb a particular idea as a meme or a shout. This is in contrast to “whispers”, which are comments that go unnoticed by a community as a whole. An example of a shout would be the idea of John Stewart and Steven Colbert hosting a rally at Washington D.C. This idea originated as a post to the Reddit online community and grew in popularity until it was enacted by the comedians. A whisper could be an inflammatory comment during a reasonable discussion, one that is ignored for more meaningful commentary. Finding guidelines for the creation of memetic primers could be extremely valuable for academic, industrial, and political uses, as it could further our understanding of the dynamics of online communities and could be used to change perceptions of a wide variety of topics. For example, some military and diplomatic implications of understanding the power of communities as new forums of information warfare have recently emerged. Nation-states are beginning to use the Internet to help shape international opinion of themselves (U.S.-China Economic and

Security Review Commission 2008). This form of propaganda merely requires generating a large number of posts in favor of a particular point of view. In a case cited by Bristow, the Chinese commenters are referred to as “fifty cent” posters, since that is the fee commenters earn for each pro-government post they make on social sites (Bristow 2009). This potentially dangerous situation highlights the need to understand the effect that comments can have on online communities. Small groups as well as large organizations can produce real-world effects through online communities.

 

The low cost of communication through the Internet allows smaller groups to grow and gain a voice. One illustrative example is that of the Reddit community’s campaign to change the name of Greenpeace’s whale mascot (Ohanian 2009). Greenpeace hosted a contest to name their cartoon whale mascot as part of the campaign to stop whaling. The name suggested by an individual Reddit community member was silly and nonsensical, but the idea eventually grew in volume as other members of the community put their support behind the name. Eventually, the drive and power of the Reddit pushed the name “Mr. Splashy Pants” into the most popular position in the contest (Ohanian 2009). “Mr. Splashy Pants” highlights the power of memes to drive communities to action.

 

How does one uncover the core of these online communities? Traditionally, sociologists have studied a specific community’s culture (here defined as a set of ideas and meanings the community adheres to) to better understand that community (Marx and McAdam 1994). However, in some cases a traditional understanding of culture may not properly fit a community. As Marx put it:

“Much of what sociologists study as collective behavior occurs within settings where traditional cultural explanations are not applicable or not very useful as guides for understanding behavior. Studies of collective behavior can be organized by noting whether they occur in contexts in which culture is (1) indifferent, (2) inadequate, or (3) in dispute.” (Marx and McAdam 1994)

When they discuss Internet culture in general, Marx and McAdam’s comments are relevant to the culture of the community at a particular point in time. Much of what makes up Internet culture can be referred to as “counterculture” (Turner 2006). Turner’s book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, provides insights into the minds of leaders of early Internet culture, from their dream of a world connected to the later hacker conventions at college campuses around the nation (Turner 2006). However, it is important to understand that the culture of those who helped form the Internet now influences only a small portion of all the communities that exist online. Communities range from the political at Daily KOS, to the humorous at Fark and the scientific at Slashdot (2009; 2009; 2009). Online communities build independent cultures, and what may be acceptable in one may be taboo in another. It is important to understand these cultures and learn from them because they slowly impact our offline lives.

 

These communities have influence and can incite action, as occurred during the

“Internet Revolt” set off by the 2009 Iranian election. During this election, members of Fark, Slashdot, and other communities tried to provide Internet proxies for those protesting the elections in Iran (JournalSquared 2009). It is debated whether those posting anti-Iranian government tweets were actually in Iran and whether they were acting in the interests of Iran or other nations, but nevertheless they ignited massive online activity. This is a prime example of an online community finding a problem and attempting to address it on the international level.

 

The impacts of blogs and comments need not be international to be significant. Their effects on everyday items and culture are great. Culture is partly defined by a community forming shared opinions on art and lifestyle, and the Internet expands what we consider culture and community (Salganik and Watts 2008). The influence that a community has on an individual’s opinion can be staggering (Salganik and Watts 2008). Salganik and Watts performed an experiment that demonstrated the profound impact that communities have on individual taste in and consumption of music. Their experiment exposed different communities to the same music, and these communities then rated the music much as music is rated at iTunes and Amazon. Choices of favored songs were not very consistent, with only a few songs being picked as either very popular or very unpopular by each participant group almost randomly (Salganik and Watts 2008). This indicates that a song’s popularity may be an artifact of a community’s support of one artist by luck of being initially favored (Salganik and Watts 2008). In essence, if one artist is preferred by a single member of a community, everyone else in the same community tends to like that artist.

 

While the effect of online comments can be seen anecdotally, such as in the case of Mr. Splashy pants or the Comedy Central rally, doing so without the use of method and rigor to study these effects leaves it unclear how certain comments gain attention.

Anecdotal accounts of discussions cannot give insight into the specifics of the writing process of a comment’s author or the context of the comment. In addition, these shouts are prevalent in communities in which feedback systems exist for a comment to gain support. One must examine these comments in a similar context to see the effect of these feedback systems. I ask the following research question:

 

RQ: Within blogs having popularity feedback systems, which memetic primers lead to a comment being read by a larger portion of the community?

 

One can read the first few comments on a blog post to gauge the audience response, rather than trying to recall nuances and differences in the comments on the story. A reader rarely continues to a third or fourth page of comments without encouragement in the form of a good discussion or site moderation. Even on the first page, a reader’s eye may be drawn to long comments or comments that have garnered a significant number of replies.

 

As participants move to become part of communities, do they attempt to emulate popular posts, much as novice might try to emulate a master? Does identification of authorship matter? If so, comments written by famous community members might explain why certain ideas like memes or those of celebrity fame are often repeated. This will be the aspect of comments this study will try to address. Further refining of these questions of the nature of blogs leads to the following high-level goals of the study:

□	Is the “volume” of a comment related to the number of replies it receives, and how much of the discussion the comment monopolizes
□	How “loud” is a comment when posted on the Internet?
□	Can memetic primers help a comment to optimize its volume?
□	Do these “loud” comments then control the discussion in the community?

 

While examples of powerful comments are be found readily on the Internet, it’s beyond the scope of this study to consider all commented pages and blogs, since each community has a commenting style of its own with its own nuances. Therefore, as is explained in detail below, the focus of this dissertation will be special-interest blogs, specifically blogs that cover news of the video game industry. This focus on blogs with community identities allows us to gain more insight into their behavior, through methods established in socio-technical fields. Special-topic blogs show some evidence to support the view that their members, due to shared interests, are inclined to “bandwagoning” heuristics (Yucel 2007; Sundar, Oeldorf-Hirsch et al. 2008). “Bandwagoning” is a component of the MAIN Model, a mental model of media consumption (Sundar 2007). This heuristic governs a trust decision on part of the reader, making the reader more likely to agree with the major opinion in the community. This phenomenon, in addition to other heuristics within the MAIN Model, may give insight into the “volume” or

“loudness” of a given comment.

 

My familiarity with these blogs is an important factor in this study’s focus due to the need for familiarity with context and meaning in analyzing each comment. It is also useful that many of these video game forums implement designs that attempt to increase the visibility of valuable comments, by placing these comments first or showing more of their text. For example, special interest blogs such as Slashdot hide what their moderators consider uninteresting posts and regularly refer back to their own discussions on hot topics. As a member of these communities I understand how these protocols could affect my study and I can adjust my work accordingly.

 

Memetic primers also are potentially useful for providing new insights into both analyzing web discussions and forecasting trends in web communities. Interest in the examining discourse that happens in online spaces is increasing in both academia and industry (Adamic and Glance 2005; Chi, Tseng et al. 2006; Conrad and Schilder 2007; McArthur 2008). This analysis provides a way to gauge the opinions of large, interested collectives of experts, in order to predict outcomes in various fields. Adamic and Glance’s study of the predictions of bloggers during the 2004 presidential campaign is an important example of this technique (Adamic and Glance 2005). Many predicted a very insular and divided election, and the study of the blogging community confirmed that cross-posting between liberal and conservative blogs was very uncommon, indicating that both groups were “mini echo chambers”. In essence, people tended to comment on and link to evidence on sites they agreed with (Adamic and Glance 2005).

 

Formation of a consensus within a community is only one way a shout can increase in volume. While consensus in online communities does develop over time, arguments and differences in opinion can also call attention to comments and be a predictor of shouts. A community without dissenters is unlikely. A single story may draw hundreds of comments, and that story may then be copied in another community drawing hundreds of that community’s own comments. Each one of these comments may contain subtleties that make any comment difficult to classify as positive or negative, as opposed to sarcastic. This nesting of meaning and context creates huge problems for those examining trends in communities in hope of predicting consensus. However, if in fact most readers notice only the comments with the most volume, it is possible that a smaller set of comments could be used to gain insight into a community.

 

This dissertation first provides a literature review on the background topics mentioned as they apply to the study. The review also includes a look at blogs and futurist thought as well as at current and foundational studies of these topics in academia and industry. Next, the dissertation will discuss relevant theories, including the MAIN Model and sensemaking. A section will detail gamer culture and explain why this subset of Internet culture was chosen for the study. Following will be the methodology and procedures, in which the research question and study methods will be detailed, along with a previous case study and lessons learned from it that will be applied to the current study. An analysis of data follows, with insights into which memetic primers worked and which did not. This experiment found that negative comments were significantly more remembered and replied to than positive comments. Finally, this dissertation will discuss impacts of memetic primers and suggest future avenues of study.

HOW TO MAKE FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE ON THE INTERNET: A DISSERTATION ON POPULAR COMMENTS ON BLOGS

 

Sharing is caring!