Online Comment Culture

Being an active commenter felt like being an internet socialite, part of an elite society of people who put their voice out there instead of lurked. And my fellow internet socialites responded in turn. Some upvoted, responded, debated. Some liked what I said, some hated it. A few of my comments made it to the top and became a fountain of dopamine. A few comments made it to the very bottom too. That can happen with 16 years of commenting history. [...] Various estimates of lifetime human ac...

 Consumers of Alternative News are More Likely to Fall for...

Most of the online activism Facebook pages contain claims that mainstream media is manipulated by higher entities (and thus the information is be not neutral or reliable). Such an antagonism makes any kind of persuasion process, even if based on more solid information, very dicult. As a response to partisan debates, the emergent groups of trolls began to provide parodistic imitations of a wide range of online partisan topics. Despite the evident parodistic (and sometimes paradoxical) contents...

 Social Networks "Flatten" Social Structures

Visibility has its cost; in order to make broader social networks vis- ible, Friendster flattens those networks, collapsing relationship types and contexts into the ubiquitous “Friend.” More problematically, Friendster does not provide ways of mapping or interpreting the contextual cues and social structural boundaries that help people manage their social worlds. Physi- cal distance, to abstract from the obvious, is not just an obstacle to build- ing social relations but is also the dimen...

 Beginnings of the Reputation Economy

The formal reputation networks that exist AF arose organically from the informal social media developed through the 21st century. An early barrier to interacting with strangers online—particularly when engaging in financial transactions—was not knowing if the person you were dealing with was reliable. Primitive reputation scores were the first solution, enabling buyers to rate sellers. These systems rapidly spread to social networks, discussion forums, and filesharing sites, as a way of v...