Every time I search something like “Why is X bad?” on reddit or other forums, the majority of comments is always people arguing the exact opposite. This has been my experience countless times over the years. Recently I started searching the opposite of what I want to know, like “Why is X good?”, and it works flawlessly.
I think the psychological effect is called reactance. When faced with opposition to their position, people will defend it more aggressively than they would just agree with someone affirming the same position.
There was a joke that said if you wanted programming help, you’d post a question on Stack Overflow, then use another account and answer your question with an aggressively wrong answer. People would attack the wrong answer and actually give a quality answer more regularly than they would otherwise just answer a question with no answers.
It also reminds me of that web comic with a woman telling a man to come to bed, and he just stares at the computer and says “I can’t. Someone is wrong on the internet.”
“The quickest way to get the correct answer to a question is to post the incorrect answer online.”
Is a pretty old Internet adage
Many snake oil products do this as a marketing strategy.
Search for “is X a scam?” will have the first few results be paid promotional blogs. “Is X a scam? Actually, it is amazing! It brought my hair back and gave my dog healthier teeth blablabla”
If you need tech help, log in to a sock puppet and give yourself bad advice.
Big brain move.
Yes. If I randomly search “I hate X” OR “x sucks” it will lead to nothing but posts that say stuff like: “The X hate is getting ridiculous” or “why do people say X sucks? It’s great.”
The answer is probably boring and dystopian like SEO for engagement ragebait. It’s hoping you have the same opinion you’re searching and will devolve into arguing with others needlessly over which Linux distros suck (all of them except yours) why yours is the best (it isn’t) and why others need to switch (they don’t unless they still use Windows)
I have not. I think the underlying popularity of whatever position you are querying is the main determinant of what kind of results you will get.
Yes. Not just in social media either, it starts at search engines. I have a feeling that it’s not just arbitrary nor generalized to every field but something purposeful and in line with current liberal Western narratives.
liberal Western narratives
I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt if you mean this political or not. I do want to state that in the Netherlands liberal is associated with the right wing. Not the extreme right, but rubbing against it for sure. So liberal narratives amount to “money to the rich” over here.
I’d say liberal encompasses more than just “right wing” politics but yeah, that’s kinda what I was referring to. 👍
