Your YouTube Comment Section Has Been Taken Over By a Couple of Negative A**holes, And Here’s Why…

As a YouTuber, are you fed up with that one unconstructively negative comment, which takes over your comment section by storm? 🌪

Maybe it’s a petty “that’s 5 minutes I won’t get back”? 💢

Then your comment section and community is suffering from a psychosocial phenomenon called social contagion. Social contagion is indeed information contagion, however with the added amplifying factors: behaviour and emotions. Those factors really denote a single thing: interactions between the people exchanging information. 💱

But what is interaction really? Here are the 3 underpinning mechanisms by which we can characterise social interactions in a YouTube comment section:

👩‍❤️‍👩 Affective imitation: As the name indicates, this is when people mimic others’ behaviours and emotions when interacting with each other. It is well-known that imitation is quite strong on the social web. The YouTube comment section really shouldn’t be any exceptions. In fact, although this could not be very reliable, some studies have shown that social media information such as that shared on facebook for instance was better at spurring social movements. Thus it is possible that affective imitation online is even stronger than in real life…

⚽ Intergroup interaction: This suffers from a very unfortunate aspect of human mass psychology (i.e. in-group vs out-group). Whilst affective imitation is neither good nor bad in my opinion, studies have shown that intergroup interactions seem to be mostly for the worse. Intergroup interaction is when 2 different groups (e.g. 2 groups with differing opinions about a topic) engage with each other. Some scientists in the field believe that as 2 different groups form a positive relationship, this actually on average increases negative attitudes in individuals such as prejudice, fear, avoidance, aggression, and etc…

🎁 Reciprocity: As explained in one of my previous posts, the comment section forms a comment-reply social network. Reciprocity in a social network is how either the network as a whole or parts of the network become strongly connected with one another. Reciprocity is the means by which people form deeper, more meaningful, and stronger bonds. And yes, this does happen in full swing in the comment section as well. Naturally, reciprocity of similar views will drastically increase the echo chamber and social contagion effects.

(Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9739846/)

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