Criticality above All

I like to look at the comments when I watch YouTube, when I noticed that there's a theme of the top comment of some videos: the comments are almost all critical. Either they provoke some entity (usually big, greedy corps) or outlining mistakes or overall silliness of one's act. There's some exceptions of course; praises for being different than the others or simply just comments that's on topic with the content (usually funny ones) are some examples of the exceptions.

There must be some method to this madness. Being that the algorithm of YouTube is tuned for attention regarding to giving people content (because more attention = more watchtime = more ad revenue = more money), I have a theory that people just gravitate towards other's opinions, either to agree with them or to disagree with them. It doesn't matter if the opinion is agreeable or controversial; it will be pushed up by the algorithm. The more agreeable or controversial some post is, the more people will talk about it, and the more engaging that post will be.

It doesn't take much for this bias to become apparent; even a single like-dislike number is enough to bias content in this manner. Just look at Urban Dictionary; most of the top definitions are opinions.

This is an interesting fact to learn. Social networking services are tuned to prefer people's preferences, rather than the overall sentiment or relevance of the topic in question. And the Internet grown up to be this way.