Have you ever felt like the internet was just kind of “blah” today? We have too. So we did an experiment, and the results are pretty neat. Turns out yes, BuzzFeed's community can get pretty moody sometimes.
Pictured above: BuzzFeed, very often.
Can social media sites go through large scale emotional trends? Like, can Twitter or Facebook get depressed or have a manic episode? Can Tumblr as a whole wake up on the wrong side of the bed?
We recently tried to answer that question, at least for BuzzFeed, by using numbers pulled from our reaction bar. BuzzFeed's team of data scientists were given time periods of major news stories — controversial ones from the last year that caused an uproar of some kind — and they measured positive and negative reaction use for each story.
The question we attempted to answer was whether or not a particularly controversial news story could cause an overall increase of negative reactions across our entire website. Were users in such a rotten mood after reading hard news that it affected the way they reacted to other stories? And does that add up in such a direct way that it's a quantifiable mood? Think of it like the online version of when you burn your hand on the stove and end up shouting at your dog about it even though it's not the dog's fault you accidentally grabbed a hot skillet.
The answer, fascinatingly, is yes. BuzzFeed can become depressed on a macro, sociological level. Which should be a no brainer, but it's kind of a big deal.
This corgi is what BuzzFeed looks like after one too many posts about Miley Cyrus' new hair cut.
Most social websites follow the Facebook model of like, share, and comment, which at its inception was revolutionarily articulate. Users are typically given two options: to spit the story back out and reshare it, or to simply show their interest or disinterest with some form of like or dislike. Reddit has an upvote/downvote system that essentially shows approval which then moves content; Tumblr has like and reblog; Twitter has favorite or retweet — the list goes on forever.
BuzzFeed is a bit different in that we have an ever-changing reaction bar of various emotions you can assign to posts — custom reactions you can win, a heart for liking, and a broken heart for disliking. If enough people use the same reaction in a quick enough period of time, say "LOL" on a story about a tortoise named Bryan that wears a chef's hat and lives in a kitchen, it goes into LOL Feed for further promotion.
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