I have a strange habit of trying to find patterns. I do this especially on social media. And I do it mostly to find something interesting. For example I often do it to understand social networks better. To understand how the algorithms possibly work. Or to understand what human behaviors could be at display.
Yesterday I published a status on my personal Facebook account.
There were a total of 56 reactions breaking down as 36 ‘Likes’ and 20 ‘Loves’. This roughly means 64% people liked the status and 36% people loved it.
However, the first 10 reactions were only ‘love’
And, the last 10 reactions were only ‘like’
And so my hypothesis is that this didn’t happen by accident. I believe my status was rolled out to my friends’ newsfeed in this order such that the people who would love react saw it first, followed by others.
My other hypothesis is about human behavior. And that is that as long as the status only had ‘love’ reacts, others wanted to also love react to it. As that was the only reaction they saw at the post. And when someone changed the pattern, others didn’t care about the love react anymore.
In the end, they are what I said they are; hypotheses and I would need to run down a large amount of data to come to a conclusion.
Please share your feedback in comments. Have a great weekend.