Was Skinner Wrong? Operant Conditioning & Down-Voting in Online Communities
http://news360.com/article/264717628
#RGTron
3 things.
1) why the tron hash tag?
2) I'm failing to see an actual connection to Skinner and operant conditioning in the article. It's not enough say "BF Skinner!" And throw out a couple terms. I don't think this author really grasps Skinner's work. To me, it looks like patterns of online karma/posting follow conditioning models exactly as Skinner described.
3) the article misses one very important thing - attention. Receiving attention is a positive reinforcement. If a poster gets punished (say with downvotes that hurt their feelings), what happens next? They probably alter their behavior and post about it. And when they post about it, they get a reaction. At that point, any response ("good" or "bad") is reinforcing their behavior with attention. Which follows Skinner's model.
Theoretically... If you forget about negative reinforcement, negative punishment, the fact that a dislike can sometimes be a positive reinforcement, both likes and dislikes are actually meaningless and can be ignored completely and not apply to behavioral change at all... So yeah, aside from all of it, it's the same :D