Interesting question—I doubt this would be the case, but agree it can be at least partially answered empirically.
Perhaps the forum team could try and do some kind of name analysis vs karma to rule this out? This would be difficult, because you would have to somehow control for “quality of post/comment” which would be hard but possible. For example you could get a team of people to rate post quality blinded to the poster name, then compare the karma of similarly rated posts with different names.
Alternatively you could do a prospective study, perhaps putting up similar-ish types of posts or quicktakes written by the same person/people under randomly assigned pseudonyms. This could be a bit disengenuous and bad actor-ish though as you would be kind of experimenting with us all without our consent, but hey that’s what big tech does all the time.
I’m sure there are other ways of assessing this I am missing too.
Interesting question—I doubt this would be the case, but agree it can be at least partially answered empirically.
Perhaps the forum team could try and do some kind of name analysis vs karma to rule this out? This would be difficult, because you would have to somehow control for “quality of post/comment” which would be hard but possible. For example you could get a team of people to rate post quality blinded to the poster name, then compare the karma of similarly rated posts with different names.
Alternatively you could do a prospective study, perhaps putting up similar-ish types of posts or quicktakes written by the same person/people under randomly assigned pseudonyms. This could be a bit disengenuous and bad actor-ish though as you would be kind of experimenting with us all without our consent, but hey that’s what big tech does all the time.
I’m sure there are other ways of assessing this I am missing too.
What if you could only see who wrote a post after you’ve rated the comment?