scleaves

I was doing a paper on how people are treated on online forums. I said that people are often treated by the reputation they have built and not by what they write immediately. To test this, me and a buddy swapped accounts on a forum with relaxed rules and didn't pretend to be each other necessarily but didn't tell anyone and just posted as we normally did. People on this online community seemed to like my buddy better, and this was evident that when I tried to strike a conversation up with people, I was called nice terms and people genuinely wanted to help me out, while when I was using my own account, people usually just called me names. But I was posting as I normally did. With that said, I do not recommend such a practice or experiment to people. We knew that it wouldn't harm anything before we overtook it, and we didn't keep it up for long.

Now there is something else you should know. I didn't troll the forum under my own account but my buddy really went out on a limb to communicate on that forum. I had a little under a couple thousand posts on the forum that were mostly a few lines, and he had 5,000 posts on the forum and just about all were actually a page or two long.

Also, no one suspected a thing until we told them later.

I feel bad about doing this experiment now because it seems kind of immature, but you can't change the past, and I think the subject is interesting.