Next time I would like to know whether I'm in a fucking experiment or not. IRB's exist for a reason ... and taking it off the reservation to use our collective behavior in an experiment without telling the subject is: 1. unethical
2. amoral
3. and go fuck yourself. But facebook did it ... I guess so can you!
I'm highly confused here. This kind of 'experiment' isn't something that requires a review board. This is simple statistics gathering from an already established set of data. It's amateur data gathering as well (no offence to jleopold.) This is like people watching at the mall and telling your friend that you noticed that teens tend to 'shop' in larger groups than the elderly. This is neither amoral nor unethical. I could understand the animosity if he had tried to manipulate content, 'game' the number of shares, or otherwise cause something to happen which wouldn't normally, but in this case he didn't do any of those things. Maybe I just don't understand, though. I'd like to hear your thoughts, though.
Woah. Hey. Wait a minute now. I'm curious, what's with the strong, negative reaction? What he did, at least from what I understand, doesn't seem that outrageous. All he did was really an observational experiment, seeing how following certain people or certain tags would affect what information he's exposed to. It doesn't sound like he actually did anything that would actually affect either A) the behavior of the people he was observing or B) the dynamics of the website. Should he maybe of said "Hey, I have an idea that I want to try out! Let me know what you think."? Yeah. Probably. To be fair though, this is probably the most benign experiment I've seen in a while.
It wasn't unethical and in fact informing his subjects they were being observed would negatively impact the quality of the study (from what I understand). Informing someone that you will observe them cannot do anything except impact their behavior. Even if they choose to act as they already were, the fact that it becomes a conscious choice instead of an unchallenged course of action would alter what the study 'results' would 'say.' In fact it's possibly a bit rash of backtoyoujim to assume he was even part of the experiment, other than by dint of the fact that he was using the same site as someone else who was doing a thing on that website. btyj is actually none of these, at this current time. I don't think observational studies (this is far more accurately a study than an experiment) can actually harm or impact a person's experience or behavior. If they do, then they clearly fail at being observational studies. I am all for people trying to observe behavior and patterns through publicly available and publicly taken information/actions, especially in such a benign scenario as "what is the behavior and pattern en masse"? I don't see how these studies can hurt the groups they observe really, so long as the observation is nonobtrusive. Now, watch-watch-watch, collect my data, and sell it? That of course is a problem and I'd be super pissed and so on. However... ...not what's happening here. Carry on with the navel-gazing, less so of the outbursts that non-private information was collected by a co-user/co-inhabitant/co-person to look at for group behavior/information out of sheer curiosity and theory-testing.I followed the top five of the most badged, active posters, popular commenters, and active commenters.
In this case, informal meant a high school student using public data to literally count dots while watching TV, which will have no ramifications, lacks all academic significance, released, nor used, any private data, and which made largely eclectic conclusions. Perhaps I should have asked first, but this is the equivalent of a student looking around the lunchroom and then sharing his observations with a friend. You do something similar everyday, whether you share your observations or not. If it makes you feel any better, based on your profile history (am I allowed to look at that?), it doesn't seem that you affected the study in any way.