product contamination

I’ve written about product contagion – the weird ability of one product to “infect” another with its properties (or its “cooties“) when they touch in a shopping cart – but there’s a related phenomenon that is, if anything, even stranger.

Writers need to think about more than the quality of their writing. They need to worry about the quality of the comments on their content. A recent experiment produced an interesting finding: the presence of low-quality comments on an article caused the article itself to be considered lower in quality.