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Comment by skilled | Hacker News Reader

Is the idea that multiple people are looking at a product supposed to inspire me to purchase it? I really struggle to understand the logic.

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But look, there are only 2 items left, and 5 have been sold in the past hour. Also, 15 people are also currently looking at this product, so you better hurry and buy it before it's too late! ... or before you think twice and realize you don't need this product at all.

I would expect that it contributes to sales both by creating a fake sense of validation from others and by creating a fake sense of urgency (get it while in stock!), both of which are good tools to compromise decision making of the buyer.

On top of validation and urgency that are negative, you have also a true sense of popularity that indicates that the product works, has good reputation, fits a common purpose or is priced correctly.

Crowd selection isn't negative, in fact without it we d just be picking fruit at random in the forest with a good chance of dying of poisonning, instead of chatting online... on a popular forum we think like minded people also frequent, having opinions we suppose we'll be interested in on posts that are ranked by upvotes :p

Crowd selection lead to Hitler, Jan 6th, COVID denial, Jonestown, etc..

Just because everyone believes the world is flat doesn't make it so.

"People like Coldplay and voted for the Nazis, you can't trust people Jez." - Super Hans.

But I mean, you immediately went to Hitler which is a lazy exit in a discussion and hard for me to defend, but let's try, since I'm French. When Germany had to submit to the Versaille Treaty and pay gold fines every year until 1975, went into a crisis compounded by the US financial crisis and we robbed the Ruhr coal mines to solve our own issues, voting Hitler with all his promises may have turned Germany around from its abject submission and sad destiny. It was too far into insanity but... wasnt it better than having the French elites continue to think that Germany had to be punished forever ?

At least in school in France we now learn not to blame ONLY the little guy voting out of despair, but also the unfair winners of WWI. Without that crowd deciding together to do something, anything, where would Germany be today ? Hard to be optimistic in 1933. And it drove the WWII winners into building a better post-war reparation program, not only explained by the communist scarecrow but also the lessons of the inception of WWII in Germany: revenge against abject humiliation.

These dark plugins really do work, short term at least.

When marketing enables them, the conversion rates increase by a significant fraction straight away.

Looking at increase in real dollars it becomes a hard sell to turn them back off again.

we do tend to read the most popular topics here on HN

Of course it works. Scarcity. Loss aversion. Validation. These are very strong psychological effects that are basically impossible to filter out completely, even if you know exactly what is going on and how brain works.

I was in a meeting where the sales logic was explained as "social proof". People would choose a busy restaurant over a quiet one. Similarly they would choose a popular product over an unpopular one.

The idea is that a significant portion of the visitors are undecided, hesitant, or are postponing the purchase. These tactics try to push these people for a decision. I personally react to pushing by closing up, so they lose me if they push too hard. But many people are not like this, or maybe they are just waiting a bit before committing, and that's when these methods can work.

And these are not new either, just old sales tactics, applied to the new context. The pushiness of these counters etc remind me of the Hard sell[0] for example.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_sell

It's called FOMO and it works.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_missing_out

This is very likely, and any kind of popularity information helps making decisions.

In fact I mostly buy steam games in the popular section to sort out the trash. Each time I choose a niche unfeatured thing it turns out to be random trash nobody wanted... unsurprisingly.

Why do you think your brain wouldnt rank a product with 500 views right now above a product with 3, or be wrong about such ranking ? I think it helps ignore shit, because it's rare you want to buy stuff nobody else wants.

Even if we assume for a minute that this information isn't being faked (which it very often probably is - see other thread) I think there are nuances there.

Looking at something and actually buying it are different. If we really wanted to help the customer decide we might want to also show the number of customers that returned the item. Or wait: allow reviews of them ;)

Would it help anyone to see that "200 people are reading xwolfi's comment"? Not really. That's just because there are not many comments yet and says nothing about the quality of it. It's much better to rank comments by votes and let that affect sort order. "200 people found xwolfi's comment so insightful they clicked the vote link" is a much better indicator of quality.

Reviews are insanely more useful (provided they re genuine) ofc and any online service without review has to be used carefully, you're right !

Yes. The idea is that other consumers being on the site creates a sense of security, that it must be legit if there’s a bunch of other customers.

Yes, you may think you are unaffected but that's just you lying to yourself.

Same, but if combined with limited stock it can make sense.

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