[themagician]

Those counts are the rating by which people determine legitimacy of content. Popular content must be correct by virtue of that fact that so many people can’t be wrong. And when you only show people content that they all ready agree with it further reinforces its legitimacy.

Remove the counts and people have no external validation for the legitimacy of a piece of content. They actually have to read it. What we have now is a system where someone sees a headline, “Proof Obama birth certificate fake!” With 100k like and 10k comments and they don’t even read it and just comment, “I knew it!”

When you pick up a newspaper you have to actually read it. You can’t just look at the headline and see how many people agree with it before you can form any kind of opinion.

[emodendroket]

What seems likely to me is that people share obviously fake news not because they see it has a lot of likes but because it confirms things they already believe.

[themagician]

What they see is often determined by those counts in the first place, and what people decide to read/comment/share is more often than not because a post has a lot of likes/comments. Then they share it to get likes for them self.

If the only incentive to read/share/comment was a genuine understanding or willingness to share and participate the entire space would be different.