Human Psychology

I recently took a look through the archives of this blog, which by the way has over 50 reviews, articles, reports and other memorabilia of my past few years as a "semi-pro", when I noticed something about the view count. It had to do with the most viewed posts here on Turning Pages. First of all, my second most viewed post was about my Merida 120 that I raced at National Secondary School Champs a few years ago, and which I sold a few months ago to make way for something with slightly more travel. The second thing was the most viewed post I have; it was not a review, as I may have expected, but actually a race report... 

This confused me somewhat, as race reports are only usually read by a select group of people, and now even less since I stopped interacting with a large number of said individuals. If you haven't guessed already, that post was the Nationals 2013 report titled "Tarnished Glory," which covers the positive aspects of what was a very eventful race.

This confused me slightly, I mean, who wants to read about half a race? I personally thought that everyone would flock to the second part of the story, as that was where all the drama was. But that was not the case.

So what does this say about people? Firstly, a lot of people knew that I would be writing a post about that particular race, and as such were probably expecting a lot of drama to unfold in that particular piece and wanted to read about what happened. But when given the two pieces, the first received 10 times more views than the second, nitty gritty piece. This gives me some hope for humanity, as with two options to choose from most people were going for the more positive piece.

But it doesn't stop there; there weren't just ups in that mix. Not only did these posts get the most views, they also opened up the most comments...

That is another aspect of Human Psychology: The Anonymous Function, and it is one that destroys some of the faith the previous point creates. This is the ability of people to speak their mind, show their true colours and generally behave in an appalling manner simply because they believe that no-one knows who they are. It is something that has become more and more common with the advent of sites such as the notorious askFM, the various forums around the internet and unfortunately also here on Turning Pages. That race opened me up to a torrent of abuse from anonymous individuals taking the chance to vent their frustrations and take some cheap shots under the protection of the internet. This is part of the reason that the Anonymous Comment option no longer exists on Turning Pages, with comments requiring a log in and name before they are published.

This brings me to my third point, people like to think that they are smarter than everyone else, and anonymous commentators are no exception. Fortunately, if you know what to look for, everyone leaves clues behind no matter how anonymous they think they are. I now know exactly who those "anonymous" people are and choose not to associate with them any more.

Problem solved.

So, running a blog has revealed some strange things that I didn't quite know about people before. It had brought out some of their best, some of their worst, and I have had a great time unraveling it all and putting it together. I never would have thought that I would find myself here in this position simply from running a blog, and yet here we are.

It's fun being Human.