I asked ChatGPT about existing experiments on this matter. Sheep behavious is real:

Key Studies: The “Hidden Votes” Experiment (Muchnik et al., 2013)

One of the most well-known studies on this topic was published in Science by Muchnik, Aral, and Taylor. Researchers manipulated upvotes and downvotes on a social news site (similar to Reddit) with 100,000+ users. When an initial upvote was artificially added to a post, it increased the likelihood that others would upvote it by 32%. Downvotes did not have the same effect—they were often corrected by other users. The experiment suggests strong social influence in voting behavior. “Bandwagon Effect in Online Voting” (Lorenz et al., 2011)

This study found that when people saw public votes before casting their own, they converged towards the majority opinion. The effect was particularly strong in subjective judgments, like ratings of art or music. YouTube and Social Proof (Salganik, Dodds, & Watts, 2006)

In a controlled music experiment, researchers manipulated download counts for different songs. Songs with high fake download numbers became even more popular, showing strong herding behavior. “Hidden Likes” Experiment on Instagram (2019)

Instagram conducted real-world A/B testing by removing visible like counts in several countries. Initial reports suggested reduced social pressure, but Meta has not released detailed statistics. What Happens When Votes Are Hidden? Some studies show that without visible votes, people rely more on personal judgment instead of following the herd. However, others found that herding still happens when other subtle signals (such as comments, engagement, or reposts) remain.

Yeah, I edited the answer forgot about case when user wants to vote on many comments, check it out now and see if your questions still hold.

TLDR from AI Chat about whats this all about:

This guy is deep in thought about existence, change, and the nature of reality. He reflects on how everything is in constant motion—our bodies, emotions, even the universe itself. He’s exploring mindfulness, non-attachment, and going with the flow instead of resisting life’s natural rhythms. He sees time as an illusion, emotions as energy, and life as an interconnected dance. Ultimately, he’s embracing presence, letting go of control, and finding beauty in the ever-changing now.

Yeah I saw that chart, but this data comes from reddit itself, which tells me to be sceptic about it. They are public company now and they have to look good to investors.

yup its what I was thinking as well. Reddit might deliberately run ai bots to fake traffic.

Damn you sound like bot you know that? No typos, perfect answer. Seriously. Can you prove you’re a human? xd

Well maybe. Apparntly some folks are already doing that but its not done yet. Let’s wait for the results. If everything is legit we should have not one but plenty of similar and better models in near future. If Chinese did this with 100 chips imagine what can be done with 100000 chips that nvidia can sell to a us company

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSr_vwZGF2k This is what I watched. I base my opinion on this. Im not saying this is true. It just sounded legit enough and I didnt have time to research more. I will gladly follow some links that lead me to content that destroys this guys arguments

WTF dude. You mentioned Asia. I love Asians. Asia is vast. There are many countries, not just China bro. I think you need to do these reflections. Im talking about very specific case of Chinese Deepseek devs potentiall lying about the chips. The assumptions and generalizations you are thinking of are crazy.

Did they? According to their repo its still WIP https://github.com/huggingface/open-r1

well if they really are and methodology can be replicated, we are surely about to see some crazy number of deepseek comptention, cause imagine how many us companies in ai and finance sector exist out there that are in posession of even larger number of chips than chinese clamied to have trained their model on.

Although the question rises - if the methodology is so novel why would these folks make it opensource? Why would they share results of years of their work to the public losing their edge over competition? I dont understand.

Can somebody who actually knows how to read machine learning codebase tell us something about deepseek after reading their code?

Its just my opnion based on few sources I saw on the web. Should I attach them as links to the comment? I guess I could. But thats extra time which Im not sure I want to spend. Imagine the discussion where both sides provide links and sources to everything they say. Would be great? I guess? But at the same time would be very diffcult on both sides and time consuming. Nobody doest that in todays internet. Nobody ever did that in causal conversations. Not just internet acutally, in both real life and internet. Providing evidence is generally for court talk.

You are right. We are all on our own in pursue of truth. And with rise of AI and fake reality things are going to be crazier and crazier each year. Pair that also with the fact that our brains have limited storage capacity for information and knowledge and it doesnt look bright for humans. I stay optimistic though despite that.

Yup. Thats internet nowadays. Full of comments like this. Cant do muich about it

internet

So are these techiques so novel and breaktrough? Will we now have a burst of deepseek like models everywhere? Cause that’s what absolutely should happen if the whole storey is true. I would assume there are dozens or even hundreds of companies in USA that are in a posession of similar number but surely more chips that Chinese folks claimed to trained their model on, especially in finance sector and just AI reserach focused.

Apparently DeepSeek is lying, they were collecting thousands of NVIDIA chips against the US embargo and it’s not about the algorithm. The model’s good results come just from sheer chip volume and energy used. That’s the story I’ve heard and honeslty it sounds legit.

Not sure if this questions has been answered though: if it’s open sourced, cant we see what algorithms they used to train it? If we could then we would know the answer. I assume we cant, but if we cant, then whats so cool about it being open source on the other hand? What parts of code are valuable there besides algorithms?

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