we also conducted several tests that ruled out other seemingly commonsensical explanations of out results. for example. one might think users are simple predisposed to rate others comments positively the public nature of online ratings -- posting a comments for the world to see -- might make it more likely that people would rate positively than negatively and such tendencies certainly exist in our data. up votes were 4.6 times more common than down votes on this site. with 5.13% of all comments receiving an up vote by the first viewer of the comments and only 0.82% of comments receiving a down vote by the first viewer.