Memetic Comments: Why Your Online Opinions Aren't Really Yours

You've never had an original opinion in the comments section. Neither have I.

Not really.

By the time you type your response, you’ve already been infected by the first three comments you read. Their framing became your framing. Their tone shaped your tone. Their hot take became the lens through which you processed the entire thread.

This is mimesis in action — and it’s quietly destroying authentic conversation online.

The Experiment That Proved It

In 2013, researchers from MIT and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem ran a massive experiment on a social news site. They randomly gave certain comments a single fake upvote, a single fake downvote, or no vote at all — then watched what happened over five months across more than 100,000 posts.

The results, published in Science, were stark. Comments that received one artificial upvote ended up with final ratings 25% higher than the control group. Not because they were better. Because one early signal of approval triggered a cascade — each subsequent reader was more likely to upvote a comment that already looked popular.

One vote. A quarter of the final score.

The negative manipulation didn’t work the same way — people pushed back against downvoted comments, correcting them upward. But positive herding? It snowballed unchecked. The researchers called it “social influence bias.” René Girard had a simpler name for it decades earlier: mimesis.

What Mimesis Actually Means (In Two Sentences)

Girard’s insight was this: we don’t desire things independently. We want what we see others wanting. Online, that means the first three comments in a thread don’t just express opinions. They create the opinions everyone else will have.

If your favorite podcaster trashes crypto, suddenly you’re skeptical too. Not because you researched blockchain, but because you trust them. If the top reply on a news article is outraged, you feel the outrage before you’ve finished reading the headline. You’re not thinking. You’re mirroring.

And you almost never notice it happening.

Watch It Happen in Real Time

Picture a Reddit thread. Someone posts: “Is it okay to not want kids?”

The first reply lands within minutes. It’s supportive, well-written, confident: “Absolutely. Society’s pressure to reproduce is outdated. Live your life.” It gets 15 upvotes before most people even see the thread.

Now watch the cascade:

• Reply #2 echoes the framing. “This. Don’t let anyone guilt you.”
• Reply #3 adds a personal story — but one that conveniently supports the same angle.
• Reply #4 directly attacks the opposite position: “Anyone who judges you for this is projecting their own insecurity.”
• By reply #10, anyone considering a nuanced take — “it’s complicated, here’s why some people find meaning in parenthood” — reads the room and either stays silent or hedges so hard their comment says nothing.

The first commenter didn’t just share an opinion. They set the frame, and everyone else arranged themselves around it — agreeing, amplifying, or staying quiet.

That’s memetic commenting. Not a conspiracy. Not coordinated. Just the natural physics of humans reading before they think.

The Architecture of Imitation

This isn’t a bug in human nature. It’s a feature of platform design.

Upvote systems create consensus before one exists. Reddit’s algorithm surfaces early-upvoted comments. Latecomers see a thread that already looks like it has a “correct” answer. The Muchnik study proved this: early positive signals create cascading agreement that has nothing to do with content quality.

Algorithmic sorting rewards speed, not depth. The first reply gets the most eyeballs. A thoughtful response posted two hours later gets buried. The incentive is clear: type fast, match the room’s energy, collect the upvotes.

Quote-tweet culture turns disagreement into performance. On Twitter/X, disagreement isn’t a conversation — it’s content. Quote-tweeting someone to dunk on them rewards the sharpest reaction, not the most accurate one. The audience picks a side, and mimesis does the rest.

Top comments become the de facto summary. Most people don’t read articles. They read the top comment and adopt its framing. A 3,000-word investigative piece gets reduced to whatever quip reached the top of the pile fastest.

Every platform that shows you other people’s reactions before you’ve formed your own is an engine of memetic copying. The infrastructure doesn’t just allow imitation — it depends on it.

What We Actually Lose

This might sound like an academic curiosity. The consequences are everywhere.

We lose the dissenting voice that matters most. The person with an unusual perspective reads the thread, senses they’ll be piled on, and closes the tab. Their insight — the one that might have changed someone’s mind — never gets posted. The Smithsonian’s coverage of the Muchnik study noted this exact dynamic: social influence doesn’t just amplify popular views, it suppresses unpopular ones.

We get lonelier while agreeing with more people. Performative agreement isn’t connection. When you mirror a thread’s consensus because the social cost of disagreeing is too high, you trade authenticity for belonging — and on some level, you know it. That gap between what you actually think and what you publicly say compounds into isolation.

Radicalization feeds on unchallenged agreement. Research published in New Media & Society found that fringe digital spaces drive polarization by strengthening in-group identity and out-group hostility. People don’t radicalize through a single shocking post. They radicalize through thousands of mimetic comments that slowly narrow the range of acceptable thought until extreme positions feel like common sense.

Bad decisions scale. When a product review thread gets hijacked by one early negative comment, that company loses revenue it might deserve. When a political conversation gets framed by the fastest hot take, the nuance voters need disappears. Mimesis doesn’t just distort online conversations. It distorts the real-world outcomes those conversations produce.

What a Non-Memetic Comment Actually Looks Like

Here’s the same Reddit prompt — “Is it okay to not want kids?” — answered two ways.

The memetic version (written after reading the thread):

“Totally fine. Society needs to stop pressuring people into parenthood. Live your life, don’t let anyone make you feel guilty.”

Clean, confident, popular. Also functionally identical to the three comments above it. This person didn’t think. They echoed.

The non-memetic version (written before reading anyone else):

“I go back and forth on this. Part of me knows I’d regret not having kids when I’m 70. Part of me knows I don’t want to raise a child in this economy. I think the honest answer is that I’m scared of both options, and I don’t think anyone who’s certain either way has really sat with it.”

Messier. More vulnerable. Harder to upvote because it doesn’t validate a clean position. But it’s actually real — and it’s the kind of comment that makes someone else think, “Oh, I feel that too.”

The first version plays the game. The second version breaks it.

Breaking the Mimetic Loop

How do you have an original thought online when the infrastructure is designed to prevent it?

Ask questions instead of making statements. Hot takes create binary reactions — agree or disagree. Questions invite exploration. They bypass the memetic reflex because there’s no position to copy yet.

Learn why people think differently. When you understand how different personalities process the same information, you stop seeing disagreement as tribal warfare and start seeing it as different operating systems running different code. The person who enrages you in a thread might simply be processing reality through a completely different lens — one that catches something yours misses.

Speak before you scroll. If you never see other people’s comments before writing your own, mimesis can’t prime you. You’d be surprised how different your honest first reaction is from the take you would have crafted after reading the room.

That last point is why 9takes exists. Comments are hidden until you submit your own. No priming. No upvotes shaping what you see first. Just you and the question. It’s a small architectural change, but it inverts the entire incentive structure — from “match the consensus” to “say what you actually think.”

The mimetic loop can be broken. But not on platforms built to sustain it.