Thoughts on Wikipedia? I know you have some… Since I first started aimlessly clicking around on the internet years ago, I remember being warned how untrustworthy this site was. Ironically, now Wiki is typically the first site I go to if it’s available on a subject I’m researching. Anyways, in 2006, WIKIPEDIA posted an article on the reliability of WIKIPEDIA… conflict of interest? I think yes. It goes on and on about different studies that compared Wikipedia to other well-known encyclopedias and results were it ~typically~, ~sometimes~, ~most of the time?~ measured up to its competitors. Convinced Wikipedia is reliable yet? Same.
All this talk about untrustworthy posts on the internet got me thinking about the hundreds of posts I scroll through each and every day (religiously) on my Instagram app. I’m sure you’re familiar with this concept. Can we really trust what we read on there? Did Mary really lose 20 pounds by becoming a vegetarian? Did Tyler really bench more than “any NFL player ever” last week?? The world may never know but one trend may give us insight into what types of posts are more believable than others.
A study titled, “Size Matters: Word Count as a Measure of Quality on Wikipedia,” compares the word count of articles posted on Wikipedia to its quality and also its probability of becoming a featured article. They “achieved a 96.31% accuracy in the binary classification task” of separating articles that contained more than 2,000 words. Does this mean that we should trust instagrammers who post novels underneath their photos more than those who don’t? Personally, my eyes feast on short, witty captions AKA maybe I’m just not trendy enough?? Although the Instagram app itself hasn’t changed much over time, the way we use it definitely has. Think of all the workout routines posted as captions, the diet ideas, and the *inspiring* quotes we are exposed to on a daily (hourly?) basis. We’re getting more in depth with what we share on social media and experts are catching on.
Whether you’re a celebrity, a wannabe celebrity, a human, or just your average social media-loving college student, we can all agree that people are gettin’ a little wordy on the gram, right? An article titled, “Are Super-Long Instagram Captions the New Personal Blog?” dives into this idea (I smell irony in the long title about the long posts… just sayin’). It shows popular examples of posts with more words than Instagram should allow… where’s the word count, Insta?
Recent Example (I’m sure you’ve already seen this since Selena has 127 million followers):
A common theme, present in Selena’s post above as well, is that captions tend to get longer the more personal we get. People want to explain themselves in a way that’s not short and sweet, but long, emotional, and detailed. This brings us back to the idea of trust. Do more words and longer captions really make us trust someone more?
Just like lengthy Wiki articles, long posts get more attention. Maybe we get caught up in the idea that a longer caption means more work went into it therefore it should be rewarded more? Whether you think the length of the post matters to its credibility or not, we can all agree that #AllLengthsMatter.
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