FINALLY, confirmation of what many have long suspected 鈥 people who regularly upload material to the internet are just attention seekers.
The success of 鈥溾 websites like YouTube and Wikipedia has puzzled psychologists, since a small number of people do most of the work for little obvious reward, while the rest benefit, seemingly without giving anything back.
One explanation is that people just feel good helping out the community, but now researchers at Hewlett-Packard鈥檚 lab in Palo Alto, California, have shown that contributors are in it for personal glory, not public service. The team analysed the habits of 580,000 YouTube contributors and found that the more hits their videos got, the more likely they were to continue uploading material ().
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