If movies are any indication of how the real world works, your supervillain plan for world domination needs to have at least 20 steps and somehow involve the Moon. If it isn't circuitously complicated, why even bother? But in reality, a true supervillain doesn't need access to the world's gold supply or an arsenal of nukes to make the planet go his or her way. Our next evil mastermind simply needs a basic understanding of how the rest of us use the internet.

5 The Upvote Mechanism Makes It Easy For A Few People To Control A Large Group

Eva Blue / Flickr

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With a wealth of information at the fingertips of anyone owning an internet-connected device, you would think we would be the most informed mamajammas to have ever walked the Earth. And you'd be wrong! Yes, we have a lot of information to explore, but that information is so curated that it might as well not be there. And one way we curate our own exposure to ideas is by upvoting, or "liking," other people's posts.

You know the drill: On sites like Reddit or Yelp, comments and posts rise to the top based on votes. The problem is that we aren't totally honest with ourselves when it comes to how we vote. Let's say you're the first person to read a Reddit post. You want to give the writer a quick nod of encouragement for speaking his or her mind, so you give it an upvote. Whoever encounters the post next is going to respond to the content PLUS the vote you just gave. If your response was positive, they're more likely to vote positively as well. And then the next person, who sees two positive responses, feels compelled to agree with the two people who clearly saw something special in the post. Several thousand upvotes later, we've got content on the front page of Reddit.

Reddit

Racial politics and failed military takeovers are only slightly more susceptible to groupthink than Pokemon made of foliage.

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Sure, some of us are reading every word of every post and thoughtfully weighing the pros and cons of an upvote before committing to a click, but most of us aren't. One team of researchers found that by giving a post a single upvote, the post's overall performance increased by 25 percent. And on a site that has 36 million registered accounts, a 25-percent boost carries serious weight.

Some Reddit users have picked up on this process and have used it to their advantage, manipulating public perception in order to have their competitors banned or raise themselves to prominence on the site.

Mashable

"I'd like to thank all the me who helped make this artificial, fleeting fame possible."

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And while the Reddit community takes it upon themselves to hunt down and ban vote manipulators, all the monitors in the world can't change the fact that we're a bunch of sheep in the first place.