Why are "First!" comments so despised?

If you've been on any internet site with a large membership or readership, you've likely seen the "First!" phenomenon. For those who have been living under a cyber-rock for all the time you've been on the internet, allow me to bring you up to speed. "First!" is a phenomenon that usually takes place in the comments section on blogs, but it tends to find its way into all manor of websites if that website has some sort of social and/or communication element and becomes popular enough. On blogs, "First!" is the practice of pointing out that you are the first person to comment on a post by posting a comment that only says, "First!", or some variant (proper pronunciation, spelling, and punctuation are not required, nor expected from those who post "First!" posts). The only point of the first post is to point out that you were the first person to post a comment on the post. It is not constructive, informative, entertaining, or in any way positive. "First!" also finds its way onto the official WoW forums in the form of people posting a "First!" reply after a Blizzard poster posts a new thread or replies to an existing one. It's less common on Youtube because Youtube shows the newest comments first, rather than the oldest first, so if the video's poster is popular enough to garner the kind of audience that would include people who post "First!" comments, those comments are usually hidden by the dozens or hundreds or even thousands of comments that come after.

But that's enough information about this heinous practice. The reason I am writing this, as you may have guessed from the title, is to try to figure out why the practice is considered so heinous in the first place. After all, in the long run, if a blog is popular enough to gain an audience that includes first-ers, then its posts will generally have enough other comments to make the "First!" post ignorable. And most communities don't give much attention to "First!" posts anyways. Most, except for the commenters of WoW.com, where first-ing is not tolerated at all and will only guarantee that your comment is mocked by the few who deign to reply to it, and those mocking responses will be up-voted while yours is down-voted, while you will likely be either given a warning or banned from commenting. This reaction is relatively unique to WoW.com, but I imagine that it does represent the opinion of the larger internet on "First!" posts.

Yet "First!" posts aren't all that unique in the grand scheme of things. They are just another example of someone calling attention to themselves in spite of not deserving that attention, and the web is full of examples of that (most people call those types "attention whores"). Most of us don't get in a tizzy over attention whores, so why are we annoyed by first-ers? Perhaps it's because it's easy to avoid most internet attention whores, but we must scroll past that "First!" comment in order to get to the meat of the comments section. If a blogger is nothing but an attention whore, we can stop reading his blog. If a youtube user is nothing but an attention whore, we can stop watching his videos. If, however, the first commenter on a blog post is an attention whore, we are forced to give him that attention he seeks by reading his comment. Our choice in the matter is taken away from us, and most people resent having their choice taken away from them.

Our disdain for first-ers might be related to something more deeply rooted, though, something called the anchoring effect. The anchoring effect is a mental time-saver that our brains use whereby we judge our things based on our first impression of them, rather than always judging each experience on its own merits. For example, your thoughts on raiding were likely deeply affected by your first raid. If your first raid was an abysmal failure, all other raids you run will seem much better by comparison. Inversely, if your first raid is wipe-less speed run, progression raiding will probably seem unnecessarily frustrating and difficult.

What does this have to do with "First!" posts? Well, when we read that first comment on a post, our brains are hoping to use that comment to gauge the rest of the comments. But a "First!" post isn't a legitimate comment, so our brains are left hanging, forced to compare each subsequent comment to a troll. And of course, anything except more trolling is preferable to a "First!" post, so every subsequent post will seem better by comparison. Thus our brains aren't able to judge subsequent comments as discerningly as it would be able to had the first comment been legitimate.

Of course, the simple explanation is usually the best, and in the case of "First!" posts, there is a simple explanation. We, the more enlightened denizens of the internet, associate "First!" posts with the less refined parts of the internet: Youtube, the official forums, etc. As such, the presence of "First!" posts on a website normally thought to be beyond that kind of drivel is disheartening. It means a website you consider to be a cut above the rest of the internet might not be so. Thus it is reasonable for a website to want to discourage that kind of behavior, for it stands on similar grounds to the other ways of the troll (not that kind), and trolling in general is to be discouraged whenever it can be.