Research on the effect downvotes have on user civility - Politics

Research on the effect downvotes have on user civility
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Research on the effect downvotes have on user civility

Posted: 18 Jul 2017 08:35 AM PDT

So in case you haven't noticed we have turned off downvotes a couple of different times to test that our set up for some research we are assisting. /r/Politics has partnered with Nate Matias of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cliff Lampe of the University of Michigan, and Justin Cheng of Stanford University to conduct this research. They will be operating out of the /u/CivilServantBot account that was recently added as a moderator to the subreddit.

Background

Applying voting systems to online comments, like as seen on Reddit, may help to provide feedback and moderation at scale. However, these tools can also have unintended consequences, such as silencing unpopular opinions or discouraging people from continuing to be in the conversation.

The Hypothesis

This study is based on this research by Justin Cheng. It found "that negative feedback leads to significant behavioral changes that are detrimental to the community" and "[these user's] future posts are of lower quality… [and] are more likely to subsequently evaluate their fellow users negatively, percolating these effects through the community". This entire article is very interesting and well worth a read if you are so inclined.

The goal of this research in /r/politics is to understand in a better, more controlled way, the nature of how different types of voting mechanisms affect how people's future behavior. There are multiple types of moderation systems that have been tried in online discussions like that seen on Reddit, but we know little about how the different features of those systems really shaped how people behaved.

Research Question

What are the effects on new user posting behavior when they only receive upvotes or are ignored?

Methods

For a brief time, some users on r/politics will only see upvotes, not downvotes. We would measure the following outcomes for those people.

Probability of posting again
Time it takes to post again
Number of subsequent posts
Scores of subsequent posts

Our goal is to better understand the effects of downvotes, both in terms of their intended and their unintended consequences.

Privacy and Ethics

Data storage:

All CivilServant system data is stored in a server room behind multiple locked doors at MIT. The servers are well-maintained systems with access only to the three people who run the servers. When we share data onto our research laptops, it is stored in an encrypted datastore using the SpiderOak data encryption service. We're upgrading to UbiKeys for hardware second-factor authentication this month.

Data sharing:

Within our team: the only people with access to this data will be Cliff, Justin, Nate, and the two engineers/sysadmins with access to the CivilServant servers
Third parties: we don't share any of the individual data with anyone without explicit permission or request from the subreddit in question. For example, some r/science community members are hoping to do retrospective analysis of the experiment they did. We are now working with r/science to create a research ethics approval process that allows r/science to control who they want to receive their data, along with privacy guidelines that anyone, including community members, need to agree to.
We're working on future features that streamline the work of creating non-identifiable information that allows other researchers to validate our work without revealing the identities of any of the participants. We have not finished that software and will not use it in this study unless r/politics mods specifically ask for or approves of this at a future time.

Research ethics:

Our research with CivilServant and reddit has been approved by the MIT Research Ethics Board, and if you have any serious problems with our handling of your data, please reach out to jnmatias@mit.edu.

How you can help

On days we have the downvotes disabled we simply ask that you respect that setting. Yes we are well aware that you can turn off CSS on desktop. Yes we know this doesn't apply to mobile. Those are limitations that we have to work with. But this analysis is only going to be as good as the data it can receive. We appreciate your understanding and assistance with this matter.

We will have the researchers helping out in the comments below. Please feel free to ask us any questions you may have about this project!

submitted by /u/english06
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Donald Trump signs off on Obama’s Iran deal, which he promised to scrap

Posted: 18 Jul 2017 05:36 AM PDT