We tested the effects of hiding downvotes in r/politics. Here's what we learned - Politics

We tested the effects of hiding downvotes in r/politics. Here's what we learned
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We tested the effects of hiding downvotes in r/politics. Here's what we learned

Posted: 05 Jan 2018 10:47 AM PST

This fall, the r/politics subreddit worked with me and other researchers to investigate the effect of downvote buttons on behavior in an online community (read the original announcement).

Working on a short timeline and expecting the platform to change reddit's design any day, we assembled a quick pilot study that we hoped would offer further evidence on the question, even if it wouldn't provide a conclusive answer. From July 31st through September 7th, we tested this idea by using a CSS rule to hide reddit's comment downvote button on randomly assigned days and looking for systematic differences.

Thanks to everyone for your thoughtful ideas for the study, and for putting up with these changes during our research!

I've explained the results in detail in a post on the CivilServant website: Do Downvote Buttons Cause Unruly Online Behavior? Analysis details, including key parts of the R code, are available in our full report on Github.

Summary of Findings

Our study has two main limitations: (a) methods for hiding downvotes on reddit only affect 45% of r/politics commenters, those who use the desktop version and (b) our pilot study could have produced clearer results if it had been longer.

With those limitations, here's a summary of what we found. Overall, hiding downvotes does not appear to have had any of the substantial benefits or disastrous outcomes that people expected:

A longer study and adjustments to the research design are needed for more conclusive answers
We failed to find evidence of an effect from hiding downvotes on the chance that a newcomer's future comments will be removed by moderators
Hiding downvotes slightly increases the vote score of comments and substantially reduces the percentage of comments that receive a negative vote score, on average
Hiding downvotes may increase the number of comments per day on average, but we would need a longer study to be confident
We failed to find evidence that hiding downvotes changes the number of comments removed by moderators per day on average
Hiding downvotes increased the percentage of commenters who aren't usually vocal on political subreddits, but we couldn't find an effect on partisan involvement
As expected, hiding downvotes decreases the rate at which people come back and comment further

Here are the charts from those findings:

https://imgur.com/dgxfSfZ.png

https://imgur.com/H0CMoFd.png

https://imgur.com/EtmQ8j3.png

https://imgur.com/kHes6Vm.png

So Should This Subreddit Hide Downvotes?

As a researcher, I focus on reporting what we discovered rather than suggesting what to do. Based on this research, I can say that hiding downvotes does not appear to have had any of the substantial benefits or disastrous outcomes that people expected. Since mobile readers on reddit retain the ability to downvote, the effect on scores is incomplete on the current reddit site.

In communities with millions of commenters, small effects can add up. It's possible that further research that better distinguishes small effects could find something meaningful.

How You Can Help Answer This Question More Clearly

Reliable research should never rely on a single small pilot study.

As creator of the CivilServant bot, I hope that this report can guide future research here or elsewhere that tests the social impact of downvoting systems in online communities. Future studies could:

Find a way to hide downvotes for everyone
Run the experiment for longer
Randomly assign downvotes to be hidden on specific posts rather than days (which is posible on reddit)
Develop more nuanced measures of unruly behavior
(I share more suggestions in the blog post about this study)

Acknowledgments

This study was designed in a collaboration among J. Nathan Matias, Cliff Lampe, Justin Cheng, and /u/english06. I wrote the software, conducted the data analysis, and wrote this report. Any errors are my own.

If you spot serious errors, please comment and I will update the report accordingly.

submitted by /u/natematias
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Saturday Morning Political Cartoon Thread

Posted: 06 Jan 2018 08:41 AM PST

It's Saturday morning, folks. Let's all kick back with a cup of coffee and share some cartoons!

Feel free to share political cartoons (no memes/image macros, though) in this thread. The subject doesn't have to be US politics and can be from any time. Just keep them political and safe for work.

submitted by /u/optimalg
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Trump: My winning presidency 'on first try' shows 'genius....and a very stable genius at that'

Posted: 06 Jan 2018 04:40 AM PST