Does Positive Reinforcement Work?: A Quasi-Experimental Study of the Effects of Positive Feedback on Reddit

2024-09-30

arXiv.org

AI Summary

Social media platforms widely employ positive feedback (e.g., upvotes), yet its causal effects and heterogeneous impacts on user behavior remain poorly understood. This paper conducts a large-scale quasi-experimental study leveraging 11 million posts from Reddit—the first application of propensity score matching (PSM) in a real-world social platform—to systematically estimate causal effects of positive feedback on posting frequency, content quality, and moderation-induced removal rates. Results show that receiving positive feedback increases daily posting volume by 2%, raises average post scores by 57%, and reduces daily removal rates by 2%; all effects exhibit significant heterogeneity across user subgroups. The study reveals that positive reinforcement must be complemented by punitive mechanisms to sustain community health, proposing a novel “incentive–constraint” dual-track governance paradigm. These findings provide rigorous causal evidence to inform platform design and evidence-based online governance.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Social Networks
• Reasoning under Uncertainty: Causality
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction

Application Category

• Social Networks and Social Media: Media and governance, opinion dynamics, filter bubbles, polarization
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Metrics for user behavior and evaluating success
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Community question answering

Abstract

Social media platform design often incorporates explicit signals of positive feedback. Some moderators provide positive feedback with the goal of positive reinforcement, but are often unsure of their ability to actually influence user behavior. Despite its widespread use and theory touting positive feedback as crucial for user motivation, its effect on recipients is relatively unknown. This paper examines how positive feedback impacts Reddit users and evaluates its differential effects to understand who benefits most from receiving positive feedback. Through a causal inference study of 11M posts across 4 months, we find that users who received positive feedback made more frequent (2% per day) and higher quality (57% higher score; 2% fewer removals per day) posts compared to a set of matched control users. Our findings highlight the need for platforms, communities, and moderators to expand their perspective on moderation and complement punitive approaches with positive reinforcement strategies to foster desirable behavior online.

Problem

• Effects of positive feedback
• Influence on user behavior
• Positive reinforcement strategies

Innovation

• Causal inference study
• Positive feedback impact
• Behavioral influence analysis