Random Voting Effects in Social-Digital Spaces: A case study of Reddit Post Submissions

Abstract: At a time when information seekers first turn to digital sources for news and opinion, it is critical that we understand the role that social media plays in human behavior. This is especially true when information consumers also act as information producers and editors by their online activity. In order to better understand the effects that editorial ratings have on online human behavior, we report the results of a large-scale in-vivo experiment in social media. We find that small, random rating manipulations on social media submissions created significant changes in downstream ratings resulting in significantly different final outcomes. Positive treatment resulted in a positive effect that increased the final rating by 11.02% on average. Compared to the control group, positive treatment also increased the probability of reaching a high rating (>=2000) by 24.6%. Contrary to the results of related work we also find that negative treatment resulted in a negative effect that decreased the final rating by 5.15% on average.