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Trolling and harassment are so common online that they may seem unavoidable. But what if things didn’t have to be this way? New research on one particular corner of Reddit suggests that online communities are actually a lot more responsive to ground rules of civility than one might expect.
In a new community-based experiment, researchers found that pinning a simple reminder of forum guidelines to the top of posts in the popular web forum r/science had a significant impact on increasing new users’ contributions to discussions and on decreasing the amount of abusive or off-topic comments in the threads.
In a paper published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nathan Matias, Ph.D., shows evidence that a “stickied” post at the top of a comment thread was associated with an 8.4-percent higher likelihood that new commenters’ comments wouldn’t be deleted for violating community guidelines. He also observed that posting the rules correlated to a 70-percent higher chance that first-time commenters would jump into a discussion. Matias, an associate research scholar at Princeton University, writes that the reminder may help new commenters feel more comfortable joining the conversation by making it clear that the group abides by some social norms.
Read more here. (Inverse)
In a new community-based experiment, researchers found that pinning a simple reminder of forum guidelines to the top of posts in the popular web forum r/science had a significant impact on increasing new users’ contributions to discussions and on decreasing the amount of abusive or off-topic comments in the threads.
In a paper published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nathan Matias, Ph.D., shows evidence that a “stickied” post at the top of a comment thread was associated with an 8.4-percent higher likelihood that new commenters’ comments wouldn’t be deleted for violating community guidelines. He also observed that posting the rules correlated to a 70-percent higher chance that first-time commenters would jump into a discussion. Matias, an associate research scholar at Princeton University, writes that the reminder may help new commenters feel more comfortable joining the conversation by making it clear that the group abides by some social norms.
Read more here. (Inverse)
