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Widespread underprovision on Reddit

Published: 23 February 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Many online communities ask their members to do work for the good of everyone on the site. On social voting sites like Reddit, this means that users judge a stream of incoming links by voting them up or down. The links with the most up-votes bubble up to the main page, pointing everyone toward the best content. A threat to all sites designed this way, however, is underprovision: when too many people rely on others to contribute without doing so themselves. In this paper, we present findings suggesting that widespread underprovision of votes is happening on Reddit, arguably the internet's largest social voting community. Notably, Reddit overlooked 52% of the most popular links the first time they were submitted. This suggests that many potentially popular links get ignored, jeopardizing the site's core purpose. We conclude by discussing possible reasons behind it, and suggest future research on social voting sites.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CSCW '13: Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work
    February 2013
    1594 pages
    ISBN:9781450313315
    DOI:10.1145/2441776
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 23 February 2013

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    Author Tags

    1. free riding
    2. reddit
    3. social navigation
    4. underprovision
    5. voting

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    CSCW '13
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    CSCW '13: Computer Supported Cooperative Work
    February 23 - 27, 2013
    Texas, San Antonio, USA

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    Overall Acceptance Rate 2,235 of 8,521 submissions, 26%

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    • (2024)Optimization-Based Countering of Misinformation on Social Networks2024 American Control Conference (ACC)10.23919/ACC60939.2024.10644234(135-142)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2024
    • (2024)Is Human-AI Interaction CSCW?Companion Publication of the 2024 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing10.1145/3678884.3689134(95-97)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2024
    • (2024)Wikibench: Community-Driven Data Curation for AI Evaluation on WikipediaProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642278(1-24)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
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    • (2023)Upvotes? Downvotes? No Votes? Understanding the relationship between reaction mechanisms and political discourse on RedditProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3580644(1-28)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
    • (2023)Analysis of Moral Judgment on RedditIEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems10.1109/TCSS.2022.316067710:3(947-957)Online publication date: Jun-2023
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