Down Votes

Goal: Improve discourse Evidence rating (PDN): Unlikely Civic signal: Understand — Promote thoughtful conversation When to use: Reactive

What it is

Buttons added to comments and posts that allow members in a forum to vote content "down" in a discussion thread

Intended impact

By pushing down certain types of comments or posts, members can signal and reduce low quality content for others and send a critical signal to the creator of the comment or post.

Evidence that it works

Papakyriakopoulos et al. (2023) examined nine subReddits that removed their up & down vote functionality to see how those changes affected the quality of discourse along the three dimensions of civic, deliberative and demagogic discourse. The researchers constructed a quasi-experiment by matching those subReddits with other similar ones that did not remove up & down votes (which Reddit includes as a default setting); by comparing any change in discourse quality to the "matched" subReddit they were able to distill the impact of the switch in functionality (researchers call this a "difference in difference" design). They found that when a subReddit removed down votes, keeping up votes, there was an improvement in discourse across all three dimensions; civic and deliberative discourse increased while demagogic discourse decreased. (Note: all effects we include are statistically significant, unless otherwise stated.)

A separate pilot field experiment conducted on r/Politics (Matias, 2018) found no effects of removing down votes, yet the author notes the study was underpowered, i.e. they had too little data to be able to see a statistically significant effect.

Overall, evidence points to the likelihood that including downvote functionality may degrade discourse. Because Papakyriakopoulos et al. (2023) is a quasi-experiment, however, we cannot rule out that some other confounding variables produced the effects we see, so more evidence is needed (ideally a field experiment on another platform) to confirm the negative effects of allowing downvotes.

Note: While downvotes may have a negative impact on online discussions, up votes are likely to have a positive impact.

Why it matters

Special Considerations

Citations

• *Upvotes? Downvotes? No Votes? Understanding the relationship between reaction mechanisms and political discourse on Reddit* — Papakyriakopoulos, O., Engelmann, S., & Winecoff, A. (Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems)

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From the Prosocial Design Network's Digital Intervention Library (https://www.prosocialdesign.org/library/down-votes), licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Reformatted for the RT Commons; text otherwise as published. Library citation: Prosocial Design Network (2024), Digital Intervention Library, https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/Q4RMB. Anything built from this pattern should credit the Prosocial Design Network and the researchers cited above.

Details

• goal: Improve discourse
• citations: [object Object]
• image alt: A downvote icon next to a comment that has a bunch of thumbs-downs on it.
• image url: https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/647f696dc653a97c26f42a0b/6983513546067e7ac62c5913_library%20icon%20downvote%202.png
• pdn rating: Unlikely
• when to use: Reactive
• civic signal: Understand
• pdn library doi: 10.17605/OSF.IO/Q4RMB
• civic signal goal: Promote thoughtful conversation