Popularity and Quality in Social News Aggregators: A Study of Reddit and Hacker News

By Gregory Stoddard. 2015

40 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this paper we seek to understand the relationship between the online popularity of an article and its intrinsic quality. Prior experimental work suggests that the relationship between quality and popularity can be very distorted due to factors like social influence bias and inequality in visibility. We conduct a study of popularity on two different social news aggregators, Reddit and Hacker News. We define quality as the relative number of votes an article would have received if each article was shown, in a bias-free way, to an equal number of users. We propose a simple poisson regression method to estimate this quality metric from time-series voting data. We validate our methods on data from Reddit and Hacker News, as well the experimental data from prior work. This method works well even though the collected data is subject to common social media biases. Using these estimates, we find that popularity on Reddit and Hacker News is a stronger reflection of intrinsic quality than expected.

Subfields: Communication, Sociology and Political Science, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

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Citations in the corpus

Averaging Gone Wrong: Using Time-Aware Analyses to Better Understand Behavior (2016, background): “…sociological studies often use students who join a school in the same year to understand the effect of interventions [22, 30], and condition on the year in which people were born to understand people’s behavior, such as variations in financial decision-making [47] or opinions on issues [19, 28].”
Aligning Popularity and Quality in Online Cultural Markets (2021, background): “These relationships have also been observed experimentally by Stoddard (Stoddard 2015), who studied the relationship between the intrinsic article quality and its popularity in the social news sites Reddit and Hacker news.”
User Migration in Online Social Networks: A Case Study on Reddit During a Period of Community Unrest (2016, background): “Socially-curated websites such as Reddit depend on large communities for content creation and moderation (Lampe et al. 2010; Zhong et al. 2013; Stoddard 2015).”