# Discussion quality diffuses in the digital public square

## TL;DR

This study investigates how social feedback influences comment quality on large public Facebook pages, revealing that social feedback improves comment quality and relevance, especially among high-quality contributors, through the lens of social norms.

## Contribution

The paper demonstrates that social feedback mechanisms enhance comment quality and relevance in digital public squares, extending understanding of influence among strangers online.

## Key findings

- Social feedback increases comment quality.
- High-quality commenters respond with more relevant comments.
- Similarity between viewed and written comments increases under social feedback.

## Abstract

Studies of online social influence have demonstrated that friends have important effects on many types of behavior in a wide variety of settings. However, we know much less about how influence works among relative strangers in digital public squares, despite important conversations happening in such spaces. We present the results of a study on large public Facebook pages where we randomly used two different methods--most recent and social feedback--to order comments on posts. We find that the social feedback condition results in higher quality viewed comments and response comments. After measuring the average quality of comments written by users before the study, we find that social feedback has a positive effect on response quality for both low and high quality commenters. We draw on a theoretical framework of social norms to explain this empirical result. In order to examine the influence mechanism further, we measure the similarity between comments viewed and written during the study, finding that similarity increases for the highest quality contributors under the social feedback condition. This suggests that, in addition to norms, some individuals may respond with increased relevance to high-quality comments.