Conversations Gone Alright: Quantifying and Predicting Prosocial Outcomes in Online Conversations

TL;DR

This paper investigates how online conversations can lead to positive, prosocial outcomes, introducing new metrics and models to predict these outcomes from initial comments, thereby enabling platforms to foster better interactions.

Contribution

It introduces new theory-inspired metrics for prosocial outcomes and demonstrates that these can be accurately predicted from early conversation cues using a large Reddit dataset.

Findings

Prosocial outcomes can be forecasted from initial comments.

Models outperform human predictions by 24% in ranking conversations.

Early cues can help platforms prioritize positive interactions.

Abstract

Online conversations can go in many directions: some turn out poorly due to antisocial behavior, while others turn out positively to the benefit of all. Research on improving online spaces has focused primarily on detecting and reducing antisocial behavior. Yet we know little about positive outcomes in online conversations and how to increase them-is a prosocial outcome simply the lack of antisocial behavior or something more? Here, we examine how conversational features lead to prosocial outcomes within online discussions. We introduce a series of new theory-inspired metrics to define prosocial outcomes such as mentoring and esteem enhancement. Using a corpus of 26M Reddit conversations, we show that these outcomes can be forecasted from the initial comment of an online conversation, with the best model providing a relative 24% improvement over human forecasting performance at ranking conversations for predicted outcome. Our results indicate that platforms can use these early cues in their algorithmic ranking of early conversations to prioritize better outcomes.