Assessing Peer Award Diversification on Reddit

TL;DR

This study investigates how Reddit's diversification of awards impacted user engagement, revealing increased awarding levels and suggesting that more award options enhance platform interaction and monetization.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive analysis of the effects of award diversification on user behavior and engagement on Reddit.

Findings

Awarding level increased significantly after diversification

Two original awards remained most popular

More award options benefit user engagement and monetization

Abstract

Monetizing user-generated content in social media such as Reddit, in which users are both content creators and consumers, is challenging. Among the platform's strategies we find Reddit Awards, paid tokens of appreciation given by peer users who markedly enjoyed a particular posted content. Initially, there were only three awards, but the platform later greatly expanded their number and variety. This work thus aims to investigate how awarding changed after such diversification. To this end, two datasets of posts made before and after the change (16M submissions and 203M comments) were analyzed by operationalizing awarding level and award diversity. Results show that after diversification, the awarding level increased across multiple measures, both significantly and considerably, albeit two of the original three awards remained by far the most commonly given. Such an increase indicates that providing more award options benefits users and is a viable user interaction approach for platforms to both engage users and monetize their content.