Re-Ranking News Comments by Constructiveness and Curiosity Significantly Increases Perceived Respect, Trustworthiness, and Interest
Emily Saltz, Zaria Jalan, Tin Acosta

TL;DR
Re-ranking comments based on constructiveness and curiosity enhances perceived respect, trustworthiness, and interest, promoting healthier online discussions and reducing polarization, especially in politically sensitive contexts.
Contribution
This study demonstrates that up-ranking prosocial comments improves perceived credibility and reduces polarization, offering a novel approach to moderating online discussions.
Findings
Up-ranking curiosity and constructiveness improves respect and trustworthiness.
Constructiveness increases perceived favorability towards political groups.
Personal stories and constructiveness enhance perceived informativeness.
Abstract
Online commenting platforms have commonly developed systems to address online harms by removing and down-ranking content. An alternative, under-explored approach is to focus on up-ranking content to proactively prioritize prosocial commentary and set better conversational norms. We present a study with 460 English-speaking US-based news readers to understand the effects of re-ranking comments by constructiveness, curiosity, and personal stories on a variety of outcomes related to willingness to participate and engage, as well as perceived credibility and polarization in a comment section. In our rich-media survey experiment, participants across these four ranking conditions and a control group reviewed prototypes of comment sections of a Politics op-ed and Dining article. We found that outcomes varied significantly by article type. Up-ranking curiosity and constructiveness improved a…
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Taxonomy
TopicsPublic Relations and Crisis Communication
