The Impact of Featuring Comments in Online Discussions
Publication date
2025
Authors
Waterschoot, Cedric
van den Hemel, Ernst
van den Bosch, Antal
Editors
Aiello, Luca Maria
Chakraborty, Tanmoy
Gaito, Sabrina
Advisors
Supervisors
Document Type
Part of book
Metadata
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License
cc_by
Abstract
A widespread moderation strategy by online news platforms is to feature what the platform deems high quality comments, usually called editor picks or featured comments. In this paper, we compare online discussions of news articles in which certain comments are featured, versus discussions in which no comments are featured. We measure the impact of featuring comments on the discussion, by estimating and comparing the quality of discussions from the perspective of the user base and the platform itself. Our analysis shows that the impact on discussion quality is limited. However, we do observe an increase in discussion activity after the first comments are featured by moderators, suggesting that the moderation strategy might be used to increase user engagement and to postpone the natural decline in user activity over time.
Keywords
Content moderation, NLP, online discussions, Taverne, Theoretical Computer Science, General Computer Science
Citation
Waterschoot, C, van den Hemel, E & van den Bosch, A 2025, The Impact of Featuring Comments in Online Discussions. in L M Aiello, T Chakraborty & S Gaito (eds), Social Networks Analysis and Mining - 16th International Conference, ASONAM 2024, Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), vol. 15212 LNCS, Springer, Cham, pp. 65-74, 16th International Conference on Social Networks Analysis and Mining, ASONAM 2024, Rende, Italy, 2/09/24. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-78538-2_5, conference