The Impact of Featuring Comments in Online Discussions
Cedric Waterschoot, Ernst van den Hemel, Antal van den Bosch
TL;DR
This study investigates whether featuring high-quality comments on online news platforms affects discussion quality and activity. Using a before/after design on a 2023 NUjij dataset with both featured and nonfeatured discussions, it combines user- and editorial-centered quality measures with an editorial 'featured-worthy' score derived from a prior model. The results show no robust improvement in discussion quality from featuring, but engagement persists longer in discussions where comments are featured, suggesting moderation may delay activity decay. The findings highlight data-access limitations for studying moderation effects and call for cross-platform replication and controlled experiments to generalize the impact of featuring on online discourse.
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.