Consumers and Curators: Browsing and Voting Patterns on Reddit
This research addresses how users interact with crowd-sourced news curation on social platforms like Reddit, providing insights into voting behavior and information consumption patterns.
The study analyzed browsing and voting patterns on Reddit using a new dataset of 309 users' activity logs over one year, finding that 73% of posts were voted on without viewing the content and revealing cognitive fatigue in frequent voters.
As crowd-sourced curation of news and information become the norm, it is important to understand not only how individuals consume information through social news Web sites, but also how they contribute to their ranking systems. In the present work, we introduce and make available a new dataset containing the activity logs that recorded all activity for 309 Reddit users for one year. Using this newly collected data, we present findings that highlight the browsing and voting behavior of the study's participants. We find that most users do not read the article that they vote on, and that, in total, 73% of posts were rated (ie, upvoted or downvoted) without first viewing the content. We also show evidence of cognitive fatigue in the browsing sessions of users that are most likely to vote.