Conversations Gone Alright: Quantifying and Predicting Prosocial Outcomes in Online Conversations
This work addresses the need to enhance positive interactions in online platforms, offering a novel approach beyond just reducing antisocial behavior, though it is incremental in applying forecasting methods to a new domain.
The study tackled the problem of predicting positive outcomes in online conversations by introducing new metrics for prosocial outcomes like mentoring and esteem enhancement, and showed that these outcomes can be forecasted from the initial comment with a model providing a 24% relative improvement over human performance.
Online conversations can go in many directions: some turn out poorly due to antisocial behavior, while others turn out positively to the benefit of all. Research on improving online spaces has focused primarily on detecting and reducing antisocial behavior. Yet we know little about positive outcomes in online conversations and how to increase them-is a prosocial outcome simply the lack of antisocial behavior or something more? Here, we examine how conversational features lead to prosocial outcomes within online discussions. We introduce a series of new theory-inspired metrics to define prosocial outcomes such as mentoring and esteem enhancement. Using a corpus of 26M Reddit conversations, we show that these outcomes can be forecasted from the initial comment of an online conversation, with the best model providing a relative 24% improvement over human forecasting performance at ranking conversations for predicted outcome. Our results indicate that platforms can use these early cues in their algorithmic ranking of early conversations to prioritize better outcomes.