Widespread underprovision on Reddit

Abstract

Many online communities ask their members to do work for the good of everyone on the site. On social voting sites like Reddit, this means that users judge a stream of incoming links by voting them up or down. The links with the most up-votes bubble up to the main page, pointing everyone toward the best content. A threat to all sites designed this way, however, is underprovision: when too many people rely on others to contribute without doing so themselves. In this paper, we present findings suggesting that widespread underprovision of votes is happening on Reddit, arguably the internet's largest social voting community. Notably, Reddit overlooked 52% of the most popular links the first time they were submitted. This suggests that many potentially popular links get ignored, jeopardizing the site's core purpose. We conclude by discussing possible reasons behind it, and suggest future research on social voting sites.