Assessing Peer Award Diversification on Reddit

Amaury Trujillo

IIT-CNR

11 October 2022

Introduction

Content Structure in Reddit

content hierarchy

Subreddit: community of users and content around a shared interest

Submission: post on a subreddit with a title and text body or link (website or embedded multimedia)

Comment: post on a submission or another comment in the form of plain or rich text

Monetization on Reddit

• Reddit Ads
  • Advertisement model
  • Promoted submissions
• Reddit Premium
  • Subscription model
  • No advertisements
  • Exclusive features
• Reddit Coins

Reddit Coins

• Introduced in September of 2018
• Virtual goods used to award posts
• Some awards also grant special bonuses
• Can be obtained via:
  • Reddit Premium
  • Direct purchase
  • A gift by admins
  • An award bonus

Reddit Gildings

Coins could be exchanged for one of three gilding awards

Platinum
Costs 1,800 coins
Gives 700 coins

Gold
Costs 500 coins
Gives 100 coins

Silver
Costs 100 coins
No perks

Reddit Awards

Diversification to hundreds of awards since July of 2019

More Than Colorfour Imagery

Many awards are humorous references to Internet slang, memes, or inside jokes.

Trollface

hehehe

Defeated

Research Questions

1. How award diversification changed
   awarding levels?
2. How diverse are the awards given by
   Reddit users?

Background

Paid Appreciation Tokens

Recognition symbols of the enjoyment that some content has brought to their giver.

Twitch Bits and Cheers

• A strong alternative to third-party donation tools
• A mechanism with which streamers monetize their content

TikTok Coins and Gifts

• A key mechanism in the platform’s financial success
• The main source of revenue for some content creators

Peculiarities of Reddit Coins and Awards

• Content sharing and discussion (original or by others) are the main focus of posts, and only these receive awards
• Content creators/sharers do not monetize awards, even when some rewards entail coins
• Peer relationship among users, as all can be content creators/sharers/consumers at the same time

Literature about Awarding in Reddit

• In most, awards are a mere measure of post success
• Only a couple of works focus on gilding:
  • An analysis which found gilding differences among clusters of subreddits¹
  • An experimental study which found that users increase their activity upon gilding²

1. Julia Mendelsohn and Lucy Li. Giving gold: Understanding appreciation in reddit communities. Technical Report. Stanford University, Stanford, CA. (2017).

2. Gordon B et al. 2021. How do peer awards motivate creative content? Experimental evidence from Reddit. Management Science (2021).

Methods

Data Collection

1. Select top 50 subreddits as of Jan 2019
   • Exclude NSFW and official subreddits
2. Collect posts before and after diversification
   • Two six-month datasets:
     • 2019H1 (gildings)
     • 2020H1 (awardings)
   • Total of 16M submissions and 203M comments

Measurement of Awarding Levels

• Awards given: the count of awards given, regardless of their identity (also called awardings)
• Coins spent: the sum of distinct award prices multiplied by the respective number of times given
• Awarded posts: the number of posts that received at least one awarding

All of the above are expressed per thousand posts (PTP)

Definition of Award Diversity

For each subreddit, I use a Hill diversity index \(^1D = e^H\), with \(H\) being Shannon’s entropy:

\[ H = -\sum_{i = 1}^A p_i \ln(p_i) \]   where \(A\) is the number of distinct awards, and \(p_i\) is the proportion of all awardings regarding award \(i\).

\(^1D \in [1,A]\).   If \(^1D = A\) then there is a perfect balance among the awards present in a given subreddit.

Results

Awarding Levels

• Overview
• Plot
• Table

• After diversification there was a remarkable increase for all awarding measures (PTP)
• Growth at the dataset level:

kind	awards given	coins spent	awarded posts
submissions	+196%	+127%	+114%
comments	+155%	+115%	+131%

Award Diversities

• Overview
• Plot
• Table

• In both datasets submissions had a higher median and spread in award diversity w.r.t. comments
• Median diversity growth:
  • submissions: +691%
  • comments: +490%

Most Common Awards

Awards Overview

Total Coins Spent

Gildings represented 61% of the coins spent in 2020H1

Gold
34%

Platinum
14%

Silver
13%

Discussion

The More the Better

• After diversification, Reddit Awards had an average one-year growth of +140% across all three measures
  • For comparison, there was a four-year increase of 116% in gilded comments since 2015 to 2019
• Award diversity increased but gilding was still dominant
  • An important share of growth was due to gilding awards
  • The often ironic Silver was by far the most popular

Limitations

• Potential subreddit sampling bias
  • Perhaps less popular subreddits awarded differently
• Potential bias due to the mechanism recency
• This study did not establish a causal relationship
  • Lack of control subreddits due to platform-wise change
  • There were other changes in the awarding UX (e.g., new selection dialog and order, new ways of displaying awards and awarded content)

Takeaways

• Diversification linked to a considerable awarding increase
• Still, the original hierarchical tokens remained popular
• Paid appreciation tokens are a noteworthy strategy to engage users and monetize user-generated content

Awarding is an important part of our direct-to-consumer revenue […]. By giving awards, users not only recognize others but also help Reddit […].

Reddit admin u/venkman01