News Feeds and User Engagement: Evidence from the Reddit News Tab
Name
Moehring-SM15MR-Sloan-2022.pdf
Description
Thesis PDF
Size
1.35 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
f2d055d8d70ddd1f34b1eb1e69f587bf
Author(s)
Moehring, Alex
Advisor(s)
Tucker, Catherine
Date Issued
February 2022
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
We study how the introduction of a new non-personalized news feed impacts user engagement quantity, quality, and diversity on Reddit. In June 2018, Reddit introduced the News tab on iOS devices that surfaces popular content from a curated list of news-related communities. We leverage this natural experiment to identify the causal effects of the News tab on iOS user engagement in a difference-in-differences design. We find that the News tab increases the share of iOS devices that engage with news-related content and there is a relatively larger increase in low-quality engagement, measured through voting on the platform. We also find that the diversity of engagement within news categories and within articles from publishers across the political spectrum increases as a result of the News tab. These results suggest that non-personalized feeds can be an important tool to mitigate algorithmic filter bubbles, and need not come at the expense of reduced user engagement.
MIT Department
Sloan School of Management
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In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
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