News Feeds and User Engagement: Evidence from the Reddit News Tab

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.