Buttons added to comments and posts that allow participants in a forum to vote content "up" in a discussion thread

By pushing up certain types of comments or posts, members can signal and promote higher quality content for others and send a positive signal to the creator of the comment or post.

Papakyriakopoulos et al. (2023) examined nine subReddits that removed their up & down vote functionality to see how those changes affected the quality of discourse along the three dimensions: civic, deliberative and demagogic discourse. The researchers constructed a quasi-experiment by matching those subReddits with other similar ones that did not remove up & down votes (which Reddit includes as a default setting); by comparing any change in discourse quality to the "matched" subReddit the researchers were able to distill the impact of removing the functionality (researchers call this a "difference in difference" design). They found that when a subReddit removed down votes, keeping up votes, there was an improvement in discourse across all three dimensions; civic and deliberative discourse increased while demagogic discourse decreased.  When those subReddits subsequently removed up votes, however, they saw a degradation in discourse, as did subReddits that removed both up and down votes at the same time. (Note: all effects we include are statistically significant, unless otherwise stated.)

Overall, based on the results from Papakyriakopoulos et al. (2023), giving forum members the ability to upvote content appears likely to improve the quality of discourse in a subReddit, and perhaps other online fora. Because their study is a quasi-experiment, however, we cannot rule out that some other confounding variable produced the effects we see, so more evidence is needed (ideally a field experiment on another platform) to confirm the positive impact of including an upvote feature.

Note: While upvotes are likely to improve the quality of online discourse, downvotes may have the opposite effect and so should be used cautiously if at all.

Online platforms and community moderators may be interested not just in reducing toxic content, but elevating content and exchanges. Upvote functionality offers a simple mechanism not only to surface but also encourage higher quality dialogue.