Investigating How Gilds Were Employed on Reddit

Certain types of positive feedback are among the most commonly-used signals in online communities. For the recipients, these signals may already be serving as positive reinforcement, a psychology principle effective at encouraging desired behaviors in offline settings. Furthermore, our preliminary work shows that Reddit moderators are explicitly providing positive feedback to reinforce behavior. Even though users and moderators may currently be reinforcing behavior through positive feedback, we do not understand what type of content is being reinforced. We aim to fill that gap by uncovering how often prosocial metrics from prior work appear in posts that receive positive feedback compared to those that do not. We find that existing measures of prosocial behavior are insufficient for capturing the content-level differences between rewarded posts and non-rewarded posts. We call for future work to better understand this problem and to dive deeper into the area of positive reinforcement in moderation.