The Impact of Featuring Comments in Online Discussions

A widespread moderation strategy by online news platforms is to feature what the platform deems high quality comments, usually called editor picks or featured comments. In this paper, we compare online discussions of news articles in which certain comments are featured, versus discussions in which no comments are featured. We measure the impact of featuring comments on the discussion, by estimating and comparing the quality of discussions from the perspective of the user base and the platform itself. Our analysis shows that the impact on discussion quality is limited. However, we do observe an increase in discussion activity after the first comments are featured by moderators, suggesting that the moderation strategy might be used to increase user engagement and to postpone the natural decline in user activity over time.