Direct impacts

Direct impactswere the direct actions that users took as a result of perceiv- ing manipulation. Direct impacts have an immediate effect, either on the user, or on the content (due to actions taken by the user with the content.) Consequently, these direct impact are considered to have a high degree of severity.

Skipped over / ignore Participants reported that, in serveral cases, see-

ing manipulation caused them to begin ignoring content that they would otherwise have looked at. This was the most prevalent of all kinds of im- pact: all participants reported having ignored content on the basis of a post title that they viewed as attempting to be manipulative.

A good example of this is one participant who, when asked about their response to attention-grabbing post titles, replied:

“I completely ignore them. You get enough crap on every other social media or website.”

5.3. ANALYSIS

Down vote Down-voting content is the most basic action that users on

Reddit can perform. As was discussed in the overall discussion on how Reddit works in Section 2.4.4, Reddit users may indicate their approval for content by up-voting, and their disapproval by down-voting.

Users reported downvoting in two context: first, as a matter of course, and secondly, with a specific outcome in mind. Users who described downvoting as a natural part of their use of Reddit did so as part of their usual purusal of the site. One participant, in describing their reaction to re-posted or duplicate content, described a typical example of this pattern:

“I generally just downvote unless it’s a particularly witty twist on [a repost]. Then I leave it be.”

Interestingly, many participants reported that they tended not to down- vote at all. Two reasons for this were identified: either the participant not being in the habit of downvoting, or the fact that the participants were often not signed in, which is required in order to vote.

Users who were not in the habit of downvoting tended to describe themselves as simply someone who doesn’t downvote content:

“I don’t remember the last time I downvoted.”

Another participant reported only one memory of down-voting:

“I think I’ve only down voted once, for a spammer. Yeah, I don’t really down vote much.”

Users also reported wanting to downvote, but were not signed in to the site at the time, and did not wish to sign in. One participant noted that he fell out of the habit of down-voting content as a result of an extended period of time of not being able to:

5.3. ANALYSIS

“I used to up vote and down vote things, and I just sort of stopped, because I started switching between computers a lot, and I wasn’t logged in for a few times, and there were only a few subreddits I was reading at the time, so I just went to them manually.

I never logged in, and now that I actually have gone back and logged into the computers that I use, I just don’t, for some reason. I think it’s because, when I went to up vote a few things, Reddit says “you have to be logged in to do that”, and I just can’t be bothered. It was kind of odd. I started off doing it, and I just stopped.”

Unsubscribe / Leave reddit In several cases, participants reported ma-

nipulative content causing them to leave Reddit, or to leave a sub-community of Reddit.

A participant who was discussing marketing posts (seeSection 3.6.7), described this action:

“[I] just skipped over it, ignored them, left the reddit for the day and came back the next day.”

Other instances of departing a community had longer-lasting effects:

“Everyone would post pictures of stuff that their girlfriends and whatever had given them. Just the same crap. Everyone got the same Hylian shield [an item fromZelda video games] for christmas. I really don’t care about that, and so I don’t look at the Zelda subreddit. I stopped looking at the Zelda subreddit for a month... it actually changed the way I browse that subreddit, in that I don’t anymore.”

Hide Reddit provides a mechanism that allows users to hide a post, which prevents them from seeing it appear when later browsing the site.

5.3. ANALYSIS

A participant mentioned that, when he saw posts comprised of all-capital letters (seeSection 4.4.1), he would almost always hide them:

“If it’s a fairly low-traffic subreddit, like some of the board game ones are, something that’s going to annoy me for a few weeks like the all-caps thing, I’m more likely to hide it.”

Tagging While not a built-in feature in the Reddit sites, several third-

party add-ons for the site - notably the Reddit Enhancement Suite by (So-

bel 2014) - allow users to associate posts or users with a custom label, for

future reference.

“I tend to chuckle, smile, and usually tag them as being an idiot and disregard them later on.”