Through Aggregation to Deliberation? An Experimental Study on the Effects of Discussion Summaries on Users’ Willingness to Comment and the Deliberative Quality of Their Contributions

Paper by Jana Leonie Peters and Marc Ziegele: “Users’ low willingness to participate in discussions in comment sections and the often-poor quality of their contributions have been identified as key challenges in online participation. To address these issues, previous research has proposed various strategies, including moderation. We argue that a less well-researched intervention, namely aggregation in the form of discussion summaries, reduces users’ information overload and enhances their objective knowledge and subjective knowledge, which in turn are positively associated with their willingness to participate and the deliberative quality of their comments. Results from an online experiment (n = 643) support most of our hypotheses, though objective knowledge does not directly impact willingness to comment. Differences between aggregation criteria were minimal, but fact-based aggregation was superior in improving objective knowledge compared to opinion- or argument-based approaches. These findings suggest that platform designers and moderators can utilize aggregation techniques to encourage participation and foster higher-quality online discourse…(More)”.