  At a time when information seekers first turn to digital sources for news and
opinion, it is critical that we understand the role that social media plays in
human behavior. This is especially true when information consumers also act as
information producers and editors by their online activity. In order to better
understand the effects that editorial ratings have on online human behavior, we
report the results of a large-scale in-vivo experiment in social media. We find
that small, random rating manipulations on social media submissions created
significant changes in downstream ratings resulting in significantly different
final outcomes. Positive treatment resulted in a positive effect that increased
the final rating by 11.02% on average. Compared to the control group, positive
treatment also increased the probability of reaching a high rating (>=2000) by
24.6%. Contrary to the results of related work we also find that negative
treatment resulted in a negative effect that decreased the final rating by
5.15% on average.
