  Online commenting platforms have commonly developed systems to address online
harms by removing and down-ranking content. An alternative, under-explored
approach is to focus on up-ranking content to proactively prioritize prosocial
commentary and set better conversational norms. We present a study with 460
English-speaking US-based news readers to understand the effects of re-ranking
comments by constructiveness, curiosity, and personal stories on a variety of
outcomes related to willingness to participate and engage, as well as perceived
credibility and polarization in a comment section. In our rich-media survey
experiment, participants across these four ranking conditions and a control
group reviewed prototypes of comment sections of a Politics op-ed and Dining
article. We found that outcomes varied significantly by article type.
Up-ranking curiosity and constructiveness improved a number of measures for the
Politics article, including perceived Respect, Trustworthiness, and
Interestingness of the comment section. Constructiveness also increased
perceptions that the comments were favorable to Republicans, with no condition
worsening perceptions of partisans. Additionally, in the Dining article,
personal stories and constructiveness rankings significantly improved the
perceived informativeness of the comments. Overall, these findings indicate
that incorporating prosocial qualities of speech into ranking could be a
promising approach to promote healthier, less polarized dialogue in online
comment sections.
