I was just reading this. The Medium article does leave some parts from the paper untouched though: Interesting that they didn't find an effect for the positively evaluated users. So on the left those who upvoted it and on the right those who downvoted it, and their underlying relations. Interesting graphs! mk or forwardslash, if you're bored... edit: sorry for the double notifications, something went wrong on my side.We find that negatively-evaluated users are more likely to down-vote others in the week following an evaluation, than in the week before it. In contrast, we observe no significant effect for the positively evaluated users.
We define a social networks around each post, a voting network, as illustrated in Figure 9. For a given post a, we generate a graph G = (V,E) with V being the set of users who voted on a. An edge (B,C) exists between voters B and C if B voted on C 30 days prior to when the post a was created. Edges are signed: positive for upvotes, negative for downvotes. We examine voting networks for posts which obtained at least 10 votes, and have at least one upvote and one downvote.
b_b Ah, I agreed with your comment regarding the counter intuitively stated "positive feedback has no [discernible] influence on the author" but this is what the authors seem to have meant by that. It could've been clearer in the Medium article. Which is a bit odd that they would've left it out, to me at least, because insight into the effects of positive reinforcement seems so naturally interesting.