The Sociomateriality of Rating and Ranking Devices on Social Media: A Case Study of Reddit’s Voting Practices

Abstract

Rating and ranking devices are everywhere on social media. While these devices may seem like objective tools to measure value and rank content, research shows how they profoundly shape social interaction and emotional expression and are central to platform moderation. Yet, very little is known about how users themselves talk about these devices, much less what this can tell us about how these devices co-constitute social reality on platforms. To explore this gap, we examine Reddit’s rating and ranking device, known as upvoting and downvoting, through a textual analysis of over half a million user comments that contain keywords such as “upvote” and “downvote” and their variants. We find that Redditors (Reddit users) rarely use or talk about voting in the way the platform intends. For the most part, Redditors not only disregard the rules about voting but also make, and enforce, their own rules, norms, and ethics around it. We uncover a rich set of voting practices that we present as the following four themes in a conceptual framework: (1) platform culture, (2) prescriptive device, (3) materialization of value, and (4) ontology of self. Drawing on a sociomaterial lens, we reposition voting as a material-discursive practice that is inseparable to Reddit culture. This provides compelling evidence that rating and ranking devices on social media intervene in and perform sociality and we invite future research to apply our conceptual framework to other rating and ranking devices on social media.