Estimating relative user expertise for content quality prediction on Reddit

Reddit as a social curation site relies on its users to curate content from the World Wide Web (WWW) for the consumption of other users. Content on the site is enriched through user comments, discussions and extensions. This additional content is of varying quality however - ranging from meaningful information to misleading content; depending on the reliability, expertise and intention of the authors. Reddit relies on the Wisdom of the Crowd (WotC) from its community as well as selected moderators to manage its content. We argue that this approach suffers from the cold start in collecting user votes and is at risk of user bias, particularly a group-think mentality. Besides that, managing the large collection of content on Reddit is expensive. In our study, we explore the estimation of relative user expertise through various content-agnostic approaches. We show that it is possible to infer information quality on Reddit using the expertise of the authors. This prediction of content quality could lead to an improved organisation of Reddit content (re-ranking) for user consumption and future information retrieval.