Engagement or Knowledge Retention: Exploring Trade-offs in Promoting Discussion at News Websites

How does presenting comments in a news article affect the ways that readers engage with and retain information about news? This paper presents results from a controlled experiment investigating effects related to different strategies for promoting discussion at news websites (N=336 participants). The strategies include highlighting specific comments about a data visualization, providing prompts with the comments, and annotating prompts on the visualization. By comparison to a simple list of comments (baseline), our analysis found that annotations contributed to higher levels of participant engagement in the discussion, yet lower levels of knowledge retention related to the article. These findings raise new considerations about whether and how to integrate discussion content into news and points toward future content moderation systems that assist in representing and eliciting discussion at news websites.