Abstract
Social buttons are now widespread in social media
apps. They are used to assign weight to user content
and trigger user engagement. They come in different
shapes (e.g., thumb in Facebook, arrows in Reddit or
StackOverflow, plus one in Google+) but very little is
known about the influence of the shape on user
behaviour. This paper, addresses this issue by
presenting results of a controlled randomized
experiment with 173 users. The results suggest that
thumbs up / thumbs down icons are significantly more
engaging than the plus one / minus one icons. At the
same time the result shows that type of the icon used
has no significant influence on the direction of the vote.