Unraveling the Elements of Effective Altruistic Appeals Through Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing

In today’s world, online platforms such as social media, philanthropic communities, and Q &A websites provide opportunities for people to be altruistic by donating money or answering questions without expecting anything in return. The r/Random Acts Of Pizza subreddit on Reddit is one such online community where users can post requests for free pizza while explaining their current situation, and the outcome of each request is either successful or unsuccessful. This study seeks to explore the determinants that impact the outcome of such selfless appeals. To achieve this, we propose a new model architecture that combines two models, one that deals with sparse text vectors and the other that analyzes dense features from previous works to predict the success of a request. The study reveals that the probability estimated from the first model and the number of comments on the request post is crucial in predicting the outcome of a request.