Teaming up with Kinga Makovi and Taha Yasseri, we conducted a field experiment to investigate the extent to which online users are susceptible to positive behavioral stimuli from other users and artificial agents. We created apparent human and bot accounts on Reddit and let them give symbolic awards to users with one of four rationales: praising the recipient’s logical argument, emotional sensitivity, or moral integrity, or explaining that the award resulted from a random draw in a lottery. We found that, surprisingly, awards do not increase user activity and downstream impact. In fact, awards from bots with the lottery rationale can reduce them. Nevertheless, awards encourage direct communication between users. For more, please read the preprint on arXiv.