A Study of Question Effectiveness Using Reddit "Ask Me Anything" Threads

Asking effective questions is a powerful social skill. In this paper we seek to build computational models that learn to discriminate effective questions from ineffective ones. Armed with such a capability, future advanced systems can evaluate the quality of questions and provide suggestions for effective question wording. We create a large-scale, real-world dataset that contains over 400,000 questions collected from Reddit "Ask Me Anything" threads. Each thread resembles an online press conference where questions compete with each other for attention from the host. This dataset enables the development of a class of computational models for predicting whether a question will be answered. We develop a new convolutional neural network architecture with variable-length context and demonstrate the efficacy of the model by comparing it with state-of-the-art baselines and human judges.Comment: 6 page

Reddit as an Analogy for Scholarly Publishing and the Constructed, Contextual Nature of Authority

This paper provides an overview of how the social news site Reddit can be used as an example of the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education threshold concept “Authority is Constructed and Contextual.” It posits that the construction and context of authority in the sense of Wilson’s concept of cognitive authority is in the inherent structure of Reddit and that students can benefit from an example that easily links their personal and academic lives—a connection not always made when discussing authority in peer-reviewed publications or databases

Understanding prediction of low-quality comments in online science discourse

Online public forum discussion in the Reddit science community is moderated to ensure a high standard of scientific content in discourse. This thesis project creates predictive models to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable forum comments, and it seeks to interpret those models based on input from moderators. Information was collected from moderators (their demographics, moderation habits, moderation decisions and reasons for removing comments) to curate a deeper understanding of the online moderation community and predictive models for automated moderation support

The rhetorical constitution of online community: Identification and constitutive rhetoric in the community of reddit

The concepts of online identity and online community within the context of social media have been major research interests in the field of communication in recent years. Questions of interest include how the Internet and social media contribute to the construction of identity both online and offline, and what factors encourage participation in and contribution to online communities. This thesis will address these questions related to online identity and community from a rhetorical perspective to examine the role rhetoric plays in these processes and build on the application of rhetorical approaches to online contexts. Specifically, this project proposes a rhetorical analysis of the online community of Reddit, which encourages its users to submit and vote on content that is valued by the overall community. The analysis will focus on the use of identification and constitutive rhetoric in both the communication Reddit provides about itself and the everyday communication of its members. Overall, this thesis argues that identification and constitutive rhetoric create a strong collective identity within the community that contributes to the loyalty and commitment of its members, but also constrains its members\u27 behavior within the community in ways that are consistent with this identity, which ultimately may create challenges to the community\u27s continued success. However, this thesis also finds evidence of dissent from some of Reddit\u27s established guidelines, which creates tension between those who adhere to Reddit\u27s unified, constituted identity and those who choose to ignore or deviate from it

Barbarians at the Imperium Gates: Organizational Culture and Change in EVE Online

This article looks at organizational culture and identity of different organisations in EVE Online, using a combination of critical historical and ethnographic approaches. We argue that it is helpful to understand major organizations in EVE as analogous to early polities, in terms of the ways in which claims to leadership and power are demonstrated (for example through the writing of history). Yet, as we show, these organizations have strong cultures which demonstrate resilience and a resistance to top-down cultural change, meaning that the successful implementation of such change is governed by rank-and-file members rather than their leadership. We propose that the cultural (rather than political or social) nature of this resilience is centrally important in understanding how organizations in EVE function. This unity of practices and understanding allows EVE’s major organizations to suffer huge losses to their position and prestige, and yet remain viable communities and potentially resurgent powers. This seems to challenge the ‘social network’-type descriptions often used to explain the persistent groups seen in many online games

Identity Work of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders on Reddit: Traversals of Deliberation, Moderation, and Decolonization

Marginalized groups experience issues in managing their identities for a variety of reasons, and online spaces afford them the opportunity to make sense of and revise their intersectional identities. One such group is Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs), who are at the receiving end of stereotypes that often manifest in inaccurate public perceptions. The dissertation consists of three empirical studies that disentangle how AAPIs construct and express their identity in online communities within Reddit. The first study examines how users engage in an online community through a deliberation lens to understand the extent to which Reddit supports identity work as a deliberative process. Through a content analysis of 4,406 Reddit comments collected during the 2016 US Presidential Election, I discuss how the expression of identity, and thereby solidarity, in a politicized online setting may lead to a social movement. The second study uncovers how moderators on Reddit shape the norms of their subreddit through the analytic lens of emotional labor. I conduct interviews with 21 moderators who facilitate identity work discourse in AAPI subreddits, present a thematic analysis of their moderation practices, offer recommendations for improving moderation in online communities centered around identity work, and discuss implications of emotional labor in the design of Reddit and similar platforms. The third study examines marginalization through the analytic framework of decolonization, uncovering the threats and tactics that AAPI redditors encounter and employ to decolonize their collective identity. I find that moderators of AAPI subreddits develop collective resilience within their online communities by reclaiming space to confront brigade invasion, recording collective memory to circumvent systemic erasure, and revising cultural narratives to deconstruct colonial mentality. I discuss how algorithmic configurations within sociotechnical systems reaffirm existing hegemonic values and describe ways in which redditors may work toward resistance. These three studies are woven together to uncover ways in which AAPIs negotiate collective action in the context of online identity work

The Technological Factors of Reddit: Communication and Identity on Relational Networks

The relational network reddit is one of the most popular and visited websites on a global and national (United States) level. Communication on reddit lends itself to intergroup communication in that reddit users engage with audiences from ingroup, outgroup, and mixed audience compositions. Reddit’s voting system allows for negative and positive feedback to enhance or impede on one’s message. I examine how these technological factors influence a number of communicative and identity processes: (a) identity salience, (b), identity gaps, (c) group and interpersonal evaluation, and (d) accommodative language. Drawn out of intergroup contact literature and theories about group processes and technology, I hypothesize and question how each technological factor maps onto each of the aforementioned outcomes. By analyzing each technological factor, I am able to understand how audience composition, valence of content, and nature of feedback have varying impacts on communication. I created an online experimental interface that simulated reddit’s user interface and technological affordances. A total of 316 participants entered into the online discussion board and contributed a comment to an ongoing discussion about their thoughts and beliefs on 4th of July. Two time segments were used in the study, revealing a 3 (audience composition: ingroup, outgroup, mixed) X 2 (valence of content: hostile, neutral) X 2 (feedback: negative, positive) between-groups design. Results revealed that audience composition influenced the enacted-communal identity gap in that users had a lower enacted-identity gap with ingroup and mixed audiences compared to outgroup audiences. Similarly, the enacted-communal identity gap, interpersonal evaluation, and group evaluation measures were dependent on the valence of the conversation. However, identity salience and the personal-enacted identity gap did not fluctuate based on any of the technological factors. Accommodative language was higher in ingroup conditions and when the valence was neutral. Time 2 results revealed that negative feedback influenced a perception of change in the enacted-communal identity gap and in the group evaluation measures. These results add to existing knowledge on the influence of reddit’s primary technological factors on group and identity processes and is informing of how social recommendations can change a user’s perception of their message. Advisor: Jordan Soli

Networked, Collaborative, and Activist News Communities Online: A Case Study of Reddit and Daily Kos

Participatory democracy depends on formations of community and social relations, places and spaces for critical discourse, and the organizational and technical capacity for collective action. This study seeks to better understand how these processes are at work in the virtual realm, and more broadly examine the changing nature of political information and discourse in the online context. Toward this end, I examine two sites that embody different yet highly successful models of user participation, collective content production, and increasingly, political action: the political blogging community of Daily Kos and the social news site Reddit. This study is based on three broad theoretical frameworks of community, discourse, and action. I use work by Michele Willson (2006) to explore how community exists in the virtual realm. Drawing upon the scholarship of Jurgen Habermas (1991) and more recent adaptations and extensions of Habermasian public sphere theory from Aaron Barlow (2006), I ask can online communities set the foundation for a public spheres, and if so, how do they function as virtual public spheres? Building upon understandings of online community and virtual public sphere(s), I utilize work by Manuel Castells (1997) and Jeffrey Juris (2005) to understand how community and discourse can enable collective action. These lines of analysis provide the structure through which I examine Daily Kos and Reddit. Using ethnographic methods, I place the voices and perspectives of users within this theoretical structure to produce a comprehensive look at the function of collaborative online political information communities

Effects of Online Self-Disclosure on Social Feedback During the COVID-19 Pandemic

We investigate relationships between online self-disclosure and received social feedback during the COVID-19 crisis. We crawl a total of 2,399 posts and 29,851 associated comments from the r/COVID19_support subreddit and manually extract fine-grained personal information categories and types of social support sought from each post. We develop a BERT-based ensemble classifier to automatically identify types of support offered in users' comments. We then analyze the effect of personal information sharing and posts' topical, lexical, and sentiment markers on the acquisition of support and five interaction measures (submission scores, the number of comments, the number of unique commenters, the length and sentiments of comments). Our findings show that: 1) users were more likely to share their age, education, and location information when seeking both informational and emotional support, as opposed to pursuing either one; 2) while personal information sharing was positively correlated with receiving informational support when requested, it did not correlate with emotional support; 3) as the degree of self-disclosure increased, information support seekers obtained higher submission scores and longer comments, whereas emotional support seekers' self-disclosure resulted in lower submission scores, fewer comments, and fewer unique commenters; 4) post characteristics affecting social feedback differed significantly based on types of support sought by post authors. These results provide empirical evidence for the varying effects of self-disclosure on acquiring desired support and user involvement online during the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, this work can assist support seekers hoping to enhance and prioritize specific types of social feedback

Diffusion of virtual reality in audiences viewing popular music

Virtual reality hardware has recently expanded into more consumer markets with products such as Google Cardboard, Samsung VR and the Oculus Rift while the software applications hosting the content make it much more available for audiences to access different types of VR content including music content such as music videos or live events. This thesis conducted a survey to determine how members of an online community listen to music and how they choose to use or are likely to use these VR platforms for different VR content to provide insight as to which media content that producers and advertisers can focus on to create more successful VR content. A survey was taken by 246 participants, and the results show that although members of online communities consider a variety of different uses for VR platforms, music experiences aren’t yet being adopted by enough of them while other VR content such as video games are much more popular