Anonymity Interacting with Participation on a Q&A site

International audienceThis article presents a study that investigates how anonymity influences user participation in an on-line question-and-answer platform (Quora 1). The study is one step in identifying hypotheses that can be used to address a research and design issue concerning the role of anonymity in online participation, particularly in sensitive situations where people are seeking social support. Based on the literature, we present a model that describes the factors that influence participation. These factors were used when analyzing the answers to questions in the health category on Quora. The results of this study were completed by a survey asking Quora users about their use of the anonymity feature. The main result is that the only significant difference between anonymous and non-anonymous answers is that: with anonymous answers, social appreciation correlated with the an-swer's length

The Effects of Gender Signals and Performance in Online Product Reviews

This work quantifies the effects of signaling gender through gender specific user names, on the success of reviews written on the popular amazon.com shopping platform. Highly rated reviews play an important role in e-commerce since they are prominently displayed next to products. Differences in reviews, perceived - consciously or unconsciously - with respect to gender signals, can lead to crucial biases in determining what content and perspectives are represented among top reviews. To investigate this, we extract signals of author gender from user names to select reviews where the author’s likely gender can be inferred. Using reviews authored by these gender-signaling authors, we train a deep learning classifier to quantify the gendered writing style (i.e., gendered performance) of reviews written by authors who do not send clear gender signals via their user name. We contrast the effects of gender signaling and performance on the review helpfulness ratings using matching experiments. This is aimed at understanding if an advantage is to be gained by (not) signaling one's gender when posting reviews. While we find no general trend that gendered signals or performances influence overall review success, we find strong context-specific effects. For example, reviews in product categories such as Electronics or Computers are perceived as less helpful when authors signal that they are likely woman, but are received as more helpful in categories such as Beauty or Clothing. In addition to these interesting findings, we believe this general chain of tools could be deployed across various social media platforms

The Role of Pseudonymity in Mobile e-Participation

In addition to lack of knowledge and trust in official authorities, privacy concerns are among the reasons for non-participation in public discourse. Mitigating these barriers is important when aiming to promote and ultimately increase public participation. Through the lens of a long-term field study with a mobile participation prototype, this research investigated citizens\u27 participation patterns in relation to their choice in username (real name vs. pseudonym). Our data suggests that while engagement served less socializing purposes, social appreciation was not affected by pseudonymity. Interestingly, those participating with their real-name lost trust in the local government. Overall, we found no evidence that pseudonymity impacts the level of participation, but participants indicated to favor using a pseudonym in the future

Anonymous Quorans are still Quorans, just anonymous

International audienceThis article presents a study that investigates how anonymity influences user participation in an online question-and-answer platform (Quora). The study is one step in identifying hypotheses that can be used to address a research and design issue concerning the role of anonymity in online participation, particularly among older informal caregivers. We present here a model that describes the factors that influence participation, which we based on the literature. These factors were used when analyzing the answers to questions in the health category on Quora. The results of this study complement an earlier study that we conducted on YouTube comments. On Quora, there was only one significant difference between anonymous and non-anonymous answers: with anonymous answers, social appreciation correlated with the answer's length