3,478 research outputs found
Talking to the crowd: What do people react to in online discussions?
This paper addresses the question of how language use affects community
reaction to comments in online discussion forums, and the relative importance
of the message vs. the messenger. A new comment ranking task is proposed based
on community annotated karma in Reddit discussions, which controls for topic
and timing of comments. Experimental work with discussion threads from six
subreddits shows that the importance of different types of language features
varies with the community of interest
Dynamics of Content Quality in Collaborative Knowledge Production
We explore the dynamics of user performance in collaborative knowledge
production by studying the quality of answers to questions posted on Stack
Exchange. We propose four indicators of answer quality: answer length, the
number of code lines and hyperlinks to external web content it contains, and
whether it is accepted by the asker as the most helpful answer to the question.
Analyzing millions of answers posted over the period from 2008 to 2014, we
uncover regular short-term and long-term changes in quality. In the short-term,
quality deteriorates over the course of a single session, with each successive
answer becoming shorter, with fewer code lines and links, and less likely to be
accepted. In contrast, performance improves over the long-term, with more
experienced users producing higher quality answers. These trends are not a
consequence of data heterogeneity, but rather have a behavioral origin. Our
findings highlight the complex interplay between short-term deterioration in
performance, potentially due to mental fatigue or attention depletion, and
long-term performance improvement due to learning and skill acquisition, and
its impact on the quality of user-generated content
Two Species Evolutionary Game Model of User and Moderator Dynamics
We construct a two species evolutionary game model of an online society
consisting of ordinary users and behavior enforcers (moderators). Among
themselves, moderators play a coordination game choosing between being
"positive" or "negative" (or harsh) while ordinary users play prisoner's
dilemma. When interacting, moderators motivate good behavior (cooperation)
among the users through punitive actions while the moderators themselves are
encouraged or discouraged in their strategic choice by these interactions. We
show the following results: (i) We show that the -limit set of the
proposed system is sensitive both to the degree of punishment and the
proportion of moderators in closed form. (ii) We demonstrate that the basin of
attraction for the Pareto optimal strategy
can be computed exactly. (iii) We demonstrate that for certain initial
conditions the system is self-regulating. These results partially explain the
stability of many online users communities such as Reddit. We illustrate our
results with examples from this online system.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, submitted to 2012 ASE Conference on Social
Informatic
The Impact of Crowds on News Engagement: A Reddit Case Study
Today, users are reading the news through social platforms. These platforms
are built to facilitate crowd engagement, but not necessarily disseminate
useful news to inform the masses. Hence, the news that is highly engaged with
may not be the news that best informs. While predicting news popularity has
been well studied, it has not been studied in the context of crowd
manipulations. In this paper, we provide some preliminary results to a longer
term project on crowd and platform manipulations of news and news popularity.
In particular, we choose to study known features for predicting news popularity
and how those features may change on reddit.com, a social platform used
commonly for news aggregation. Along with this, we explore ways in which users
can alter the perception of news through changing the title of an article. We
find that news on reddit is predictable using previously studied sentiment and
content features and that posts with titles changed by reddit users tend to be
more popular than posts with the original article title.Comment: Published at The 2nd International Workshop on News and Public
Opinion at ICWSM 201
Loyalty in Online Communities
Loyalty is an essential component of multi-community engagement. When users
have the choice to engage with a variety of different communities, they often
become loyal to just one, focusing on that community at the expense of others.
However, it is unclear how loyalty is manifested in user behavior, or whether
loyalty is encouraged by certain community characteristics.
In this paper we operationalize loyalty as a user-community relation: users
loyal to a community consistently prefer it over all others; loyal communities
retain their loyal users over time. By exploring this relation using a large
dataset of discussion communities from Reddit, we reveal that loyalty is
manifested in remarkably consistent behaviors across a wide spectrum of
communities. Loyal users employ language that signals collective identity and
engage with more esoteric, less popular content, indicating they may play a
curational role in surfacing new material. Loyal communities have denser
user-user interaction networks and lower rates of triadic closure, suggesting
that community-level loyalty is associated with more cohesive interactions and
less fragmentation into subgroups. We exploit these general patterns to predict
future rates of loyalty. Our results show that a user's propensity to become
loyal is apparent from their first interactions with a community, suggesting
that some users are intrinsically loyal from the very beginning.Comment: Extended version of a paper appearing in the Proceedings of ICWSM
2017 (with the same title); please cite the official ICWSM versio
Deepfakes: False Pornography Is Here and the Law Cannot Protect You
It is now possible for anyone with rudimentary computer skills to create a pornographic deepfake portraying an individual engaging in a sex act that never actually occurred. These realistic videos, called “deepfakes,” use artificial intelligence software to impose a person’s face onto another person’s body. While pornographic deepfakes were first created to produce videos of celebrities, they are now being generated to feature other nonconsenting individuals—like a friend or a classmate. This Article argues that several tort doctrines and recent non-consensual pornography laws are unable to handle published deepfakes of non-celebrities. Instead, a federal criminal statute prohibiting these publications is necessary to deter this activity
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