Related papers: Analyzing behavioral trends in community driven di…
Providing mental health support for loved ones across a geographic distance creates unique challenges for the remote caregivers, who sometimes turn to online communities for peer support. We qualitatively analyzed 522 Reddit threads to…
The prevalent perspective in quantitative research on opinion dynamics flattens the landscape of the online political discourse into a traditional left--right dichotomy. While this approach helps simplify the analysis and modeling effort,…
Online communities can serve as meaningful sources of social support, particularly for marginalized and vulnerable groups. Disclosure of personal information facilitates integration into online communities but may also expose individuals to…
Questions form an integral part of our everyday communication, both offline and online. Getting responses to our questions from others is fundamental to satisfying our information need and in extending our knowledge boundaries. A question…
The rise of a trending topic on Twitter or Facebook leads to the temporal emergence of a set of users currently interested in that topic. Given the temporary nature of the links between these users, being able to dynamically identify…
The irreplaceable key to the triumph of Question & Answer (Q&A) platforms is their users providing high-quality answers to the challenging questions posted across various topics of interest. From more than a decade, the expert finding…
Most platforms, including Reddit, face a dilemma when applying interventions such as subreddit bans to toxic communities -- do they risk angering their user base by proactively enforcing stricter controls on discourse or do they defer…
Many researchers studying online communities seek to make them better. However, beyond a small set of widely-held values, such as combating misinformation and abuse, determining what 'better' means can be challenging, as community members…
Stack Exchange, a question-and-answer(Q&A) platform, has exhibited signs of a declining user engagement. This paper investigates user engagement dynamics across various Stack Exchange communities including Data science, AI, software…
Stress is a nigh-universal human experience, particularly in the online world. While stress can be a motivator, too much stress is associated with many negative health outcomes, making its identification useful across a range of domains.…
Social news websites, such as Reddit, have evolved into prominent platforms for sharing and discussing news. A key issue on social news websites sites is the formation of echo chambers, which often lead to the spread of highly biased or…
In this work, we introduce an extremely general model for a collection of innovation processes in order to model and analyze the interaction among them. We provide theoretical results, analytically proven, and we show how the proposed model…
In January 2021, retail investors coordinated on Reddit to target short selling activity by hedge funds on GameStop shares, causing a surge in the share price and triggering significant losses for the funds involved. Such an effective…
In the current landscape of online abuses and harms, effective content moderation is necessary to cultivate safe and inclusive online spaces. Yet, the effectiveness of many moderation interventions is still unclear. Here, we assess the…
The social news aggregator Digg allows users to submit and moderate stories by voting on (digging) them. As is true of most social sites, user participation on Digg is non-uniformly distributed, with few users contributing a…
Twitter, a popular social network, presents great opportunities for on-line machine learning research. However, previous research has focused almost entirely on learning from passively collected data. We study the problem of learning to…
The complexity of navigating digital privacy, safety, and security threats often falls directly on users. This leads to users seeking help from family and peers, platforms and advice guides, dedicated communities, and even large language…
Deplatforming, the permanent banning of entire communities, is a primary tool for content moderation on mainstream platforms. While prior research examines effects on banned communities or source platform health, the impact on alternative…
Data extracted from social media platforms, such as Twitter, are both large in scale and complex in nature, since they contain both unstructured text, as well as structured data, such as time stamps and interactions between users. A key…
On-line social networks publish information on a high volume of real-world events almost instantly, becoming a primary source for breaking news. Some of these real-world events can end up having a very strong impact on on-line social…