Related papers: The Phantom Steering Effect in Q&A Websites
Badges are endemic to online interaction sites, from Question and Answer (Q&A) websites to ride sharing, as systems for rewarding participants for their contributions. This paper studies how badge design affects people's contributions and…
A wide variety of online platforms use digital badges to encourage users to take certain types of desirable actions. However, despite their growing popularity, their causal effect on users' behavior is not well understood. This is partly…
User modeling plays an important role in delivering customized web services to the users and improving their engagement. However, most user models in the literature do not explicitly consider the temporal behavior of users. More recently,…
Badges are a common, and sometimes the only, method of incentivizing users to perform certain actions on online sites. However, due to many competing factors influencing user temporal dynamics, it is difficult to determine whether the badge…
To incentivize users' participations and steer their online activities, online social networks start to provide users with various kinds of rewards for their contributions to the sites. The most frequently distributed rewards include…
Online platforms where volunteers answer each other's questions are important sources of knowledge, yet participation is declining. We ran a pre-registered experiment on Stack Overflow, one of the largest Q&A communities for software…
Stack Overflow incentive system awards users with reputation scores to ensure quality. The decentralized nature of the forum may make the incentive system prone to manipulation. This paper offers, for the first time, a comprehensive study…
Generalized reciprocity -- the tendency to help others after receiving help oneself -- is widely theorized as a mechanism sustaining cooperation on online knowledge-sharing platforms. Yet robust empirical evidence from field settings…
Programming is a valuable skill in the labor market, making the underrepresentation of women in computing an increasingly important issue. Online question and answer platforms serve a dual purpose in this field: they form a body of…
User response to contributed content in online social media depends on many factors. These include how the site lays out new content, how frequently the user visits the site, how many friends the user follows, how active these friends are,…
Understanding user dynamics in online communities has become an active research topic and can provide valuable insights for human behavior analysis and community management. In this work, we investigate the "bandwagon fan" phenomenon, a…
Online knowledge platforms such as Stack Overflow and Wikipedia rely on a large and diverse contributor community. Despite efforts to facilitate onboarding of new users, relatively few users become core contributors, suggesting the…
A central concern in an interactive intelligent system is optimization of its actions, to be maximally helpful to its human user. In recommender systems for instance, the action is to choose what to recommend, and the optimization task is…
Understanding susceptibility to online influence is crucial for mitigating the spread of misinformation and protecting vulnerable audiences. This paper investigates susceptibility to influence within social networks, focusing on the…
With the increase in acceptance of open source platforms for knowledge sharing, Question and Answer (Q\&A) websites such as Stack Overflow have become increasingly popular in the programming domain. Many novice programmers visit Stack…
Many websites rely on user-generated content to provide value to consumers. These websites typically incentivize participation by awarding users badges based on their contributions. While these badges typically have no explicit value, they…
Collaborative tagging has been quickly gaining ground because of its ability to recruit the activity of web users into effectively organizing and sharing vast amounts of information. Here we collect data from a popular system and…
Online user dynamics has been actively studied in recent years and bandwagon behavior is one of the most representative topics which can provide valuable insights for user identity change. Many previous studies have characterized bandwagon…
Social media platform design often incorporates explicit signals of positive feedback. Some moderators provide positive feedback with the goal of positive reinforcement, but are often unsure of their ability to actually influence user…
Social media platforms offer flagging, a technical feature that empowers users to report inappropriate posts or bad actors to reduce online harm. The deceptively simple flagging interfaces on nearly all major social media platforms disguise…