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Online communities adopt various reputation schemes to measure content quality. This study analyzes the effect of a new reputation scheme that exposes one's offline social status, such as an education degree, within an online community. We…
Millions of users visit Stack Overflow regularly to ask community for answers to their programming questions. However, like many other platforms, Stack Overflow consistently struggles with low user retention and declining levels of user…
Social media feeds have become central to the Internet. Among the most visible are trending feeds, which rank content deemed timely and relevant. To examine how feed signals influence behaviors and perceptions, we conducted a randomized…
Unlike traditional media, social media typically provides quantified metrics of how many users have engaged with each piece of content. Some have argued that the presence of these cues promotes the spread of misinformation. Here we…
Social influence plays a vital role in shaping a user's behavior in online communities dealing with items of fine taste like movies, food, and beer. For online recommendation, this implies that users' preferences and ratings are influenced…
Images become an important and prevalent way to express users' activities, opinions and emotions. In a social network, individual emotions may be influenced by others, in particular by close friends. We focus on understanding how users…
Models of computational trust support users in taking decisions. They are commonly used to guide users' judgements in online auction sites; or to determine quality of contributions in Web 2.0 sites. However, most existing systems require…
A common explanation for negative user impacts of content recommender systems is misalignment between the platform's objective and user welfare. In this work, we show that misalignment in the platform's objective is not the only potential…
Most scientists are aware that, in addition to the traditional and subscription-based publication model, there is also the possibility of publishing their research in open access. Various surveys show that scientists are in favour of this…
An-ever increasing number of social media websites, electronic newspapers and Internet forums allow visitors to leave comments for others to read and interact. This exchange is not free from participants with malicious intentions, which do…
The ever-increasing amount of information flowing through Social Media forces the members of these networks to compete for attention and influence by relying on other people to spread their message. A large study of information propagation…
Context. GitHub has introduced a new gamification element through personal achievements, whereby badges are unlocked and displayed on developers' personal profile pages in recognition of their development activities. Objective. In this…
Q&A forums are widely used in large classes to provide scalable support. In addition to offering students a space to ask questions, these forums aim to create a community and promote engagement. Prior literature suggests that the way…
Social media algorithms are thought to amplify variation in user beliefs, thus contributing to radicalization. However, quantitative evidence on how algorithms and user preferences jointly shape harmful online engagement is limited. I…
Subliminal learning describes a student language model inheriting a behavioral bias by fine-tuning on seemingly innocuous data generated by a biased teacher model. Prior work has begun to characterize this phenomenon but leaves open…
Online communities play a critical role in shaping societal discourse and influencing collective behavior in the real world. The tendency for people to connect with others who share similar characteristics and views, known as homophily,…
Reward models (RMs) are central to the alignment of language models (LMs). An RM often serves as a proxy for human preferences to guide downstream LM behavior. However, our understanding of RM behavior is limited. Our work (i) formalizes a…
Voting online with explicit ratings could largely reflect people's preferences and objects' qualities, but ratings are always irrational, because they may be affected by many unpredictable factors like mood, weather, as well as other…
Peer recommendation is a crowdsourcing task that leverages the opinions of many to identify interesting content online, such as news, images, or videos. Peer recommendation applications often use social signals, e.g., the number of prior…
Cognitive biases have been shown to lead to faulty decision-making. Recent research has demonstrated that the effect of cognitive biases, anchoring bias in particular, transfers to information visualization and visual analytics. However, it…