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Despite extensive research, the mechanisms through which online platforms shape extremism and polarization remain poorly understood. We identify and test a mechanism, grounded in empirical evidence, that explains how ranking algorithms can…
Recent years have seen a rise in social media platforms that provide peer-to-peer support to individuals suffering from mental distress. Studies on the impact of these platforms have focused on either short-term scales of single-post…
How effectively do we adhere to nudges and interventions that help us control our online browsing habits? If we have a temporary lapse and disable the behavior change system, do we later resume our adherence, or has the dam broken? In this…
Large language models (LLMs) are known to produce varying responses depending on prompt phrasing, indicating that subtle guidance in phrasing can steer their answers. However, the impact of this framing bias on LLM-based evaluation, where…
Indirect reciprocity based on reputation is a leading mechanism driving human cooperation, where monitoring of behaviour and sharing reputation-related information are crucial. Because collecting information is costly, a tragedy of the…
Research on the growth of online tagging systems not only is interesting in its own right, but also yields insights for website management and semantic web analysis. Traditional models that describing the growth of online systems can be…
System prompts for AI coding agents increasingly employ motivational framing -- from neutral task descriptions to fear-driven threats -- yet no controlled study has examined whether such framing affects agent behavior. We present two…
Given the increasing scale of model sizes, novel training strategies like gradual stacking [Gong et al., 2019, Reddi et al., 2023] have garnered interest. Stacking enables efficient training by gradually growing the depth of a model in…
Positive feedback via likes and awards is central to online governance, yet which attributes of users' posts elicit rewards -- and how these vary across authors and communities -- remains unclear. To examine this, we combine…
Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable success in recent years, enabling a wide range of applications, including intelligent assistants that support users' daily life and work. A critical factor in building such assistants is…
Most models of social contagion take peer exposure to be a corollary of adoption, yet in many settings, the visibility of one's adoption behavior happens through a separate decision process. In online systems, product designers can define…
Conversational AI models are becoming increasingly popular and are about to replace traditional search engines for information retrieval and product discovery. This raises concerns about monetization strategies and the potential for subtle…
Steering vectors are a lightweight method to control language model behavior by adding a learned bias to the activations at inference time. Although steering demonstrates promising performance, recent work shows that it can be unreliable or…
Online platforms face pressure to keep their communities civil and respectful. Thus, the bannings of problematic online communities from mainstream platforms like Reddit and Facebook are often met with enthusiastic public reactions.…
The question-answering (QA) capabilities of foundation models are highly sensitive to prompt variations, rendering their performance susceptible to superficial, non-meaning-altering changes. This vulnerability often stems from the model's…
Participatory crowd sensing social systems rely on the participation of large number of individuals. Since humans are strategic by nature, effective incentive mechanisms are needed to encourage participation. A popular mechanism to recruit…
Bots are, for many Web and social media users, the source of many dangerous attacks or the carrier of unwanted messages, such as spam. Nevertheless, crawlers and software agents are a precious tool for analysts, and they are continuously…
Young people worldwide are participating in ever-increasing numbers in online fan communities. Far from mere shallow repositories of pop culture, these sites are accumulating significant evidence that sophisticated informal learning is…
Online gaming is a multi-billion dollar industry that entertains a large, global population. One unfortunate phenomenon, however, poisons the competition and the fun: cheating. The costs of cheating span from industry-supported expenditures…
The aim of this paper is to present methods to systematically analyze individual and group behavioral patterns observed in community driven discussion platforms like Reddit where users exchange information and views on various topics of…