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Understanding the sociodemographic composition of online platforms is essential for accurately interpreting digital behavior and its societal implications. Yet, current methods often lack the transparency and reliability required, risking…
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.…
Online communities are an increasingly important stakeholder for firms, and despite the growing body of research on them, much remains to be learned about them and about the factors that determine their attributes and sustainability.…
In this paper, we apply social network analytic methods to unveil the structural dynamics of a popular open source goal oriented IRC community, Ubuntu. The primary objective is to track the development of this ever growing community over…
This is the first work investigating community structure and interaction dynamics through the lens of quotes in online discussion forums. We examine four forums of different size, language, and topic. Quote usage, which is surprisingly…
Two prevailing theories for explaining social group or community structure are cohesion and identity. The social cohesion approach posits that social groups arise out of an aggregation of individuals that have mutual interpersonal…
Content has historically been the primary lens used to study language in online communities. This paper instead focuses on the linguistic style of communities. While we know that individuals have distinguishable styles, here we ask whether…
Online communities develop unique characteristics, establish social norms, and exhibit distinct dynamics among their members. Activity in online communities often results in concrete ``off-line'' actions with a broad societal impact (e.g.,…
Increasingly people form opinions based on information they consume on online social media. As a result, it is crucial to understand what type of content attracts people's attention on social media and drive discussions. In this paper we…
In this work, we present a novel quantification of conflict in online discussion. Unlike previous studies on conflict dynamics, which model conflict as a binary phenomenon, our measure is continuous-valued, which we validate with manually…
Online Mental Health Communities (OMHCs), such as Reddit, have witnessed a surge in popularity as go-to platforms for seeking information and support in managing mental health needs. Platforms like Reddit offer immediate interactions with…
Many benefits of online communities---such as obtaining new information, opportunities, and social connections---increase with size. Thus, a ``successful'' online community often evokes an image of hundreds of thousands of users, and…
Online conversations can go in many directions: some turn out poorly due to antisocial behavior, while others turn out positively to the benefit of all. Research on improving online spaces has focused primarily on detecting and reducing…
Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to identify the factors influencing the growth of healthcare virtual communities of practice (VCoPs) through a seven-year longitudinal study conducted using metrics from social-network and semantic…
After the COVID-19 pandemic caused internet usage to grow by 70%, there has been an increased number of people all across the world using social media. Applications like Twitter, Meta Threads, YouTube, and Reddit have become increasingly…
Research from a variety of fields including psychology and linguistics have found correlations and patterns in personal attributes and behavior, but efforts to understand the broader heterogeneity in human behavior have not yet integrated…
This study investigates how social media sentiment derived from Reddit comments can be used to enhance investment decisions in a way that offers higher returns with lower risk. Using BERTweet we analyzed over 2 million Reddit comments from…
We study user behavior in the courses offered by a major Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) provider during the summer of 2013. Since social learning is a key element of scalable education in MOOCs and is done via online discussion forums,…
Many Web platforms rely on user collaboration to generate high-quality content: Wiki, Q&A communities, etc. Understanding and modeling the different collaborative behaviors is therefore critical. However, collaboration patterns are…
The architecture of public discourse has been profoundly reshaped by social media platforms, which mediate interactions at an unprecedented scale and complexity. This study analyzes user behavior across six platforms over 33 years,…