Better When It Was Smaller? Community Content and Behavior After Massive Growth
Better When It Was Smaller? Community Content and Behavior After Massive Growth
复制标题
越小越好吗？
DOI：
10.1609/icwsm.v11i1.14884
复制
发表时间：
2017
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Michael S. Bernstein
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Zhiyuan Jerry Lin;Niloufar Salehi;Bowen Yao;Yiqi Chen;Michael S. Bernstein
在线社区对会员数量的增长有着爱恨交织的关系：新会员带来了新的视角，但老会员担心增长会打断社区的社会动态，降低内容质量。为了对这两种理论进行仲裁，我们分析了来自10个Reddit子社区的超过4500万条评论，这些评论是在每个子社区被添加到所有Reddit用户的默认设置中时发生的。利用这些自然实验，我们测试内容投票模式，语言模式和社区网络模式在默认之前和之后的变化。结果支持这样一种说法，即社区保持高质量，即使在增长后也与以前的自我相似。在社区违约后，支持率暂时下降，但社区很快恢复到违约前甚至更高的水平。同样，对低质量帖子的投诉在被默认后不会增加。强适度也有助于保持普遍的好评和低投诉水平。社区的语言使用在被默认后不会变得更像Reddit的其他部分。然而，增长确实对注意力产生了一些影响：社区默认后，社区成员将其活动集中在较小比例的帖子上。
Online communities have a love-hate relationship with membership growth: new members bring fresh perspectives, but old-timers worry that growth interrupts the community’s social dynamic and lowers content quality. To arbitrate these two theories, we analyze over 45 million comments from 10 Reddit subcommunities following an exogenous shock when each subcommunity was added to the default set for all Reddit users. Capitalizing on these natural experiments, we test for changes to the content vote patterns, linguistic patterns, and community network patterns before and after being defaulted. Results support a narrative that the communities remain high-quality and similar to their previous selves even post-growth. There is a temporary dip in upvote scores right after the communities were defaulted, but the communities quickly recover to pre-default or even higher levels. Likewise, complaints about low-quality posts do not rise in frequency after getting defaulted. Strong moderation also helps keep upvotes common and complaint levels low. Communities’ language use does not become more like the rest of Reddit after getting defaulted. However, growth does have some impact on attention: community members cluster their activity around a smaller proportion of posts after the community is defaulted.