Detecting Platform Effects in Online Discussions

Abstract

Online discussions are the essence of many social platforms on the Internet. These platforms are receiving increasing interest because of their potential to become deliberative spaces. Many studies have proposed approaches to measure online deliberation and to evaluate which are the best design principles for deliberative online platforms. However, little research has focused on how deliberation in online platforms is affected by the arrival of events like the emergence of new topics or the modification of platform features. In this article we present a methodology to detect events that affect online deliberation in online discussions. Our results on Menéame, the most popular Spanish social news site, show that a change in how discussions are shown to the user, from a linear to a hierarchical conversation view, significantly enhanced deliberation. In particular we observe that this type of interface induced argumentative structures of online discussion.

Deliberative Platform Design: The Case Study of the Online Discussions in Decidim Barcelona

“…The combination of both approaches makes Decidim Barcelona an interesting case study for multiple reasons. First, recent studies have shown that conversation threading in online discussion platforms promotes the emergence of discussion cascades with higher levels of reciprocity [3] and online deliberation [5]. Second, given that users are able to mark the alignment of comments with the proposal (positive, negative and neutral), we can compare the typical network structures originated by the different types of comment alignment.…”

On the Impact of Choice Architectures on Inequality in Online Donation Platforms

“…Additive decomposability is a structural property of some inequality measures requiring that for any partition G of the population into groups, the measure, I (y), can be expressed as the sum of a "within-group component" I G ω (y) (a weighted sum of subgroup inequality levels) and a "between-group component" I G β (y) (computed by assigning to each element in a subgroup д ∈ G the subgroup's mean benefit µ д ): 2 I (y) = I ω (y) + I β (y). Following [30], we focus on a family of inequality indices called generalized entropy indices that satisfy additive decomposability.…”

“…To this end, prior works have proposed Regression Discontinuity Designs (RDDs) [2,11,17,21]-a quasi-experimental design that reasons about the causal effects of interventions by identifying a threshold above or below which an intervention is assigned. We follow this methodology by comparing the projects before and after a new design feature is introduced.…”

The role of the media with regard to news aggregators. Their presence on Menéame

“…Kaltenbrunner, González, Ruiz de Querol and Volkovich (2011), from a more sociological point of view, studied the behaviour of Menéame users when sharing websites between December 2005 and July 2009, and they concluded that it promotes interaction not only among friends but also that users are more motivated to share content than to establish relations of friendship, which could have positive implications for the design of a networked community. Aragón, Gómez and Kaltenbrunner (2017) detected that a change in the interface used by Menéame to show discussions caused a significant increase in debate among users. No other research has been carried out regarding the aggregator that is being studied in this paper.…”