Exploring characteristics and effects of user participation in online social Q&A sites

Abstract

People are seeking more meaningful and customized information than what is obtained by keywords-based queries and document retrieval through a search engine. In this paper, we look at a set of such services, referred to as social Q&A sites. With sites such as Google Answers, and primarily Yahoo! Answers, we attempt to understand various characteristics of user participation and their possible effects on the design and success of the site. We discuss these social Q&A sites by comparing their designs based on user participation and point out the effects and defects of each. We show that active user participation is the core component of these sites. We further analyze rich data collected from more than 55,000 Yahoo! Answers user profiles to understand the nature of user participation, and the quality of this participation. With our analysis we discover that Yahoo! Answers model implicitly encourages users to make an active contribution. An important contribution of the work reported here is the framework with which various factors relating to user participation in social Q&A sites can be studied.

Social reference: Toward a unifying theory

“…Answers, Answerbag, and WikiAnswers). Reputation is determined by a set of site-specific criteria; a few highly active users on each of these sites only answer questions and do not ask many (Adamic et al, 2008;Shachaf, in press;Shah et al, 2008;Zhang, Ackerman, Adamic, & Nam, 2008). Despite the fact that users can participate in various roles (ask, answer, evaluate, and categorize questions) on these sites simultaneously (Bian et al, 2008), only about one fifth of the users participate in dual roles, asking and responding to questions (Adamic et al, 2008;Shachaf, in press).…”

Social Q&A

“…Answers users based on their experience level and found that users at higher levels tended to be contributors more than consumers, and that they created a disproportionate share of the content and value of the site. However, their efforts did not go unrewarded by the community: Shah et al (2008) observe that while the highest ranking users did not earn as many plaudits for submitting interesting questions as those at lower levels, they did earn more Best Answer designations, and only the latter carries with it point rewards leading to higher levels. High-ranking users may in fact be the most skilled answerers, or they may be more economically rational actors, and employ conscious strategies to maximize their potential reward.…”

“…Are there external factors, such as relationships and communications across other sites, that influence participants' behavior? Shah et al (2008) also identified a challenge common to most comparative studies of SQA sites: extracting comparable data samples. Although Yahoo!…”

“…SQA sites offer enticements such as level titles, badges, public acknowledgment on leaderboards, increased rating power, and other site privileges as a reward for the accumulation of positive rating points, and the social reward structures of Yahoo! Answers have been identified as critical to the site's success (Shah, Oh, & Oh, 2008).…”

“…Another cross-site comparison was carried out by Shah et al (2008), who used a crawler to gather information from 55,005 Yahoo! Answers users and 83,846 Google Answers users, which the authors report was the entire user population of the latter site at that time.…”