TY - GEN
T1 - The impact of anonymity in online communities
AU - Omernick, Eli
AU - Sood, Sara Owsley
PY - 2013/12/1
Y1 - 2013/12/1
N2 - The scale of participation on social news sites has challenged community managers, leaving them unable to detect and remove all inappropriate content by hand. Automated insult and profanity detection systems have helped, but have failed to address the problem of why this content is contributed in the first place. That is, what implications do interface design choices have on the content being generated? One such design choice is whether or not a site allows anonymous comments. What impact does allowing anonymity have on the quality or quantity of participation on a site? This case study analyses the impact of anonymity on a technology social news site, TechCrunch.com. TechCrunch is ideal for this study in that it underwent a shift from allowing anonymous comments (using the Disqus commenting platform) to disallowing them (using the Facebook commenting platform) in March of 2011. We compare the quality of anonymous and real identity comments through measures of reading level, relevance to the target article, negativity and presence of swear words and anger words. We couple this qualitative analysis with a quantitative analysis of the change in participation to give a complete picture of the impact of anonymity in this online community, with the end goal of informing design on similar social news sites.
AB - The scale of participation on social news sites has challenged community managers, leaving them unable to detect and remove all inappropriate content by hand. Automated insult and profanity detection systems have helped, but have failed to address the problem of why this content is contributed in the first place. That is, what implications do interface design choices have on the content being generated? One such design choice is whether or not a site allows anonymous comments. What impact does allowing anonymity have on the quality or quantity of participation on a site? This case study analyses the impact of anonymity on a technology social news site, TechCrunch.com. TechCrunch is ideal for this study in that it underwent a shift from allowing anonymous comments (using the Disqus commenting platform) to disallowing them (using the Facebook commenting platform) in March of 2011. We compare the quality of anonymous and real identity comments through measures of reading level, relevance to the target article, negativity and presence of swear words and anger words. We couple this qualitative analysis with a quantitative analysis of the change in participation to give a complete picture of the impact of anonymity in this online community, with the end goal of informing design on similar social news sites.
KW - Anonymity
KW - Comment threads
KW - Community management
KW - Negativity
KW - Online communities
KW - Profanity
KW - User-generated content
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84893581077&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.1109/SocialCom.2013.80
DO - 10.1109/SocialCom.2013.80
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84893581077
SN - 9780769551371
T3 - Proceedings - SocialCom/PASSAT/BigData/EconCom/BioMedCom 2013
SP - 526
EP - 535
BT - Proceedings - SocialCom/PASSAT/BigData/EconCom/BioMedCom 2013
T2 - 2013 ASE/IEEE Int. Conf. on Social Computing, SocialCom 2013, the 2013 ASE/IEEE Int. Conf. on Big Data, BigData 2013, the 2013 Int. Conf. on Economic Computing, EconCom 2013, the 2013 PASSAT 2013, and the 2013 ASE/IEEE Int. Conf. on BioMedCom 2013
Y2 - 8 September 2013 through 14 September 2013
ER -