Visualizing "Answer People" In Online Discussions

Marc Smith writes "'Answer people,' the folks who contribute much of the value in the Internet, are a small minority of all online users. According to a recent paper my co-authors and I have published in the Journal of Social Structure, less than 2% of authors in Usenet newsgroups are likely to be the helpful 'answer person' type — authors who reply to many other people with brief replies. The paper Visualizing the Signatures of Social Roles in Online Discussion Groups contains social network visualizations of the ties created when authors reply to one another. These images highlight the difference between these helpful folks and other types of contributors. The findings may apply to other threaded discussions, maybe even here at Slashdot."

Comments

hmmm

[jadin]

I've noticed when browsing for answers for specific problems I'm having, I'll find an answer I could post to some random web forum. Most of those however require registration, and I never bother. If I'm already a member I'll post it, but sometimes it's just not worth jumping through a dozen hoops to post a random answer. Especially considering they might never check that six month old post ever again.

I'm sure I'm not alone.

Re:hmmm

[fbartho]

Use the bugmenot firefox extension! That's what I do... I don't know about the long term effects of giving good karma to random usernames on random boards, are, however it lets me feel good about helping out, even if in the end it's anonymous and nobody can ever tie it back to me.

Re:Wait, I'm confused...

[Kadin2048]

Surprises me too.

However, a few years ago there was someone who was talking about an "imminent Usenet renaissance." Not sure that's actually occurred but their theory was that most ISPs no longer make it easy to get on Usenet, so the users who actually participate in discussions there are usually fairly interested / experts. In other words, most of the AOL users / script kiddies / etc. are busy trolling PHPBB sites, because they're easier to get into than Usenet.

Unfortunately because of the spam problems, there's really no point in reading unmoderated groups IMO.

From an architectural standpoint I really like Usenet. It's just unfortunate that upgrades to it that would have curtailed spam and kept it alive and more mainstream never caught on. It's certainly a better way of having a global discussion system than discrete, centralized web forums, where a single server crash (or rogue admin, or hacking) can eliminate thousands or millions of discussions in an instant. Usenet is the collective memory of the internet, thanks to caching services; very few web forums can compete with that. (Actually I'd say that Slashdot is one of the few that does, because Slashdot has been consistently good about preserving old content and not deleting stuff; most database-driven web sites aren't like that, though.)

Almost makes me want to fire up my newsreader and see if there's anything there to see. Almost.

Paying Them

[resistant]

I'd be willing to bet that an effective universal micropayment system coupled with a decent reputation network would bring quite a few more of these people out of the (lurker) woodwork, especially the ones who otherwise would be more moved to do other things that actually pay the bills. Forums, Usenet groups, Wikis, etc., not only offer no payment, their feedback mechanisms are poor to non-existent. Even the best of the "super-contributors" can become burned out or discouraged. Even minimal payment would be enough for a great many people who just want to know in some solid way that their efforts are indeed appreciated.

It's a hard social and business problem over which I've been ruminating for years. :)

Re:Paying Them

[Jugalator]

Google did this with Google Answers, but it's retired. :-( I liked that idea far more than Yahoo! Answers (Google's quality obviously became waay higher) and wonder if there's a well used replacement?

Re:Karmic Value

[marcello_dl]

Indeed but I usually help people out because i feel part of some communities. When I have problems I see somebody took the time to do howtos, so when I can help I do it myself.

Who cares about the status. (did I mention my ***EXCELLENT*** karma on slashdot?)

2000s Usenet != 1980s Usenet

[billstewart]

I'm disappointed to see that the paper doesn't discuss evolution over time of the conversational roles. There were hardly even any reference papers from before about 1999, so it's unlikely that any of them used pre-1997 data, even though it's all there.

Back in the early 1980s, I used to read all of Usenet. It's changed a bit since then :-) (It helped to have a gimongous laser printer in the basement that could do double-sided 4-up printing, though I think by the time we got that I'd stopped reading a few newsgroups like net.singles. Dead trees were a lot faster than 1200 baud.) In the late 80s I was running it on a leftover machine with a 32 Mbps hard drive. I wasn't reading much of Usenet by the mid-90s, but it still had active discussions in a few newsgroups.

And then there was the September that Never Ended, and there were still a few years of viability before the bandwidth expansion forced most ISPs to stop carrying it.

Slashdot may be full of answer people.

[Colin Smith]

Which ironically could be why it's so popular.

1: Most don't initiate a topic. Simply reading the latest cool stories.
2: Look at the social network diagram of an answer person. Few interconnections. It indicates introverted social behaviour, which is classic computer/science etc geek/nerd. It's not like we're short of those.
3: Hands up the system administrators and technical support analysts.

In fact, the way Slashdot is structured with the constant new topics may even attract "answer people" over other bulletin board cultures. It'd be interesting to see an analysis done here. It'd be interesting if different bulletin board systems encouraged different types of people to use them. Hmm, you could even track the types of interactions based on the age of the story and by UID to see if the general culture has changed.

Interesting social research.

Not just Karmic Value

[Colin Smith]

Well yes people like to be favorably for contributing positively. There's an added benefit.

http://lowery.tamu.edu/Teaming/Morgan1/sld023.htm

The bottom 90% "teach others" is a fabulous aid to learning yourself. If you're interested in a subject, someone asks a question and you answer it after a bit of research, you're going to understand and remember the stuff well.

Re:2000s Usenet != 1980s Usenet

[wordsthatendinq]

I'm disappointed to see that the paper doesn't discuss evolution over time of the conversational roles. You can't expect a social science paper to do everything known to mankind, and this paper does a heck of a lot of things. In fact, it might take this paper to be cited a few times before some other social scientist picks up on the historical data.

I was just at the conference where Marc Smith (incidentally, an author of the paper and author of the /. story) presented this paper, and what I thought was most interesting was not just the computational tools they used to visualize thread data (apparently they existed for a long time but I wasn't aware of them), but the team's ability to use these tools to characterize users to a high degree of accuracy. What disappoints me about Smith's post is that he only emphasizes ``answer people'', while in their study they could accurately identify many other types of users including spammers and flame warriors, without looking at message content.

What makes this cool is that traditional social network analysis has not done very much in differentiating types of relations between users. They just draw lines between users, and the resulting network diagram is an incomprehensible mess. These people differentiate between incoming and outgoing messages, initiations and replies, first visits and returns. Maybe social scientists should have figured this out sooner, but better now than never.

Depends on topic

[Tablizer]

Wouldn't this depend on the topic? A topic like "MS-Access" would be where people ask and answer technical questions; but not politics forums, which are by their nature mostly philosphical debates. Thus, if you measure the political forum for quantity of questions like, "when was Lincoln born?", you will indeed find very little and I would expect it to be that way. They might be counting the wrong thing.