Abstract
Based on various factors such as experience, interest, and motivation, users in any system choose to perform certain activities more than the others. In this study, we investigate a similar behavior and its dynamics in the websites of StackExchange. We find that most of the users in these websites tend to contribute predominantly to one of the activities available on these websites. Such a behavior yields a high-level distribution of users across the activities, referred to as User-distribution. We find that this distribution varies for different websites of StackExchange. We also observe that the users contributing to different activities trigger each other to provide more contribution. Using these insights, we build a model that explains the effect of change in user-distribution on the amount of knowledge produced on these websites. The model shows that one can formulate an optimal ecosystem by motivating the right kind of users, which leads to the maximum fostering of knowledge on these websites.
A preliminary version of this work reporting the activity-selection behavior of users is published here [7].
J. S. Saini—The author contributed while he was a student at Indian Institute of Technology Ropar, India.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by WOS-A, Department of Science and Technology, India [SR/WOS-A/ET-1058/2014] and CSRI, Department of Science and Technology, India [SR/CSRI/344/2016].
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Chhabra, A., Iyengar, S.R.S., Saini, J.S., Malik, V. (2020). Activity-selection Behavior and Optimal User-distribution in Q&A Websites. In: Nguyen, N.T., Hoang, B.H., Huynh, C.P., Hwang, D., Trawiński, B., Vossen, G. (eds) Computational Collective Intelligence. ICCCI 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12496. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63007-2_67
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