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Are user-contributed reviews community property?: exploring the beliefs and practices of reviewers

Published: 02 May 2013 Publication History

Abstract

User-contributed reviews form the cornerstone of many Web communities and online services. People rely on reviews as a source of information about products, services, creative efforts, and the reputation of other buyers and sellers. Although specific rights about the ownership and control of these reviews are spelled out in licensing agreements and by copyright law, most reviewers' actions are guided instead by evolving social norms. In this paper, we report on 203 responses to a questionnaire offered to reliable US-based Mechanical Turk workers who have written different types of online reviews. The questionnaire uses a series of realistic scenarios and specific questions about recent practice to probe participants about how online reviews may be reused, archived, re-purposed, deleted, and otherwise manipulated. We use these collective attitudes and behaviors to arrive at a picture of current social norms and examine user-contributed reviews as a counterpart to other types of online content, including photos and tweets.

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Cited By

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  • (2020)Designing Positive Behavior Change Experiences: a Systematic Review and Sentiment Analysis based on Online User Reviews of Fitness and Nutrition Mobile ApplicationsProceedings of the 19th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia10.1145/3428361.3428403(152-161)Online publication date: 22-Nov-2020
  • (2019)Understanding and Encouraging Online Reviewing With a Selection-Based Review SystemInteracting with Computers10.1093/iwc/iwz02931:5(446-464)Online publication date: 12-Dec-2019
  • (2015)Exploring the Ownership and Persistent Value of Facebook ContentProceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing10.1145/2675133.2675203(712-723)Online publication date: 28-Feb-2015
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    cover image ACM Conferences
    WebSci '13: Proceedings of the 5th Annual ACM Web Science Conference
    May 2013
    481 pages
    ISBN:9781450318891
    DOI:10.1145/2464464
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 02 May 2013

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    Author Tags

    1. information rights
    2. product reviews
    3. removal
    4. reuse

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    WebSci '13: Web Science 2013
    May 2 - 4, 2013
    Paris, France

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    Overall Acceptance Rate 245 of 933 submissions, 26%

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    View all
    • (2020)Designing Positive Behavior Change Experiences: a Systematic Review and Sentiment Analysis based on Online User Reviews of Fitness and Nutrition Mobile ApplicationsProceedings of the 19th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia10.1145/3428361.3428403(152-161)Online publication date: 22-Nov-2020
    • (2019)Understanding and Encouraging Online Reviewing With a Selection-Based Review SystemInteracting with Computers10.1093/iwc/iwz02931:5(446-464)Online publication date: 12-Dec-2019
    • (2015)Exploring the Ownership and Persistent Value of Facebook ContentProceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing10.1145/2675133.2675203(712-723)Online publication date: 28-Feb-2015
    • (2013)Experiences surveying the crowdProceedings of the 5th Annual ACM Web Science Conference10.1145/2464464.2464485(234-243)Online publication date: 2-May-2013

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