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Seven Words You Can't Say on Answerbag: Contested Terms and Conflict in a Social Q&A Community

Published: 10 July 2016 Publication History

Abstract

On a social Q&A site with thousands of transactions per day, what constitutes inappropriate content is not always obvious. In virtual communities such as this, users largely define and continuously renegotiate what constitutes appropriate participation, and moderators must allow healthy debate while curbing conflict. This paper presents an empirical analysis of Answerbag, a social Q&A site where moderators combined content analysis and transaction log analysis with information retrieval principles to identify non-obvious words associated with reported and unreported instances of conflict on the site. Content and transaction log analysis revealed the processes by which Answerbag users negotiated the meaning of contested terms, and suggested instances when conflict was a positive force for the community.

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Cited By

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  • (2021)The Impact of Question Type and Topic on Misinformation and Trolling on Yahoo! AnswersDiversity, Divergence, Dialogue10.1007/978-3-030-71305-8_10(127-140)Online publication date: 19-Mar-2021
  • (2021)The relationships between misinformation and outrage trolling tactics on two Yahoo! Answers categoriesJournal of the Association for Information Science and Technology10.1002/asi.24497Online publication date: 21-May-2021
  • (2018)From Royals to VegansThe 41st International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research & Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3209978.3210058(835-844)Online publication date: 27-Jun-2018

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  1. Seven Words You Can't Say on Answerbag: Contested Terms and Conflict in a Social Q&A Community

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    HT '16: Proceedings of the 27th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media
    July 2016
    354 pages
    ISBN:9781450342476
    DOI:10.1145/2914586
    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 the author(s) 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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    Published: 10 July 2016

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    Author Tags

    1. boundary objects
    2. community Q&A
    3. community management
    4. online communities

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    HT '16: 27th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media
    July 10 - 13, 2016
    Nova Scotia, Halifax, Canada

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    HT '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 16 of 54 submissions, 30%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 378 of 1,158 submissions, 33%

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    View all
    • (2021)The Impact of Question Type and Topic on Misinformation and Trolling on Yahoo! AnswersDiversity, Divergence, Dialogue10.1007/978-3-030-71305-8_10(127-140)Online publication date: 19-Mar-2021
    • (2021)The relationships between misinformation and outrage trolling tactics on two Yahoo! Answers categoriesJournal of the Association for Information Science and Technology10.1002/asi.24497Online publication date: 21-May-2021
    • (2018)From Royals to VegansThe 41st International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research & Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3209978.3210058(835-844)Online publication date: 27-Jun-2018

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