Isaac Waller
ABSTRACT
In many online platforms, people must choose how broadly to allocate their energy. Should one concentrate on a narrow area of focus, and become a specialist, or apply oneself more broadly, and become a generalist? In this work, we propose a principled measure of how generalist or specialist a user is, and study behavior in online platforms through this lens. To do this, we construct highly accurate community embeddings that represent communities in a high-dimensional space. We develop sets of community analogies and use them to optimize our embeddings so that they encode community relationships extremely well. Based on these embeddings, we introduce a natural measure of activity diversity, the GS-score.
Applying our embedding-based measure to online platforms, we observe a broad spectrum of user activity styles, from extreme specialists to extreme generalists, in both community membership on Reddit and programming contributions on GitHub. We find that activity diversity is related to many important phenomena of user behavior. For example, specialists are much more likely to stay in communities they contribute to, but generalists are much more likely to remain on platforms as a whole. We also find that generalists engage with significantly more diverse sets of users than specialists do. Furthermore, our methodology leads to a simple algorithm for community recommendation, matching state-of-the-art methods like collaborative filtering. Our methods and results introduce an important new dimension of online user behavior and shed light on many aspects of online platform use.
- Lada A Adamic, Xiao Wei, Jiang Yang, Sean Gerrish, Kevin K Nam, and Gavin S Clarkson. 2010. Individual focus and knowledge contribution. arXiv preprint arXiv:1002.0561(2010).Google Scholar
- Katharine A Anderson. 2017. Skill networks and measures of complex human capital. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) (2017).Google ScholarCross Ref
- Jason Baumgartner. 2017. pushshift.io Reddit archive. https://pushshift.io/. (2017). Accessed: 2018-07-23.Google Scholar
- Isaiah Berlin. 1953. The hedgehog and the fox. Weidenfeld & Nicolson.Google Scholar
- Hendrik Bode, Frederick Mosteller, John W Tukey, and Charles Winsor. 1949. The education of a scientific generalist. Science (1949).Google Scholar
- Elisabeth Bublitz and Florian Noseleit. 2014. The skill balancing act: when does broad expertise pay off?Small Business Economics42, 1 (2014).Google Scholar
- Eunjoon Cho, Seth A Myers, and Jure Leskovec. 2011. Friendship and mobility: user movement in location-based social networks. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Nicholas B Davies, John R Krebs, and Stuart A West. 2012. An introduction to behavioural ecology. John Wiley & Sons.Google Scholar
- Will Hamilton, Zhitao Ying, and Jure Leskovec. 2017. Inductive representation learning on large graphs. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS). Google ScholarDigital Library
- William L Hamilton, Justine Zhang, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Dan Jurafsky, and Jure Leskovec. 2017. Loyalty in online communities. In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM).Google ScholarCross Ref
- Srijan Kumar, William L Hamilton, Jure Leskovec, and Dan Jurafsky. 2018. Community interaction and conflict on the web. In Proceedings of the 2018 World Wide Web Conference (WWW). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Erin Leahey. 2007. Not by productivity alone: How visibility and specialization contribute to academic earnings. American Sociological Review72, 4 (2007), 533-561.Google Scholar
- Omer Levy and Yoav Goldberg. 2014. Dependency-based word embeddings. In Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers).Google ScholarCross Ref
- Omer Levy and Yoav Goldberg. 2014. Neural word embedding as implicit matrix factorization. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Trevor Martin. 2017. community2vec: Vector representations of online communities encode semantic relationships. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on NLP and Computational Social Science.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Tomas Mikolov, Kai Chen, Greg Corrado, and Jeffrey Dean. 2013. Efficient estimation of word representations in vector space. arXiv preprint arXiv:1301.3781(2013).Google Scholar
- Tomas Mikolov, Ilya Sutskever, Kai Chen, Greg S Corrado, and Jeff Dean. 2013. Distributed representations of words and phrases and their compositionality. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Scott Page. 2007. The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies.Princeton University Press. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Bryan Perozzi, Rami Al-Rfou, and Steven Skiena. 2014. Deepwalk: Online learning of social representations. In Proceedings of the 20th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Steffen Rendle, Christoph Freudenthaler, Zeno Gantner, and Lars Schmidt-Thieme. 2009. BPR: Bayesian personalized ranking from implicit feedback. In Proceedings of the 25th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Kurt C Stange. 2009. The generalist approach. The Annals of Family Medicine7, 3 (2009).Google Scholar
- Rosemary Stevens. 2017. Medical practice in modern England: the impact of specialization and state medicine. Routledge.Google Scholar
- Chenhao Tan and Lillian Lee. 2015. All who wander: On the prevalence and characteristics of multi-community engagement. In Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Jian Tang, Meng Qu, Mingzhe Wang, Ming Zhang, Jun Yan, and Qiaozhu Mei. 2015. Line: Large-scale information network embedding. In Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Philip E Tetlock. 2005. Expert political judgment: How good is it? How can we know?Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
- Justine Zhang, William L Hamilton, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Dan Jurafsky, and Jure Leskovec. 2017. Community identity and user engagement in a multi-community landscape. In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM).Google ScholarCross Ref
Recommendations
Early Activity Diversity: Assessing Newcomer Retention from First-Session Activity
CSCW '16: Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social ComputingOnline communities suffer serious newcomer attrition. This paper explores whether and how early activity diversity - the degree to which a newcomer engages in a wide range of a site's activities in the first session - is associated with their longevity. ...
A Typology of Online Communities and Community Supporting Platforms
HICSS '01: Proceedings of the 34th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences ( HICSS-34)-Volume 7 - Volume 7There is a broad agreement that the establishment of communities among users of online platforms can contribute significantly to the success of the platform. This provoked the demand for guidelines on how to build an online community. Currently, ...
A community recommendation method based on social networks for web 2.0-based IPTV
DSP'09: Proceedings of the 16th international conference on Digital Signal ProcessingWeb 2.0-based IPTV is a new Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) infrastructure that allows users to participate in content creation and consumption through Web-based communities that are formed based on user interests. However, there are some ...
Comments