Impact of group norms in eliciting response in a goal driven virtual community

Abstract

With the proliferation of social media into our daily lives, online communities have become an important platform for collaborative learning and education. To connect users with varying knowledge levels and increase the net learning throughput, these communities often follow a question-answer based approach. Understanding what drives attention to help-seeking questions can reduce the amount of questions that go unnoticed or remain unanswered by the community. In this paper we discuss an important feature that affects the activity of the community, namely the community norms. We present a machine learning based trigger-driven feedback model that functions by (i) differentiating between help-seeking questions and follow-up posts - i.e. posts that are part of an ongoing discussion, and (ii) a dynamic intervention scheme to help improve question formulation. Our findings show that adhering to the community norms significantly increases the chance of eliciting a response.