The question I'm solving in my dissertation is "Do any signs exist that indicate that community will die or will continue to exist successfully?". I don't mean any Shaman signs and i'm not trying to read coffee fortune. it is pure science.
I'm following the life of communities and community knowledge. A community is impossible to survive without users thus first of all the users need to be analyzed. I'm examining what are users behaviors, where a behavior is a broad term in Internet world.
One of the examples of such an examination was done in the paper Activity Span. The researchers analyzed survival patterns of users in web community. They were considering Yahoo Answers, Baidu Knows (Chinese) and Naver Knowledge-IN (Korean) knowledge sharing systems. The outcomes the researchers come to: for all three communities the users need to be trained to ask questions otherwise the questions remain without answers. As it was expected, people don't leave community if they got answers to their questions. The experts of communities stay longer there if their answers were awarded (best answers).
The users lifespan implies the lifespan of their community. Surely if there are clear indications of users that are going to finish their life in a community, it can be used as a sign that community will die. Let say if there are questions that nobody answers and answers nobody thanks for produce an alarm for community managers that something have to be done about their community or it disappear.
Things about communities are not so simple to figure out. A community consists not only of askers, answerers. Other types of users exist. Their behaviors are dependent on the activity in posting answers and questions, in participating in discussions, in sentiments they use in posts, in their intents. I state here that it is a complex task to describe a community as it has many participants with different behaviors, i.e different patterns. Thus it makes hard to imagine what happens with the community afterwards: is it die or survive?
I'm following the life of communities and community knowledge. A community is impossible to survive without users thus first of all the users need to be analyzed. I'm examining what are users behaviors, where a behavior is a broad term in Internet world.
One of the examples of such an examination was done in the paper Activity Span. The researchers analyzed survival patterns of users in web community. They were considering Yahoo Answers, Baidu Knows (Chinese) and Naver Knowledge-IN (Korean) knowledge sharing systems. The outcomes the researchers come to: for all three communities the users need to be trained to ask questions otherwise the questions remain without answers. As it was expected, people don't leave community if they got answers to their questions. The experts of communities stay longer there if their answers were awarded (best answers).
The users lifespan implies the lifespan of their community. Surely if there are clear indications of users that are going to finish their life in a community, it can be used as a sign that community will die. Let say if there are questions that nobody answers and answers nobody thanks for produce an alarm for community managers that something have to be done about their community or it disappear.
Things about communities are not so simple to figure out. A community consists not only of askers, answerers. Other types of users exist. Their behaviors are dependent on the activity in posting answers and questions, in participating in discussions, in sentiments they use in posts, in their intents. I state here that it is a complex task to describe a community as it has many participants with different behaviors, i.e different patterns. Thus it makes hard to imagine what happens with the community afterwards: is it die or survive?
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