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arXiv:1504.00680cs.SI

Antisocial Behavior in Online Discussion Communities

Justin Cheng, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Jure Leskovec

Abstract

User contributions in the form of posts, comments, and votes are essential to the success of online communities. However, allowing user participation also invites undesirable behavior such as trolling. In this paper, we characterize antisocial behavior in three large online discussion communities by analyzing users who were banned from these communities. We find that such users tend to concentrate their efforts in a small number of threads, are more likely to post irrelevantly, and are more successful at garnering responses from other users. Studying the evolution of these users from the moment they join a community up to when they get banned, we find that not only do they write worse than other users over time, but they also become increasingly less tolerated by the community. Further, we discover that antisocial behavior is exacerbated when community feedback is overly harsh. Our analysis also reveals distinct groups of users with different levels of antisocial behavior that can change over time. We use these insights to identify antisocial users early on, a task of high practical importance to community maintainers.

arXiv comments
ICWSM 2015
Journal reference
DOI
Subjects
cs.SISocial and Information Networks cs.CYComputers and Society stat.APApplications (Statistics) stat.MLMachine Learning (Statistics)

On Hacker News

Linked by 6 identifiable commenters in 7 comments across 5 threads, from Apr 2015 to Aug 2016. Found in 1 HN submission from Apr 2015 to Apr 2015. Open submission discussions.

Comments linking this paper, per year.

Discussed in comments5 threads

  1. News Feed FYI: Further Reducing Clickbait in Feed 1 comment

    • Indeed, I've seen at least one paper where they used Mecanical Turk and aggregated results (by showing the same examples to multiple people) to check for quality. It sounds like they did almost exactly the same thing here. Paper: 'Antisocial Behaviour In Online Discussion…

      room271View on HNParent context

  2. Fighting spam with Haskell 1 comment

    • Definitely not all strategic communications could be detected and blocked. However some research has been tasked on the issue. Take "Antisocial Behavior in Online Discussion Communities" (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1504.00680v1.pdf). This paper, though it terms it 'antisocial'…

      themeekforgotpwView on HNParent context

  3. European court decision: Websites are liable for users’ comments 1 comment

    • This is tangentially related to the same general topic, so I hope it is welcomed here. Methods for state censorship are making their way onto content providers online. For example, in the United States we have a system across Twitter, Reddit, Facebook and other sites whereby…

      themeekforgotpwView on HNParent context

  4. Internet trolls: Proactive policing 3 comments

    • The work is here: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1504.00680v1.pdf According to the data, FBUs (future banned users, aka trolls) are significantly more readable in their writing than NBUs (never banned users). That's certainly surprising. Also of note is that FBUs tend to reply more than…

      diminotenView on HNParent context

    • The article is reporting about a scientific study (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1504.00680v1.pdf discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9399090) that specifically talks about "future banned users" without asking why these users would be banned; The rest of the economist…

      sqrt17View on HNParent context

    • I don't think this technique is going to be all that helpful. This is because you cannot consider specificity and sensitivity without taking into account the prevalence. Let us look at the data from the paper [1]. From the chart on page 3, we can see that the percentage of…

      RcouF1uZ4gsCView on HNParent context

  5. Antisocial Behavior in Online Discussion Communities [pdf] 1 comment

    • The concentration of inside-the-box thinking and bullshit science in this is unbearable, I think it gave me cancer. So was this actually written for April Fools' Day? arXiv:1504.00680v1 [cs.SI] 2 Apr 2015

      perdunovView on HNParent context

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