Abstract
We examine the ways in which answers formulated in the Q&A community Quora are aggregated in a collaborative, computer-mediated body of knowledge. Readers’ experiences are shaped by the answer ranking algorithm, a central rhetorical device on Quora. Answer visibility on page is strongly dependent on the number of upvotes, but also on recency and author popularity. Upvotes depend to some extent on wordcount, followers, and use of visual representations, but not on answer’s age. This indicates that readers engage with Quora as a body of stratified information, rather than pursuing unlimited diversity of perspectives: engagement seems to be limited to the top answers, which represent, for practical purposes, Quora’s persuasive statements.
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Rughiniş, C., Rughiniş, R., Matei, Ş., Nenciu, A.P.M. (2014). Digital Rhetoric in Collaborative Knowledge-Making. In: Stephanidis, C. (eds) HCI International 2014 - Posters’ Extended Abstracts. HCI 2014. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 434. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07857-1_39
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07857-1_39
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-07856-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-07857-1
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