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Anonymity interacting with participation on a Q&A site

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Abstract

This article presents a study that investigates how anonymity influences user participation in an online question-and-answer platform [Quora (https://www.quora.com/)]. The study is one step in identifying hypotheses that can be used to address a research and design issue concerning the role of anonymity in online participation, particularly in sensitive situations where people are seeking social support. Based on the literature, we present a model that describes the factors that influence participation. These factors were used when analyzing the answers to questions in the health category on Quora. The results of this study were completed by a survey asking Quora users about their use of the anonymity feature. The main result is that the only significant difference between anonymous and non-anonymous answers is that: with anonymous answers, social appreciation correlated with the answer’s length.

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Notes

  1. http://www.topic-aal.eu/.

  2. http://goo.gl/qf6hBj.

  3. https://github.com/jekyll/classifier-reborn.

  4. https://github.com/clbustos/statsample.

  5. Also see http://selp.eu/lexique/pronoms-personnels-2.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been supported by European Union, ANR, and national solidarity fund for autonomy through AAL program (Project AALI 2012-TOPIC). We thank our colleagues Nadia Gauducheau and Michel Marcoccia for their help in building the model and identifying the markers, and our colleague Valentin Berthou for the help with categorizing the questions. We also thank the reviewer for his improvements.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. UMR 6281, CNRS, ICD, HETIC, Tech-CICO, Troyes University of Technology, 12 Rue Marie Curie - CS 42060, 10004, Troyes Cedex, France

    Malte Paskuda & Myriam Lewkowicz

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  1. Malte Paskuda
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  2. Myriam Lewkowicz
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Correspondence to Malte Paskuda.

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Paskuda, M., Lewkowicz, M. Anonymity interacting with participation on a Q&A site. AI & Soc 32, 369–381 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-016-0660-9

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