TY - GEN
T1 - Conversations gone alright
T2 - 2021 World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2021
AU - Bao, Jiajun
AU - Wu, Junjie
AU - Zhang, Yiming
AU - Chandrasekharan, Eshwar
AU - Jurgens, David
N1 - Funding Information:
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants No 1850221 and 2007251 and the NVIDIA Corporation through a GPU grant.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 ACM.
PY - 2021/4/19
Y1 - 2021/4/19
N2 - Online conversations can go in many directions: some turn out poorly due to antisocial behavior, while others turn out positively to the benefit of all. Research on improving online spaces has focused primarily on detecting and reducing antisocial behavior. Yet we know little about positive outcomes in online conversations and how to increase them - is a prosocial outcome simply the lack of antisocial behavior or something more? Here, we examine how conversational features lead to prosocial outcomes within online discussions. We introduce a series of new theory-inspired metrics to define prosocial outcomes such as mentoring and esteem enhancement. Using a corpus of 26M Reddit conversations, we show that these outcomes can be forecasted from the initial comment of an online conversation, with the best model providing a relative 24% improvement over human forecasting performance at ranking conversations for predicted outcome. Our results indicate that platforms can use these early cues in their algorithmic ranking of early conversations to prioritize better outcomes.
AB - Online conversations can go in many directions: some turn out poorly due to antisocial behavior, while others turn out positively to the benefit of all. Research on improving online spaces has focused primarily on detecting and reducing antisocial behavior. Yet we know little about positive outcomes in online conversations and how to increase them - is a prosocial outcome simply the lack of antisocial behavior or something more? Here, we examine how conversational features lead to prosocial outcomes within online discussions. We introduce a series of new theory-inspired metrics to define prosocial outcomes such as mentoring and esteem enhancement. Using a corpus of 26M Reddit conversations, we show that these outcomes can be forecasted from the initial comment of an online conversation, with the best model providing a relative 24% improvement over human forecasting performance at ranking conversations for predicted outcome. Our results indicate that platforms can use these early cues in their algorithmic ranking of early conversations to prioritize better outcomes.
KW - Antisocial behavior
KW - Behavioral forecasting
KW - Prosocial behavior
KW - Social media
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85107994853&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85107994853&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3442381.3450122
DO - 10.1145/3442381.3450122
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85107994853
T3 - The Web Conference 2021 - Proceedings of the World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2021
SP - 1134
EP - 1145
BT - The Web Conference 2021 - Proceedings of the World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2021
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
Y2 - 19 April 2021 through 23 April 2021
ER -