Understanding lurkers in online communities: A literature review

Sun, Na; Rau, Patrick; Ma, Liang

doi:10.1016/j.chb.2014.05.022

Cited by 429 publications

(310 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…Given the well-established 90-9-1 rule of social media, where 90% of visitors simply read without commenting (9%) or contributing (1%) [31], it is very likely that the narrative framework is reaching a much larger audience than simple user statistics suggest. Note that the 1.99 million posts we studied had an aggregate view count of more than 20 million views from registered users (unregistered users could view the posts, but their views were not recorded and therefore not tabulated).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Mommy Blogs” and the Vaccination Exemption Narrative: Results From A Machine-Learning Approach for Story Aggregation on Parenting Social Media Sites

Tangherlini¹,

Roychowdhury²,

Glenn³

et al. 2016

JMIR Public Health Surveill

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BackgroundSocial media offer an unprecedented opportunity to explore how people talk about health care at a very large scale. Numerous studies have shown the importance of websites with user forums for people seeking information related to health. Parents turn to some of these sites, colloquially referred to as “mommy blogs,” to share concerns about children’s health care, including vaccination. Although substantial work has considered the role of social media, particularly Twitter, in discussions of vaccination and other health care–related issues, there has been little work on describing the underlying structure of these discussions and the role of persuasive storytelling, particularly on sites with no limits on post length. Understanding the role of persuasive storytelling at Internet scale provides useful insight into how people discuss vaccinations, including exemption-seeking behavior, which has been tied to a recent diminution of herd immunity in some communities.ObjectiveTo develop an automated and scalable machine-learning method for story aggregation on social media sites dedicated to discussions of parenting. We wanted to discover the aggregate narrative frameworks to which individuals, through their exchange of experiences and commentary, contribute over time in a particular topic domain. We also wanted to characterize temporal trends in these narrative frameworks on the sites over the study period.MethodsTo ensure that our data capture long-term discussions and not short-term reactions to recent events, we developed a dataset of 1.99 million posts contributed by 40,056 users and viewed 20.12 million times indexed from 2 parenting sites over a period of 105 months. Using probabilistic methods, we determined the topics of discussion on these parenting sites. We developed a generative statistical-mechanical narrative model to automatically extract the underlying stories and story fragments from millions of posts. We aggregated the stories into an overarching narrative framework graph. In our model, stories were represented as network graphs with actants as nodes and their various relationships as edges. We estimated the latent stories circulating on these sites by modeling the posts as a sampling of the hidden narrative framework graph. Temporal trends were examined based on monthly user-poststatistics.ResultsWe discovered that discussions of exemption from vaccination requirements are highly represented. We found a strong narrative framework related to exemption seeking and a culture of distrust of government and medical institutions. Various posts reinforced part of the narrative framework graph in which parents, medical professionals, and religious institutions emerged as key nodes, and exemption seeking emerged as an important edge. In the aggregate story, parents used religion or belief to acquire exemptions to protect their children from vaccines that are required by schools or government institutions, but (allegedly) cause adverse reactions such as autism, pain, compromised immunity, and even dea...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Mommy Blogs” and the Vaccination Exemption Narrative: Results From A Machine-Learning Approach for Story Aggregation on Parenting Social Media Sites

Tangherlini¹,

Roychowdhury²,

Glenn³

et al. 2016

JMIR Public Health Surveill

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Web-designers can design a ranking system for users based on their contribution to the network. Thirdly, value can be achieved if the participant gets some kind of more tangible asset in return for participation e some kind of reward, in the form of money or cheap merchandise such as T-shirts (Sun, Rau, & Ma, 2014). In studies on the effects of rewarding and incentives on participation, it was found that immaterial incentives such as prestige and reputation are the most effective rewards, while tangible assets are found to be successful only in corporate websites, (Malinen, 2015).…”

Section: Conclusion and Recommendationsmentioning

confidence: 97%

Psychological factors behind the lack of participation in online discussions

Amichai‐Hamburger

Gazit

Bar‐Ilan

et al. 2016

Computers in Human Behavior

118

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“…Chen 2011; Sheldon, Abad, & Hinsch, 2011). A recent overview on 'lurking' activities online has found different drivers, such as environmental influence, personal preference, individual-group relationship and security consideration (Sun, Rau, & Ma, 2014). Another study focused specifically on why people use Yelp.com and found that information-seeking, entertainment, convenience, interpersonal utility, and passing time were motivations to read and write restaurant reviews on the website (Hicks et al, 2012).…”

Section: Previous Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%