This paper analyzes antisocial behavior by examining three online communities, CNN.com, CNN.com, and IGN.com. Some of the questions the researchers are curious about are is antisocial behavior innate in a user or does it build up over time and how does the community reaction affects the potential FBU, Future Banned User. A key characteristics of FBU’s are that they focus on individual threads rather than trying to spread their message across an entire platform. The paper concludes by presenting a way to predict which users can potentially be FBU’s; keeping track of how much they post and delete, as well as their content, which a sometimes can contain profanity or derogatory language against other users.
I would have loved to seen this study been done on sites such as Reddit or Stackoverflow as they are more of pure-forum type social networks. FBU’s may not necessarily be trolls though as I’ve seen first-hand on the sites I mentioned above. The community they interact with has the ability to tarnish their reputation e.g. some users on Stackoverflow have a complexity issue and are not fond of ‘simple questions. Once I saw a post a user was asking regarding a string manipulation, he/she had showed their work too so they clearly weren’t out to just get the answer and a lot of comments or replies were mean and quickly got upvotes. One comment was along the lines of “If you’re really stuck doing this you may want to change careers” Down the comment thread I read a new comment from a user defending OP saying that at one point in their career everyone was an amateur or beginner. I viewed the user’s history because it might be another account from OP but it clearly wasn’t because the user had a much higher reputation. Half hour later this user’s comment got deleted as it probably got down voted so much or seeing the backlash he/she received they proceeded to delete it.
What’s a good way to tell apart a different point of view in a particular community from an actual troll? As seen in my reflection ..
What other types of mechanisms besides down voting/banning can social sites do to promote a more positive community?
