The studies presents to us Themail, a program that gives users typographic visualization based off past emails. The team set out to answer two questions: what things does the individual talk about on email and how do their conversations differ across different people. They parsed their words and built two categories, yearly and monthly words. Yearly words revealed most used words over entire year of email exchange while monthly words were the most frequently used in an email conversation over a month. From that they developed two interaction modes for the user to explore with, haystack mode vs needle mode. The first dealt with trying to gain a big picture visualization of the relationships the user had, which most of the times the user already known. However, the needle mode served the purpose of finding specific information, which actually revealed information the user may not have been aware of. At the end, the majority of participants used the “haystack” mode to see their relationships between family members and friends. Alternatively, the users that used Themail in “needle” mode used it more to find work related information.

 

While reading about analyzing relationships via the context of messages, I thought about what kind of results this project would have if it was targeted to romantic couples. However, instead of parsing their email history it should parse their cell text history, for obvious reasons. The study should examine a couple’s text history from the beginning stages of dating until the couple splits or divorces. For couples that have been together for five, ten, fifteen, years, perhaps it’d be good to build a dataset of common words or phrases these couples use and compare them amongst each other with respect to how long they’ve been together. From that, perhaps researchers can build some kind of predictability models for any other couples as they would have plenty of data to compare against it. Does this couple, based off their messaging history, have a greater chance of staying together or breaking up in the near future?  The only challenge to this is most people wouldn’t be open to freely grant access to their messaging history.

 

The difference of words used between same-sex vs opposite-sex messaging?

Would this study yield the same result if it’d done for other languages?

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The study explores how language usage and context on a site like Kickstarter can influence whether or not a project gets funded. The researchers used Beautiful Soup, a widely used scraper, to pull down all the text. Afterwards, they tokenized the words into unigrams, bigrams, and trigrams and then trimmed it down even more by removing certain phrases and words so that their model wouldn’t account for the scarce outliers. Outliers in this context were words or phrases that may be only relevant in certain subjects such as “game credits” or “our menu”. The words were then categorized into six categories: reciprocity, scarcity, social proof, and social identity, linking, and authority. Apart from their findings, such as explicitly labeling certain phrases with projects that get funded vs phrases with projects that don’t, one of their suggestion is to perhaps create a FAQ or “Help Center” which can be of aid to the project developers as it’ll help them select words associated with successful pitches.

 

I’d be interested to see in more detail, an analysis of language usage within successful funded projects vs unsuccessful funded projects. Just because a project was funded does not mean that it was successful. This kind of study would be more to the benefit for the people that fund projects but its long term effects would be that it could help these folks perhaps use their money wisely when deciding to fund a project. Additionally, the methodology and approach used here can help my group’s project as we’re trying to identify which words or phrases are more frequently used in fake news, as oppose to reliable sources.

 

Do we find the same results of successful/unsuccessful phrases if this was done in a different language e.g. Spanish?

Does a high usage of good or bad phrases have the opposite effect?

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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?

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Chat Circles Series talks about graphical communication interfaces. Now more than ever, text is probably the most convenient way to communicate with someone.  However, what text messages fail to convey are emotions and feelings, which play a role in everyday human interaction. The researchers then set about building different interfaces, from Chat Circles, Talking in Circles, TeleDirection and Chatscape to address such challenges. Each has their particular set of features to convey how active a user is, log messages, their role in their social group, etc.; all with the goal to make communication between users more transparent. Chat Circles for example generates a circle on the screen when one types; shrinking or increasing in size and assigning them to the respective users.

 

I think emojis have been a great addition to text communication as they allow users to express themselves more genuinely. Going back through my text conversations there’s not one where I haven’t included an emoji or some sort of gif. I don’t use them as much as some people do but going through my history it seems that about every 4-5 texts. As the paper states, emotions are sometimes lost in a pure-text environment. Not just emojis but now one can add gifs to any text conversation as well, which can more accurately depict how one feels regarding an issue. Gifs are taken from all sources, tv shows, movies, memes, etc. As silly and pointless they may seem to some, I think since they usually reflect humor between two parties well which in turn builds trust. These types of add-ons to text based communication have allowed people to not be constrained to just words when communicating.

 

Can social sites like FB, Twitter, etc., based off users’ icon history, predict their behavior?

What triggers people to add icons to their text conversations?

 

 

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The Identity and Deception article analyzes user identity in virtual communities such as Usenet newsgroups. Usenet is essentially a structured online bulletin board comprised of different interest groups. User identity within Usenet, or any online community for that matter, plays a major role with regard to how a user wants to utilize such platform. Some may choose to genuinely be helpful or some may do so to simply gain attention. It also highlights the difference of identity in the physical world vs identity in an online community. In the physical world, the implied rule is one body hence one identity; our physical body providing a type of anchor with respect to our identity. However, that premise doesn’t hold in the virtual world. Like the article states a man can pretend to be a female while a high school student can claim to be an expert in medicine thus creating false interactions.

The “4chan and /b/” reading is a study that concentrates on how /b/ is particularly successful despite its core principals are that of anonymity and ephemerality. One way the writers studied ephemerality was to time how long a thread maintained itself on the first page and in doing so the researchers discovered that the median thread spent about five seconds on the first page over its lifetime.

 

Anonymity has its advantages and disadvantages, one being that users feel more comfortable expressing their true opinions while the other is that sometimes users can use it to troll or be harmful to others. I’ve seen this first hand on Reddit in particular when people post about their experience working for XYZ company. A lot of insightful and valuable comments still exist but if you try to click on the user the site will direct you to an error page meaning they deleted their account. As a user I understand their concern especially if you’re an employee and perhaps the comments you want to make, though true, may not necessarily reflect well on the company so you want to avoid any type of repercussions. Reddit has yet to add a feature that can allow users to comment or perhaps even posts as anonymous but the challenge is to filter out trolls or negative users.

 

How can online communities go about verifying people are who they say they are? This doesn’t apply to athletes, actors, etc. but more on the educational side of the spectrum

What can social media platforms do to promote anonymity, in hopes to get more genuine responses/comments, while maintaining a safe and positive community?

 

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This study analyzes the complexity and psychological intricacies of user interaction on  FB. After interviewing 13 different FB users the researchers were able to categorize the platform as three different functional regions; performance, exhibition, and personal. They reached this conclusion after asking the FB users to review their profiles; reflecting on their current activity, privacy attitude, as well as other factors that can impact the user experience.

I found the section Tensions Between Public and Personal Regions very interesting because it is something I can relate to. To start off with, I mostly use FB for the messenger as its chat feature is more reliable than some carriage coverage. I don’t consider myself an avid FB user, I check it maybe a few times a day but I hardly post anything on it. Personally I don’t like to publicize personal details but lately I’ve been thinking that in the long term I’ll regret not being as active. For example FB has that feature that reminds one of old posts one made on that particular date. I was more active in HS than I am now so now that I’m in college I see old posts corresponding to that day. However, in my late 20’s if all I see still are posts I made in middle/high school it’ll be a little depressing.

I think I’ll begin to add photo albums of when I go on trips or short vacations because it gives my phone more memory but also because it’ll be nice to have an archive of photos to just look back on maybe 5,10, 20 years. Let’s say I run into an old friend at a pub, more often than not I won’t have my laptop with me but if we want revisit some moment I could log onto my FB and it’ll be there.

Another section in the study I found to be relatable was Exhibition: Managing Content. Right now, I’m struggling in terms of managing relevance. When I check on my FB feed I have friends getting married, buying homes, backpacking Europe, while my last post was about 2 years ago. Sometimes I feel that especially family back in Peru would like to know what I’m up to but part of me also finds it emotionally exhausting to reply to comments, which is why I like IG better. A picture and a caption is all I really need.

I never really thought about it but being a FB user has one subconsciously thinking of their long term image, as I have lately. At the same time, it’s a struggle because part of me doesn’t want to share those moments with the whole world because I want them to be intimate.

 

Why doesn’t FB provide functionality to stop altogether friend requests?

Why does FB allow people to explicitly view someone’s message?

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