Summary

This paper details the research into different aspects of crowdfunding, especially kickstarter.  They specifically looked at the dynamics of crowdfunding, analyzing text for social information,  and theories of persuasion.  When analyzing and looking at data, the research team had to pay close attention to key words within certain categories that could skew the analysis of which phrases cause more crowd support.  For example, words like “menu” and “game credits” were much more common in the “Food” and “Games” respectively.  The researchers displayed different words and phrases found in descriptions for kickstarter pages and how they correlate with those pages meeting their financial goals.  They found that the phrases “we have chosen”, “got you”, and “and encouragement” were found to help a kickstarter page and the phrases “provide us”, “need one”, and “not be able” tend to hurt the chances that a kickstarter won’t be successful.

Reflection

I never thought this would be as interesting of a topic as it turned out to be.  This study makes me wonder if similar studies can be done on other social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.  Especially with YouTube descriptions, to see if the views on the channel increase or decrease from the normal amount based on the video description and tags.  Something similar could be done with twitter hashtags and tumblr tags.   Some other future research I would add onto this would be studying which types of kickstarters (in which categories) are the most successful, and what keywords help those to be even more successful.  I don’t think this specifically will add to the current research done on this topic, but I found the following video very interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oStLD-yYAy0  (it discusses kickstarter projects and their likelihood to be successful as well as general background information on how kickstarter works.)

Questions

• What additional work can be done in this area?
• How can similar studies be applied to other social media sites?
• How can the information from this video be used in future research?
• How do websites like indigogo and gofundme compare with kickstarter?
• Could similar studies be done on these other sites? Would they wield the same results?

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Summary

The research paper “Antisocial Behavior in Online Discussion Communities” discusses and analyzes user and follower participation in posts, comments, votes, likes, etc in online communities.  The researchers chose to mostly focus on people, or “trolls”, who were banned from such communities.  User generated content is essential to the growth of any online community and “trolls” most likely hinder their growth.  The purpose of this research was to answer the questions : “are there users that only become antisocial later in their community life, or is deviant behavior innate?” ,”does a community’s reaction to users’ antisocial behavior help them improve, or does it instead cause them to become more antisocial?” and “can antisocial users be effectively identified early on?”.   They investigated CNN.com, Breitbart.com, and IGN.com by reading comments and threads and also by analyzing a list of banned users from each of the sites.   A possibility for future research is to find a deeper understanding for such behavior and to better characterize the lives of antisocial users over time.   The researchers identified post features, activity features, and community features as tools that can be used to identify antisocial users.   They also found that it is easier to identify antisocial users when they post more than the average user.

Reflection

This paper discussed a lot of problems, strategies, and possible solutions that I will be able to apply to my term project.  Right now, we are thinking about focusing on helping social media platforms or communities be able to identify and possibly mute offensive and toxic users.  This research would definitely help narrow down what we are planning on doing and how we should go about gathering data and solving the problem.   This paper also had a lot of research, data, and graphs to support their findings, which is definitely something that researchers should strive towards.   I would be interested to find out if there could be a way to moderate online communities like this so moderators can manually find antisocial users.  The different types of antisocial users have helped researchers conclude that moderators may be the most effective way to delete antisocial posts, which I agree with to an extent but maybe in the future we can change social media platforms so that they will be able to moderate and modify themselves based on antisocial behavior, and also be able to predict antisocial behavior  before it happens.

Questions

• What stuff from this paper will I be able to apply to my term project?
• Which social media platforms and communities have been successful in identifying trolls and antisocial users?
• Is the use of moderators possible in communities like this?
• Are news websites like the ones studied more likely to have antisocial users?
• Are left leaning, right leaning, or neutral news sites most likely to have more antisocial users?
• What percent of users are antisocial and how is that different from one social media site to another?

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Summary

The paper “The Chat Circles Series: Exploration in Designing abstract Graphical Communication Interfaces” discusses the design and creation of a basic graphical chat program and examines the differences between different interfaces and how they effect social communication online.  Feelings, emotions, impressions, and sometimes voice are hard to convey over text, so there are new types of communication (Chatscape and Chat Circles) based on only graphics and other visual queues.  On these platforms, people can communicate with people in ways other than text, so they can change the shape and color of their icons to help communicate with others. Chatscape also allows users to change the appearances of  each others icons in the chat space.  In the future, these researchers say that they want to continue to change and influence they ways that people communicate in online spaces and possibly create more ephemeral spaces than there currently are in Chat Circles.  Maintaining conversations and interactions in some kind of database or chat log could also possibly be in future research projects.

Reflection

This is a really interesting field of study especially because I have never really learned about it or thought how it could change the current and future internet landscape. There are other social media communication tools that do not rely on textual communication, such as snapchat, instagram, pinterest, and tumblr, and now that I think about it, sites like snapchat and instagram have changed and shaped more traditional social media sites (facebook, twitter) .  Over the past few years, instagram and facebook have adapted snapchat-like story features and facebook/twitter have both changed their timelines to focus more on photo and video sharing rather than purely text posts.  Snapchat specifically is the closest platform to being almost only based on non-textual communication.

Questions

• How has photo and video sharing effected and changed sites like twitter and facebook?
• What is the future for sites like Chatscape and Chat Circle?
• Is does youtube classify as a site without primary textual communication or is it more for broadcast?
• How can sites like twitter, snapchat, and facebook get better at enabling users to express and utilize social cues?

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Bernstein, Michael S., Monroy-Hernandez, Andres. Harry, Drew. Andre, Paul. Panovich, Katrina. Vargas, Greg.  “4chan and /b/: An Analysis of Anonymity
and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community”

Donath, Judith S. “Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community.” Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community, smg.media.mit.edu/people/Judith/Identity/IdentityDeception.html.

Summary

The study that is outlined in “Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community” illustrates differences in identity within online communities.  The researchers found that people identify themselves with account ID, and individual voice.  Most of the time people are truthful about who they are online, but there are some exceptions.  Trolls, impersonators, identity concealers, and catfish all lie about their identities on the internet.

The paper “4chan and /b/: An Analysis of Anonymity and Emphemerality in a Large Online Community” discusses the often ambiguous and anonymous users of the website 4chan and how their culture shapes the whole of the internet.  The researchers studied data scraped from the “random” forum board on 4chan, one of its most popular pages, and found that since “random” is constantly being updated and old posts are constantly being deleted, that it cultivates a quickly changing community that is constantly experimenting with new ideas and memes.  Other sites such as twitter and facebook lack anonymity, which can lead to a different type of internet community with different social interactions.  They found that 90% of all posts in this forum were completely anonymous, leading to a unique culture that permeates throughout the internet.

Reflection

The first paper intrigued me mostly because I really love the MTV show “Catfish” which is an exploration into people’s online romances and how usually one person in the relationship is lying about their identity for one reason or another.  This is interesting in how it relates to the above study because it happens almost everywhere on the internet,  Facebook, Twitter, Tinder, etc. even though most of the users of these websites do not lie about who they are.

I was initially interested by the second paper because I barely knew anything about 4chan.  I knew that it has a lot of outside influence on internet culture in general, and now that I’ve read this research I know part of the reason why 4chan has so much influence on internet culture in general.

I would like to know how these findings would change if the research were to be up to date.  I know that 4chan had a lot of influence on the internet when this study took place, in 2010, but it could be different now that the internet landscape has changed in the past 7 years.  As for the other paper, I think the findings are still accurate in the current internet landscape.

Questions

• How has deception on the internet changed since this paper was written?
  • I know it is a lot harder to impersonate people on the internet nowadays
• Do other websites have some of the same characteristics of 4chan?
• How has anonymity changed since this paper was written?
• Has writing style and voice changed since these papers were written?
• Are there any websites that have consequences for lying about identity?
• What websites are easiest to fake an identity on? Which are hardest?

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Naaman, Mor, Jeffrey Boase, Chih-Hui Lai. “Is it really about me? Message Content in Social Awareness Streams.” ACM Digital Library, ACM, dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1718953. Accessed 30 Aug. 2017.

Akshay Java, Xiaodan Song, Tim Finin, Belle Tseng. “Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities”. http://aisl.umbc.edu/resources/369.pdf. Accessed 30 Aug. 2017.

Summary

The paper “Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities” studied and presented data that related to communities within twitter, how they interact with each other, the different types of users within those communities, and how those users spread and gather information through twitter.  They studied geographical distribution and user intention to conclude that the three kinds of user intentions are daily chatter, conversations, and reporting news.  They also concluded that the three user types are information sources, friends, and information seekers.

Similarly, “Is it really about me? Message Content in Social Awareness Streams” studies and analyzed the data scraped from the twitter API to figure out the recent changes in communication and social interaction due to twitter and other social media sites.  They also found distinct differences in the different users of twitter, some being focused on sharing information and most being focused on themselves and their lives.  More informational users tend to be more active, talk more often with other users, and usually have more followers.

Reflection

Both of the above papers described and researched how twitter is changing the way that people communicate and the communities and networks that have been created by this new way of communicating.  Both of the papers did extensive and applicable research, and explaining their findings fairly well.  They both also gave good insight into the questions and problems presented in the abstracts.

Twitter is probably the social media site that I use the most, so I feel like I can relate to and understand a lot of the findings presented in both of the above research papers.  Generally, I feel like I am a mixture between a “friend” type user and an “information seeker” user.  I know of and follow a lot of accounts that are strictly “information seekers”, and, as the research suggests, those accounts are not nearly as active as others.   I would also like to know how common it is for users to classify themselves as “seekers” and “friends”, or other combinations of the different types of users.  The user intentions, however, are a bit more generalized than I would have expected.  From my experience, I have found that there are a lot more types of interactions, and I hope more extensive research can be done on the topic in the future.

I would like to see how this research has held up over the years and if it is still accurate.  From what I understand, twitter has recently made an effort to push current event stories on all types of users, even those who aren’t necessarily “information seekers”.  I would also like to see if the growth rates of twitter have remained constant throughout the history of the website.  I would also like to know how “retweeting” tweets relates to the different types of users and different types of intentions.

Questions

• Generally, is the average twitter user connected to major current events in the world?  Trending pages on Twitter are now personalized, so it would be interesting to see how that has effected the spread of information.
• My primary use of twitter is discussing popular culture and entertainment with my friends – it would be interesting to see how interactions within communities like mine usually go.
• What is the future of twitter when it comes to information sharing?
• Interestingly, neither of these papers discussed the spread of trends or hashtags on twitter.  How easily do these topics spread and why?
• How has content creation on twitter changed and how will it change in the future?
• User have changed over time, how has this effected the different types of intentions of the user base?

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