Towards Understanding Negative Votes in a Question and Answer Social Network

Abstract

Online community question answering (CQA) social networking sites thrive when community members actively participate in the network. To influence participation, some CQA sites such as Stack Overflow reward members with incentives such as reputation, badges, and privileges. One way people earn such rewards is by posting helpful question and answers which get upvoted. An upvote is an indication of how useful a post is to the reader. An increase in a post’s upvotes could lead to the user who created the post accruing reputation and earning rewards in the community. To encourage people to write good posts, Stack Overflow has guidelines on their site for writing good question and answer posts. Despite these measures by Stack Overflow to encourage quality posts from community members, there are still several posts in the community with negative scores. A negative score indicates that the post received more downvotes than upvotes. If one consistently receives negative scores on their posts, it could influence them to stop using the network. Thus, it is important to identify the characteristics of posts with negative scores and explore how they differ from posts with positive scores. To contribute to research in this area, we identified the time of day posts were created, the sentiments and emotions used in writing the posts, the length of posts, and the topics that the posts were tagged with for posts with negative scores and those with positive scores. The result of our analysis on these two groups of posts suggests that posts created between 6.01 pm and 12 am received significantly higher scores than posts written at other times of the day. In addition, posts with positive scores were significantly longer in length than posts with negative scores. Furthermore, posts with positive scores were significantly more analytical and clout and less authentic compared to posts with negative scores.