Measurement quality of online collaboration in presence of negative relationships

Abstract

Online collaboration services usually focus on positive relationships between constituting actors. Many environments in which social mechanisms are present harness positive feedback of social recognition, status visibility, or collective action. Simple mechanisms of commenting on status updates and up-voting of resources attributed to an actor may result in proverbial karma flow in the socially aware online collaboration environment. On the other hand, many services allow users to also express their dislike, irritation and contempt towards resources provided by users. For instance, down-voting mechanics is crucial in online news aggregation services, such as Digg or Reddit, to maintain a certain level of quality of presented contents. Despite the availability of data, not many works have been published on measuring the negative network effects in social networks. In this paper we analyze a large body of data harvested from a Polish online news aggregation site Wykop.pl and we examine the effects of a more considerate approach to negative network construction when measuring the overall parameters and characteristics of the social network derived from positive (up-voting) and negative (down-voting) behaviors of users. © 2014 Springer-Verlag.