Behavior Indicators for Sensemaking of Online Discussions

Abstract

Online collaborative environments, such as Reddit, have led to the rise of open and self-organizing communities. However, discussions in these places are often scattered, redundant and voluminous, and do not fully support the deliberation flow. Argument polarization, groupthink, subject bubbles, subgroup dominance and lurking are commonly identified behaviors that negatively impact the quality of online discussions. In addition, open environments allow the congregation of homogeneous groups that feed on pre-existing ideas, creating discussion bubbles and contributing to users taking extreme positions on issues. Evidence from Reddit discussions suggest that, while online collaborative environments provide powerful support for the creation and dissemination of new content, their ability to support efficient debate and idea contribution is questionable. Often, debates include hundreds or thousands of people with heterogeneous behaviors concerning post frequency, size, wording and polarity. Joining an ongoing online debate requires understanding what has happened so far. Many studies have focused on summarizing the discussion content as a way to overcome the message volume, dispersion and redundancy. However, to fully understand an online debate, it is also important to perceive the group’s dynamics. The identification of dysfunctional behaviors contributes to new users’ sensemaking of the debate as a whole and supports their decision whether it is worth joining the group. Additionally, understanding the group dynamics improves participants behavior and the overall discussion. We analyze the use of content summarization and behavior indicators to understand a discussion.