Not only do authors of negatively-evaluated content contribute more
So empty vessels really do make the most noise.
That points to an obvious strategy for improving the quality of comments on any social network site. Clearly, providing negative feedback to “bad” users does not appear to be a good way of preventing undesired behaviour.
I'm not seeing such a strategy from the paper's findings. It suggests several ways to limit bad behavior, but since positive feedback doesn't seem to improve quality of comments or posting frequency, I'm getting the strong impression that the overall tone of an online community is set early on in its life, and while it can easily degrade over time there is not a whole lot you can do to improve it.
So how can unwanted behaviour be stopped? “Given that users who receive no feedback post less frequently, a potentially effective strategy could be to ignore undesired behaviour and provide no feedback at all,” say Cheng and co.
This is pretty difficult to implement, though, since it only takes two people to start a flamewar. All I can think of is very proactive moderator pruning, which would a) become a full-time job and b) creates problems of its own as people start howling about censorship.
Comments
Not only do authors of negatively-evaluated content contribute more
So empty vessels really do make the most noise.
That points to an obvious strategy for improving the quality of comments on any social network site. Clearly, providing negative feedback to “bad” users does not appear to be a good way of preventing undesired behaviour.
I'm not seeing such a strategy from the paper's findings. It suggests several ways to limit bad behavior, but since positive feedback doesn't seem to improve quality of comments or posting frequency, I'm getting the strong impression that the overall tone of an online community is set early on in its life, and while it can easily degrade over time there is not a whole lot you can do to improve it.
So how can unwanted behaviour be stopped? “Given that users who receive no feedback post less frequently, a potentially effective strategy could be to ignore undesired behaviour and provide no feedback at all,” say Cheng and co.
This is pretty difficult to implement, though, since it only takes two people to start a flamewar. All I can think of is very proactive moderator pruning, which would a) become a full-time job and b) creates problems of its own as people start howling about censorship.