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text/2_relwork.tex

@@ -61,7 +61,6 @@ These platforms allow communication over large distances and facilitate fast and
 
 All these communities differ in their design. Wikipedia is a community-driven knowledge repository and consists of a collection of articles. Every user can create an article. Articles are edited collaboratively and continually improved and expanded. Reddit is a platform for social interaction where users create posts and comment on other posts or comments. Quora, StackExchange, and Yahoo! Answers are community question and answer (CQA) platforms. On Quora and Yahoo! Answers users can ask any question regarding any topics whereas on StackExchange users have to post their questions in the appropriate subcommunity, for instance, StackOverflow for programming-related questions or MathOverflow for math-related questions. 
 
-%TODO move this elsewhere
 CQA sites are very effective at code review \cite{treude2011programmers}. Code may be understood in the traditional sense of source code in programming-related fields but this also translates to other fields, for instance, mathematics where formulas represent code. CQA sites are also very effective at solving conceptual questions. This is due to the fact that people have different areas of knowledge and expertise \cite{robillard1999role} and due to the large user base established CQA sites have, which again increases the variety of users with expertise in different fields.
 
 \subsection{Running an online community}
@@ -89,18 +88,11 @@ In their book on ''Building successful online communities: Evidence-based social
 % - encouraging contribution: online communities need contributions by users (not lurking), content is foundation of community, contributions by users follows power law (usally, also confirmed in my results)
 % - regualting behavior: maintain a funtioning community, prevent troll, inappropiate behavior, limit damage if it occurs, ease of entry & exit -> high turnover
 
-%TODO remove this
-All these criteria are heavily intertwined. Attracting new users often depends on the welcoming ness and support of users that are already on the platform. 
-Keeping users committed to the platform depends on the engagement with the community and how well the system design supports this. For the purpose of this thesis, the criteria laid out by \citeauthor{kraut2012building} can be grouped into two main categories: 1) onboarding of new users, 2) keeping users engaged, contributing, and well behaved.
 
-\subsection{Onboarding} %TODO add subsubsections or bold headers, e.g. onday flies, lurking, mentot ship program ...
+All these criteria are heavily intertwined. Attracting new users often depends on the welcomingness and support of users that are already on the platform. Keeping users committed to the platform depends on the engagement with the community and how well the system design supports this. The following sections cover the criteria 2) to 5).
+
+\subsection{Onboarding}
 The onboarding process of new users is a permanent challenge for online communities and differs from one platform to another. New users should be welcomed by the community and helped to integrate themselves into the community. This is a continuous process. It is not enough for a user to make one contribution and then revert to a non-contributing state. The StackExchange team took efforts to onboard new users better by making several changes to the site. However, there are still problems where further actions are required.
-%TODO short intro into folling paragraphs
-%on day flies, on multiple platforms, solutions on other platforms
-%bad comment section
-%lurking
-%several project by SE to improve site
-%- mentorship program, ...
 
 \textbf{One-day-flies}\\
 \citeauthor{slag2015one} investigated why many users on StackOverflow only post once after their registration \cite{slag2015one}. They found that 47\% of all users on StackOverflow posted only once and called them one-day-flies. They suggest that code example quality is lower than that of more involved users, which often leads to answers and comments to first improve the question and code instead of answering the stated question. This likely discourages new users from using the site further. Negative feedback instead of constructive feedback is another cause for discontinuation of usage. The StackOverflow staff also conducted their own research on negative feedback of the community\footnote{\label{silge2019welcome}\url{https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/07/10/welcome-wagon-classifying-comments-on-stack-overflow/}}. They investigated the comment sections of questions by recruiting their staff members to rate a set of comments and they found more than 7\% of the reviewed comments are unwelcoming.
@@ -155,8 +147,10 @@ Unwelcomeness is a large problem on StackExchange \cite{ford2016paradise}\footre
 
 \subsection{Invoke commitment}
 While attracting and onboarding new users is an important step for growing a community, keeping them on the platform and turning them into long-lasting community members is equally as important for growth as well as sustainability. Users have to feel the benefits of staying with the community. Without the benefits, a user has little to no motivation to interact with the community and will most likely drop out of it. Benefits are diverse, however, they can be grouped into 5 categories: information exchange, social support, social interaction, time and location flexibility, and permanency \cite{iriberri2009life}. 
+
 As StackExchange is a CQA platform, the benefits from information exchange, time and location flexibility, and permanency are more prevalent, while social support and social interaction are more in the background. Social support and social interaction are more relevant in communities where individuals communicate about topics regarding themselves, for instance, communities where health aspects are the main focus \cite{maloney2005multilevel}. Time and location flexibility is important for all online communities. Information exchange and permanency are important for StackExchange as it is a large collection of knowledge that mostly does not change over time or from one individual to another. StackExchange' content is driven by the community and therefore depends on the voluntarism of its users, making benefits even more important.
 
+%TODO abc this seem wrong here
 The backbone of a community is always the user base and its voluntarism to participate with the community. Even if the community is lead by a commercial core team, the community is almost always several orders of magnitude greater than the number of the paid employees forming the core team \cite{butler2002community}. The core team often provides the infrastructure for the community and does some community work. However, most of the community work is done by volunteers of the community.
 This is also true for the StackExchange platform where the core team of paid employees is between 200 to 500\footnote{\url{https://www.linkedin.com/company/stack-overflow}} (this includes employees working on other products) and the number of voluntary community members (these users have access to moderation tools) performing community work is around 10,000 \footnote{\url{https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/revision/1412005/1735651/users-with-rep-20k}}.
 
@@ -205,8 +199,8 @@ In a community, users can generally be split into 2 groups by motivation to volu
 %badge system
 %quality
 
-%TODO improve this paragraph, maybe double in length
-StackExchange employes serveral features to engage users with the platform, for instance, the reputation system and the badge (award) system. These systems reward contributing users with achievements and encourages further contribution to the community. Both systems try to keep and increase the quality of the posts on the platform.
+
+StackExchange employs serveral features to engage users with the platform, for instance, the reputation system and the badge (award) system. These systems reward contributing users with achievements and encourages further contribution to the community. Both systems try to keep and increase the quality of the posts on the platform.
 
 \textbf{Reputation}\\
 Reputation plays an important role on StackExchange and indicates the credibility of a user, as well as a primary source of answers of high-quality \cite{movshovitz2013analysis}. Although the largest chunk of all questions is posted by low-reputation users, high-reputation users post more questions on average. To earn a high reputation a user has to invest a lot of effort and time into the community, for instance, asking good questions or providing useful answers to questions of others. Reputation is earned when a question or answer is upvoted by other users, or if an answer is accepted as the solution to a question by the question creator. \citeauthor{mamykina2011design} found that the reputation system of StackOverflow encourages users to compete productively \cite{mamykina2011design}. But not every user participates equally, and participation depends on the personality of the user \cite{bazelli2013personality}. \citeauthor{bazelli2013personality} showed that the top-reputation users on StackOverflow are more extroverted compared to users with less reputation. \citeauthor{movshovitz2013analysis} found that by analyzing the StackOverflow community network, experts can be reliably identified by their contribution within the first few months after their registration. Graph analysis also allowed the authors to find spamming users or users with other extreme behavior. 
@@ -244,7 +238,7 @@ Different badges also create status classes \cite{immorlica2015social}. The hard
 \subsection{Regulation}
 Regulation evolves around the user actions and the content a community creates. It is required to steer the community and keep the community civil.  Naturally, some users will not have the best intentions for the community in mind. These actions of such must be accounted for, and harmful actions must be dealt with. Otherwise, the community and its content will deteriorate.
 
-\textbf{Content qualtity}\\
+\textbf{Content quality}\\
 Quality is a concern in online communities. Platform moderators and admins want to keep a certain level of quality or even raise it. However, higher-quality posts take more time and effort than lower-quality posts. In the case of CQA platforms, this is an even bigger problem as higher-quality answers fight against fast responses. Despite that, StackOverflow also has a problem with low quality and effort questions and the subsequent unwelcoming answers and comments\footref{silge2019welcome}.
 
 \citeauthor{lin2017better} investigated how growth affects a community\cite{lin2017better}. They looked at Reddit communities that were added to the default set of subscribed communities of every new user (defaulting) which lead to a huge influx of new users to these communities as a result. The authors found that contrary to expectations, the quality stays largely the same. The vote score dips shortly after defaulting but quickly recovers or even raises to higher levels than before. The complaints of low-quality content did not increase, and the language used in the community stayed the same. However, the community clustered around fewer posts than before defaulting. \citeauthor{srba2016stack} did a similar study on the StackOverflow community \cite{srba2016stack}. They found a similar pattern in the quality of posts. The quality of questions dipped momentarily due to the huge influx of new users. However, the quality did recover after 3 months.