You Are Who You Talk To: Detecting Roles in Usenet Newsgroups

TLDR

Understanding members’ social roles helps to grasp a group’s social context. The authors propose using social network analysis to characterize authors in Usenet newsgroups. The analysis revealed that second‑degree ego‑centric reply networks distinguish author types and newsgroup categories—question/answer, conversational, social support, and flame—and that newsgroups differ in participant populations and roles, offering useful insights for researchers and users.

Abstract

Understanding the social roles of the members a group can help to understand the social context of the group. We present a method of applying social network analysis to support the task of characterizing authors in Usenet newsgroups. We compute and visualize networks created by patterns of replies for each author in selected newsgroups and find that second-degree ego-centric networks give us clear distinctions between different types of authors and newsgroups. Results show that newsgroups vary in terms of the populations of participants and the roles that they play. Newsgroups can be characterized by populations that include question and answer newsgroups, conversational newsgroups, social support newsgroups, and flame newsgroups. This approach has applications for both researchers seeking to characterize different types of social cyberspaces as well as participants seeking to distinguish interaction partners and content authors.