Antisocial Behavior in Online Discussion Communities

TLDR

Online communities depend on user posts, comments, and votes, yet this participation also invites trolling and other undesirable behaviors. The study aims to characterize antisocial behavior in three large online discussion communities by analyzing users who were banned and to use these insights to detect such users early. The authors examine banned users across the communities, focusing on their posting patterns, content relevance, and interaction with other members. They find that banned users concentrate on a few threads, post irrelevant content, attract more responses, decline in writing quality over time, become less tolerated, are worsened by harsh feedback, and belong to distinct groups whose antisocial levels shift.

Abstract

User contributions in the form of posts, comments, and votes are essential to the success of online communities. However, allowing user participation also invites undesirable behavior such as trolling. In this paper, we characterize antisocial behavior in three large online discussion communities by analyzing users who were banned from these communities. We find that such users tend to concentrate their efforts in a small number of threads, are more likely to post irrelevantly, and are more successful at garnering responses from other users. Studying the evolution of these users from the moment they join a community up to when they get banned, we find that not only do they write worse than other users over time, but they also become increasingly less tolerated by the community. Further, we discover that antisocial behavior is exacerbated when community feedback is overly harsh. Our analysis also reveals distinct groups of users with different levels of antisocial behavior that can change over time. We use these insights to identify antisocial users early on, a task of high practical importance to community maintainers.