Identifying reputation collectors in community question answering (CQA) sites: Exploring the dark side of social media

Abstract

This research aims to identify users who are posting as well as encouraging others to post low quality and duplicate contents on community question answering sites. The good guys called Caretakers and the bad guys called Reputation Collectors are characterised by their behaviour, answering pattern and reputation points. The proposed system is developed and analysed over publicly available Stack Exchange data dump. A graph-based methodology is employed to derive the characteristic of Reputation Collectors and Caretakers. Results reveal that Reputation Collectors are primary sources of low-quality answers as well as answers to duplicate questions posted on the site. The Caretakers answer limited questions of challenging nature and fetches maximum reputation against those questions whereas Reputation Collectors answers have so many low quality and duplicate questions to gain the reputation point. We have developed algorithms to identify the Caretakers and Reputation Collectors of the site. Our analysis finds that 1.05% of Reputation Collectors post 18.88% of low-quality answers. This study extends previous research by identifying the Reputation Collectors and how they collect their reputation points.