Tie strength in question answer on social network sites
Name
Karger_Tie strength.pdf
Size
3.64 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
1152340c5c91602c838308bdf6ccd17b
Author(s)
Panovich, Katrina Marie
Miller, Robert C.
Karger, David R.
Date Issued
February 2012
Journal
Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '12)
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Citation
Katrina Panovich, Rob Miller, and David Karger. 2012. Tie strength in question & answer on social network sites. In Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1057-1066.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Asking friends, colleagues, or other trusted people to help answer a question or find information is a familiar and tried-and-true concept. Widespread use of online social networks has made social information seeking easier, and has provided researchers with opportunities to better observe this process. In this paper, we relate question answering to tie strength, a metric drawn from sociology describing how close a friendship is. We present a study evaluating the role of tie strength in question answers. We used previous research on tie strength in social media to generate tie strength information between participants and their answering friends, and asked them for feedback about the value of answers across several dimensions. While sociological studies have indicated that weak ties are able to provide better information, our findings are significant in that weak ties do not have this effect, and stronger ties (close friends) provide a subtle increase in information that contributes more to participants' overall knowledge, and is less likely to have been seen before.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/2145204.2145361
