Social Media and Digital Collaboration
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Paper Type
Complete
Paper Number
1865
Description
Many online communities encourage user engagement using positive feedback but are reluctant to adopt peer penalty to enforce community discipline due to concerns of unintended side-effects. In this paper, I look into a typical form of peer penalty in Stack Overflow to study how peer penalty affects user engagement. Specifically, I look at how downvotes to questions affect the question asker’s willingness to ask or answer again, as well as her likelihood to ask or answer in greater length. Using a policy change that removed the reputation cost of casting downvotes to questions, I am able to identify the causal effect of interest. My estimations show that the effect of peer penalty on user engagement is heterogeneous depending on the specific type of user engagement in question. Specifically, downvotes to questions discourage users from asking or answering again. However, if they decide to ask or answer again, their questions or answers are expected to be longer than when they have never received any downvote to their questions, an evidence that they make efforts to improve the quality of their input to avoid receiving downvotes again. Overall, my findings suggest that, peer penalty helps a community to reinforce the quality of its user engagement at the cost of its quantity.
Recommended Citation
Yang, Xiaoli, "Effects of Peer Penalty on Online Community Participation" (2020). ICIS 2020 Proceedings. 7.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2020/social_media/social_media/7
Effects of Peer Penalty on Online Community Participation
Many online communities encourage user engagement using positive feedback but are reluctant to adopt peer penalty to enforce community discipline due to concerns of unintended side-effects. In this paper, I look into a typical form of peer penalty in Stack Overflow to study how peer penalty affects user engagement. Specifically, I look at how downvotes to questions affect the question asker’s willingness to ask or answer again, as well as her likelihood to ask or answer in greater length. Using a policy change that removed the reputation cost of casting downvotes to questions, I am able to identify the causal effect of interest. My estimations show that the effect of peer penalty on user engagement is heterogeneous depending on the specific type of user engagement in question. Specifically, downvotes to questions discourage users from asking or answering again. However, if they decide to ask or answer again, their questions or answers are expected to be longer than when they have never received any downvote to their questions, an evidence that they make efforts to improve the quality of their input to avoid receiving downvotes again. Overall, my findings suggest that, peer penalty helps a community to reinforce the quality of its user engagement at the cost of its quantity.
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