Abstract
An Internet forum is a Web application for publishing user-generated content under the form of a discussion. The most important feature of Internet forums is their social aspect. Many forums are active for a long period of time and attract a group of dedicated users, who build a tight social community around a forum. With great abundance of forums devoted to every possible aspect of human activity, such as politics, religion, sports, technology, entertainment, economy, fashion, and many more, users are able to find a forum that perfectly suits their needs and interests. Communities of users forming around popular Internet forums undergo an evolution over time. Some Internet forums become more dense and saturated with users, some Internet forums dissolve in broader discussion topics. Forums can differ in ways they attract new users, maintain current users or decay in membership and posting intensity. In this paper we introduce a micro-community-based model for measuring the evolution of Internet forums. We show how simple concept of a micro-community can be used to quantitatively assess the openness and durability of an Internet forum. We also show that our model is capable of producing a taxonomy of Internet forums using unsupervised clustering method. We present the micro-community model, the set of basic statistics, and we apply the model to several real-world online forum communities to experimentally verify the correctness and robustness of the model.
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Research supported by the Polish Ministry of Science grant N N516 371236.
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Morzy, M. (2013). Evolution of Online Forum Communities. In: Özyer, T., Rokne, J., Wagner, G., Reuser, A. (eds) The Influence of Technology on Social Network Analysis and Mining. Lecture Notes in Social Networks, vol 6. Springer, Vienna. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7091-1346-2_27
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7091-1346-2_27
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