Negative emotions boost users activity at BBC Forum

TL;DR

This empirical study of BBC online forums reveals that most user activity involves negative emotions, with longer threads tending to be more negative and sustained by emotionally charged interactions, supported by a simulation model.

Contribution

The paper provides the first large-scale analysis linking negative sentiment to user engagement and thread longevity in online forums, supported by a computational simulation.

Findings

Most posts contain negative emotions.

Active users tend to express negative sentiments.

Longer threads are more negative and sustained by negative comments.

Abstract

We present an empirical study of user activity in online BBC discussion forums, measured by the number of posts written by individual debaters and the average sentiment of these posts. Nearly 2.5 million posts from over 18 thousand users were investigated. Scale free distributions were observed for activity in individual discussion threads as well as for overall activity. The number of unique users in a thread normalized by the thread length decays with thread length, suggesting that thread life is sustained by mutual discussions rather than by independent comments. Automatic sentiment analysis shows that most posts contain negative emotions and the most active users in individual threads express predominantly negative sentiments. It follows that the average emotion of longer threads is more negative and that threads can be sustained by negative comments. An agent based computer simulation model has been used to reproduce several essential characteristics of the analyzed system. The model stresses the role of discussions between users, especially emotionally laden quarrels between supporters of opposite opinions, and represents many observed statistics of the forum.