Antisocial Behavior in Online Discussion Communities

TL;DR

This paper analyzes antisocial behavior in online communities, revealing patterns of user misconduct, its evolution, and how community feedback influences it, providing methods to identify problematic users early.

Contribution

It offers a detailed characterization of antisocial users, their behavioral patterns, and introduces early detection techniques for community moderation.

Findings

Antisocial users focus on few threads and post irrelevantly.

Such users are more successful at eliciting responses.

Harsh feedback worsens antisocial behavior.

Abstract

User contributions in the form of posts, comments, and votes are essential to the success of online communities. However, allowing user participation also invites undesirable behavior such as trolling. In this paper, we characterize antisocial behavior in three large online discussion communities by analyzing users who were banned from these communities. We find that such users tend to concentrate their efforts in a small number of threads, are more likely to post irrelevantly, and are more successful at garnering responses from other users. Studying the evolution of these users from the moment they join a community up to when they get banned, we find that not only do they write worse than other users over time, but they also become increasingly less tolerated by the community. Further, we discover that antisocial behavior is exacerbated when community feedback is overly harsh. Our analysis also reveals distinct groups of users with different levels of antisocial behavior that can change over time. We use these insights to identify antisocial users early on, a task of high practical importance to community maintainers.