Modification of Question Writing Style Influences Content Popularity in a Social Q&A System

TL;DR

This study analyzes how question writing style affects content popularity in a social Q&A platform, demonstrating that question attributes and user behavior significantly influence view counts and can guide users to craft more engaging questions.

Contribution

It introduces a predictive model for question popularity based on question features and reveals the impact of writing style and behavioral factors on content engagement.

Findings

Question features like starting with a question word increase views.

Adding details to questions boosts their popularity.

Behavioral and algorithmic factors interact to influence content visibility.

Abstract

TurboTax AnswerXchange is a social Q&A system supporting users working on federal and state tax returns. Using 2015 data, we demonstrate that content popularity (or number of views per AnswerXchange question) can be predicted with reasonable accuracy based on attributes of the question alone. We also employ probabilistic topic analysis and uplift modeling to identify question features with the highest impact on popularity. We demonstrate that content popularity is driven by behavioral attributes of AnswerXchange users and depends on complex interactions between search ranking algorithms, psycholinguistic factors and question writing style. Our findings provide a rationale for employing popularity predictions to guide the users into formulating better questions and editing the existing ones. For example, starting question title with a question word or adding details to the question increase number of views per question. Similar approach can be applied to promoting AnswerXchange content indexed by Google to drive organic traffic to TurboTax.