How question quality drives Web performance in community question answering sites

TL;DR

This study investigates how various aspects of question quality on community Q&A sites influence web traffic, revealing that digital popularity and textual features are more impactful than questioner-related factors.

Contribution

The paper introduces a comprehensive analysis of question quality features and their relative influence on site traffic using Grey Relational Analysis.

Findings

Question quality features significantly affect web performance.

Digital popularity and textual features have greater impact than questioner-related features.

The study provides a ranked list of question quality factors influencing page views.

Abstract

Users are posting millions of questions on Community question answering sites each day. The quality of those questions significantly affects the satisfactions of the sites' users and, therefore, sites' traffic. We gathered 15 question-quality related features from one of the largest CQA sites and the site's pageview data to estimate the scale of the effect in the corresponding time series. By using a Grey Relational Analysis, we rank those question quality features and estimate the relative strength of these factors on a page's view numbers. Our results show that the features of question quality have a significant influence on web performance. We generate a ranked list of features and find that digital popularity and textual features can drive the page traffic more than questioner related features and question difficulty. The implications of the findings for Web growth and future research are discussed.