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Quora-As-Anonymous-User/ I-Deactivate-Or-Delete-My-Quora-Account 38.7% of the Questions Have Been Posted As Anonymous Deep Dive into Anonymity: A Large Scale Analysis of Quora Questions Binny Mathew1∗, Ritam Dutt1∗, Suman Kalyan Maity2, Pawan Goyal1, Animesh Mukherjee1 1 Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur 2 Northwestern University [email protected], [email protected] , [email protected] [email protected], [email protected] Abstract Whisper and Secret because while the former allow posts to be both anonymous or non-anonymous depending on the Anonymity forms an integral and important part of our digital user’s preference, the latter allow posts to be strictly anony- life. It enables us to express our true selves without the fear of judgment. In this paper, we investigate the different as- mous. Quora, in addition, has two interesting and very rich pects of anonymity in the social Q&A site Quora. The choice features – (i) the questions can be organized topically that al- of Quora is motivated by the fact that this is one of the rare lows the users to search for relevant answers easily and the social Q&A sites that allow users to explicitly post anony- moderators to manage and route/promote questions to ap- mous questions and such activity in this forum has become propriate communities for garnering better answers and (ii) normative rather than a taboo. Through an analysis of 5.1 there is an underlying social network that allows user to fol- million questions, we observe that at a global scale almost low other users, questions and topics. Over the years these no difference manifests between the linguistic structure of the have immensely enriched the interactions within the forum anonymous and the non-anonymous questions. We find that thus improving both the question and the answer quality. topical mixing at the global scale to be the primary reason for the absence. However, the differences start to feature once we “deep dive” and (topically) cluster the questions and compare Anonymity in Quora contrasts other online forums the clusters that have high volumes of anonymous questions with those that have low volumes of anonymous questions. Another important point to note here is that while anony- In particular, we observe that the choice to post the ques- mous online forums have been around for a long time, they tion as anonymous is dependent on the user’s perception of are plagued by several issues like trolling, relatively small anonymity and they often choose to speak about depression, user population, lack of expertise etc. In contrast, Quora anxiety, social ties and personal issues under the guise of does not suffer from these issues. The user base is substan- anonymity. We further perform personality trait analysis and tially larger consisting of people from all walks of life many observe that the anonymous group of users has positive corre- lation with extraversion, agreeableness, and negative correla- of whom are actually experts in various domains. This fos- tion with openness. Subsequently, to gain further insights, we ters a rich atmosphere where people can provide quality an- build an anonymity grid to identify the differences in the per- swers based on their expertise. Also in the Quora ecosys- ception on anonymity of the user posting the question and the tem, asking questions anonymously is as much acceptable community of users answering it. We also look into the first to the community as asking non-anonymously; as high as response time of the questions and observe that it is lowest for 38.7% questions are asked anonymously on Quora. Further, topics which talk about personal and sensitive issues, which the acceptance of a question from the community is depen- hints toward a higher degree of community support and user dent on the responses it has received. Consequently, we ob- engagement. serve that the mean number of responses for the anonymous and non-anonymous questions on a global scale is approx- arXiv:1811.07223v1 [cs.SI] 17 Nov 2018 Introduction imately 2.86 and 2.99 respectively. Users resort to asking questions anonymously because they feel that it has various Anonymity in Q&A sites benefits like revealing the “truth”1 or asking sensitive ques- Question answering sites are one of the primary sources tions like “I am depressed. How do I hide it at school?” with- on the Internet that attempt to meet this huge information out the fear of its repercussions. The practice has become need of the users. Q&A sites like Yahoo! Answers, Quora, normative and no longer a taboo or something to be looked Stack Exchange are community efforts that provide answers down upon. Finally, the issue of trolling is also tackled well to questions on a wide range of topics. Some of these sites in Quora through strict regulatory policies enforced by the like Yahoo! Answers and Quora have a unique feature that moderators that are normally adhered to by the community allows users to post questions anonymously which enables at large. them to ask judgmental or controversial questions freely. Note that these are different from social media sites like 1https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Quora-add-the-anonymous- ∗contributed equally to this paper. option-for-answers-and-questions Key contributions and observations in this paper Related work Analysis of a large dataset of 5.1 million Quora questions There have been several research in the past to study reveals that around 38.7% of them are posted anonymously. anonymity in the online and offline settings. In this section, This observation forms the primary motivation of the current we present a comprehensive review of the different aspects paper in which we present a detailed and extensive study of anonymity research. characterizing the anonymous questions on Quora. We sum- marize our main contributions and observations in this paper Effects of anonymity as follows. Anonymity can lift inhibition which can lead to unusual acts of kindness or generosity, or it can lead to misbehavior, such • We observe almost no difference between the linguistic as harsh or rude language and acts that are illegal or harm- structure of the questions posted anonymously and those ful (Suler 2004). Christopherson (2007) discusses the posi- posted non-anonymously at a global scale. tive and the negative effects of anonymity in detail. There are several studies focusing on the negative as- • We identify a substantial proportion of topical mixing at pects of anonymity, such as cyberbullying (Huang and the global scale i.e., questions that should be apparently Chou 2010), aggressive behaviour (Zimbardo 1969), en- posted as anonymous are posted as non-anonymous and couraging suicidal individuals to follow through with their vice versa. Oftentimes, such a behavior can be attributed threats (Mann 1981), hate sites (Chau and Xu 2007), and to the user’s perspective (Correa et al. 2015) of what many more. should be posted as anonymous and what not. Another set of studies detail the positive aspects of • As a next step, we “deep dive” into the data, whereby, anonymity mainly involving self-disclosure and degree of we (topically) cluster the questions and individually in- intimacy. In some research, the absence of interviewer spect the clusters containing large volumes of anonymous has been found to increase the duration of self-disclosure questions and compare them with those that predomi- for participants who were presented with intimate ques- nantly contain non-anonymous questions. Nuanced lin- tions (Jourard and Friedman 1970). Privacy has been shown guistic differences start becoming apparent revealing that to have positive effect on human well-being in (Werner, Alt- users extensively query about depression, anxiety, social man, and Brown 1992). De et al. (2014) find that anonymity ties and personal issues under the guise of anonymity. helps users to discuss topics which are considered to be stigma in the real world. People regularly use the protec- • Personality trait analysis further reveals that user groups tion of anonymity to reduce the social risks and to create posting anonymous questions show positive correlation different persona online than they exhibit offline (Yurchisin, with traits like extraversion and agreeableness. In con- Watchravesringkan, and McCabe 2005; Bargh, McKenna, trast, they seem to bear negative correlation with the trait and Fitzsimons 2002). In Yurchisin et al. (2005), the authors openness. find that the users use online dating services in identity ex- ploration and recreation process. Anonymity also helps in • We establish the concept of anonymity grid to identify the the protection of informants (e.g., whistle-blowers or news differences in the perception of anonymity between the sources). user posting the question and the community answering the same. While personal questions related to sex and love Anonymity in social media life are both anonymously asked and answered, questions related to job and relationship advice are asked anony- Several social media sites allow options to post content mously but answered non-anonymously and questions re- anonymously. Facebook provides ‘confession pages’ while lated to incensed topics like god, religion and politics are Yahoo! Answers and Quora allow users to post questions asked non-anonymously but answered anonymously. and answers as anonymous. There are several mobile ser- vices that allow anonymous sharing like Whisper and Secret. • We also leverage the concept of First Response Time In Correa et al. (2015), authors study the sensitivity (FRT) to quantify the time taken for a question to re- and types of content posted on Whisper and Twitter. They ceive its first response; a lower FRT corresponds to a find that the anonymity of ‘whispers’ is not binary, imply- quicker response. We note that although there is no sig- ing that the same question text exhibit different levels of nificant difference in the median FRT for anonymous and anonymity, depending on the user’s perception.
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