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Redesign as an act of violence: disrupted interaction patterns and the fragmenting of a social Q&A community

Published: 07 May 2011 Publication History

Abstract

The worst-case scenario for the redesign of an established online community is a subsequent mass migration of its core members to other sites. Using data from transaction logs, content analysis and participant observation, this paper presents a descriptive analysis of the fragmentation of a social question answering (Q&A) community in the immediate aftermath of a fundamental redesign, where site-based communication mechanisms no longer functioned. The ways in which the community and its diaspora reacted, reconnected and resettled on other sites provides empirical data to support recent research on the life cycle of online communities. The results suggest that many of the same processes that help social Q&A sites generate content and motivate participation can work to dismantle an established community if communications between members are even temporarily disrupted. Modeling a redesign as an attack on a community can help future designers anticipate alternative paths of communication and information flows.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI '11: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
May 2011
3530 pages
ISBN:9781450302289
DOI:10.1145/1978942
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 07 May 2011

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  1. online communities
  2. question answering
  3. social q&a

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Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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