Mind your p's and q's: when politeness helps and hurts in online communities

ABSTRACT

Little is known about the impact of politeness in online communities. This project combines deductive and inductive approaches to automatically model linguistic politeness in online discussion groups and determine the impact of politeness on desired outcomes, such as getting people to reply to one another. We find that politeness triples reply rates in some technical groups, but rudeness is more effective in others. The model can be applied as a "politeness checker" to encourage people to write in ways likely to garner a response from specific communities.

References

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Index Terms

• Human-centered computing

  • Collaborative and social computing

    • Collaborative and social computing theory, concepts and paradigms

      • Computer supported cooperative work

  • Human computer interaction (HCI)

    • Interaction paradigms

      • Web-based interaction

• Social and professional topics

  • Professional topics

    • Computing and business

      • Computer supported cooperative work