论文标题
问答网站中的幻影转向效应
The Phantom Steering Effect in Q&A Websites
论文作者
论文摘要
徽章通常在在线平台中用作促进贡献的激励措施。广泛认为，徽章“转向”人们在获得徽章之前提高其贡献率的行为。本文在存在徽章的情况下提供了一种新的用户行为概率模型。通过将模型应用于问答站点堆栈溢出中数千个用户的数据，我们发现转向不像以前所理解的那样广泛适用。相反，大多数用户对徽章仍然冷漠，同时仍为网站提供大量贡献。一个有趣的统计现象称为“幻影转向”，是这些用户的相互作用数据的说明，这可能导致了有关转向的一些以前的结论。我们的结果表明，大约20％的用户对徽章激励措施做出反应。此外，我们对堆栈溢出的用户进行定性调查，提供了进一步的证据，表明该模型的见解反映了社区的真实行为。我们认为，尽管徽章可能有助于在线系统中的有效奖励，但对奖励系统（例如堆栈溢出声誉点）的其他方面的研究应该成为社区的重点。
Badges are commonly used in online platforms as incentives for promoting contributions. It is widely accepted that badges "steer" people's behavior toward increasing their rate of contributions before obtaining the badge. This paper provides a new probabilistic model of user behavior in the presence of badges. By applying the model to data from thousands of users on the Q&A site Stack Overflow, we find that steering is not as widely applicable as was previously understood. Rather, the majority of users remain apathetic toward badges, while still providing a substantial number of contributions to the site. An interesting statistical phenomenon, termed "Phantom Steering," accounts for the interaction data of these users and this may have contributed to some previous conclusions about steering. Our results suggest that a small population, approximately 20%, of users respond to the badge incentives. Moreover, we conduct a qualitative survey of the users on Stack Overflow which provides further evidence that the insights from the model reflect the true behavior of the community. We argue that while badges might contribute toward a suite of effective rewards in an online system, research into other aspects of reward systems such as Stack Overflow reputation points should become a focus of the community.
