research-article

Is anyone out there?: unpacking Q&A hashtags on twitter

Authors:

Jeffrey M. Rzeszotarski,

Jorge Nathan Matias,

Andrés Monroy-Hernández, and

Meredith Ringel MorrisAuthors Info & Claims

CHI '14: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 2014

Pages 2755 - 2758

https://doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2557175

Published: 26 April 2014 Publication History

Abstract

In addition to posting news and status updates, many Twitter users post questions that seek various types of subjective and objective information. These questions are often labeled with 'Q&A' hashtags, such as #lazyweb or #twoogle. We surveyed Twitter users and found they employ these Q&A hashtags both as a topical signifier (this tweet needs an answer!) and to reach out to those beyond their immediate followers (a community of helpful tweeters who monitor the hashtag). However, our log analysis of thousands of hashtagged Q&A exchanges reveals that nearly all replies to hashtagged questions come from a user's immediate follower network, contradicting users' beliefs that they are tapping into a larger community by tagging their question tweets. This finding has implications for designing next-generation social search systems that reach and engage a wide audience of answerers.

References

[1]

André, P., Bernstein, M.S., and Luther, K. Who Gives a Tweet' Evaluating Microblog Content Value. CSCW 2012.

Digital Library

[2]

Bernstein, M., Bakshy, E., Burke, M., and Karrer, B. Quantifying the Invisible Audience in Social Networks. CHI 2013.

Digital Library

[3]

Cook, J., Kenthapadi, K., and Mishra, N. Group Chats on Twitter. WWW 2013.

Digital Library

[4]

Gilbert, E. Predicting Tie Strength in a New Medium. CSCW 2012.

Digital Library

[5]

Grannovetter, M. The Strength of Weak Ties. American Journal of Sociology, May 1973.

[6]

Hecht, B., Teevan, J., Morris, M.R., and Liebling, D. SearchBuddies: Bringing Search Engines into the Conversation. ICWSM 2012.

[7]

Horowitz, D. and Kamvar, S.D. The Anatomy of a LargeScale Social Search Engine. WWW 2010.

Digital Library

[8]

Jeong, J-W., Morris, M.R., Teevan, J., and Liebling, D. A Crowd-Powered Socially Embedded Search Engine. ICWSM 2013.

[9]

Jung, Y., Gray, R., Lampe, C., and Ellison, N. Favors from Facebook friends; Unpacking dimensions of social capital. CHI 2013.

Digital Library

[10]

Lampe, C., Ellison, N., and Steinfield, C. A Face(book) in the crowd: Social searching vs. social browsing. CSCW 2006.

Digital Library

[11]

Mahmud, J., Zhou, M.X., Megiddo, N., Nichols, J., and Drews, C. Recommending targeted strangers from whom to solicit information on social media. IUI 2013.

Digital Library

[12]

Morris, M.R., Teevan, J., and Panovich, K. What Do People Ask Their Social Networks, and Why' A Survey Study of Status Message Q&A Behavior. CHI 2010.

Digital Library

[13]

Morris, M.R. Collaborative Search Revisited. CSCW 2013.

Digital Library

[14]

Panovich, K., Miller, R., and Karger, D. Tie strength in question & answer on social network sites. CSCW 2012.

Digital Library

[15]

Paul, S.A., Hong, L., and Chi, E.H. Is Twitter a good place for asking questions' A characterization study. ICWSM 2011.

[16]

Romero, D.M., Tan, C., and Ugander, J. On the Interplay between Social and Topical Structure. ICWSM 2013.

[17]

Teevan, J., Morris, M.R., and Panovich, K. Factors Affecting Response Quantity, Quality, and Speed for Questions Asked via Social Network Status Messages. ICWSM 2011.

[18]

Thom, J., Helsley, S.Y., Matthews, T.L., Daly, E.M., and Millen, D.R. What Are You Working On' Status Message Q&A within an Enterprise SNS. ECSCW 2011.

[19]

Yang, L., Sun, T., Zhang, M., and Mei, Q. We Know What @You #Tag: Does the Dual Role Affect Hashtag Adoption' WWW 2012

Digital Library

Cited By

Ernala SYang SWu YChen RWells KDas S(2021)Exploring the Utility Versus Intrusiveness of Dynamic Audience Selection on FacebookProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/34760835:CSCW2(1-30)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3476083
Gonzalez CBollinger BYip JPina LRoldan WNieto Ruiz C(2020)Intergenerational Online Health Information Searching and Brokering: Framing Health Literacy as a Family AssetHealth Communication10.1080/10410236.2020.184744537:4(438-449)Online publication date: 18-Nov-2020
https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2020.1847445
Pina LGonzalez CNieto CRoldan WOnofre EYip J(2018)How Latino Children in the U.S. Engage in Collaborative Online Information Problem Solving with their FamiliesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/32744092:CSCW(1-26)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3274409
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Is anyone out there?: unpacking Q&A hashtags on twitter
1. Human-centered computing

Recommendations

Temporal Effects on Hashtag Reuse in Twitter: A Cognitive-Inspired Hashtag Recommendation Approach
WWW '17: Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web

Hashtags have become a powerful tool in social platforms such as Twitter to categorize and search for content, and to spread short messages across members of the social network. In this paper, we study temporal hashtag usage practices in Twitter with ...
Read More
Exploiting entities in social media
ESAIR '13: Proceedings of the sixth international workshop on Exploiting semantic annotations in information retrieval

Over the past couple of years micro blogging platforms, such as Twitter, have become extremely popular for information generation and dissemination. Each day hundreds of millions of tweets are being published, containing fresh and trending information ...
Read More
Vertex-weighted measures for link prediction in hashtag graphs
ASONAM '19: Proceedings of the 2019 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining

Communications on the popular social networking platform, Twitter, can be mapped in terms of a hashtag graph, where vertices correspond to hashtags, and edges correspond to co-occurrences of hashtags within the same distinct tweet. Furthermore, a vertex ...
Read More

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

CHI '14: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 2014

4206 pages

ISBN:9781450324731

DOI:10.1145/2556288

General Chairs:
Matt Jones
Swansea University, Wales, UK
,
Philippe Palanque
Université Paul Sabatier, France
,
Program Chairs:
Albrecht Schmidt
University of Stuttgart, Germany
,
Tovi Grossman
Autodesk Research, Canada

Copyright © 2014 ACM.

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 the author(s) 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].

Sponsors

SIGCHI: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 26 April 2014

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

CHI '14

Sponsor:

SIGCHI

CHI '14: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 26 - May 1, 2014

Ontario, Toronto, Canada

Acceptance Rates

CHI '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 465 of 2,043 submissions, 23%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 6,098 of 25,914 submissions, 24%

Upcoming Conference

CHI PLAY '24

Sponsor:
sigchi

The Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play

October 14 - 17, 2024

Tampere , Finland

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

8
Total Citations
View Citations
356
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)40
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)2

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Ernala SYang SWu YChen RWells KDas S(2021)Exploring the Utility Versus Intrusiveness of Dynamic Audience Selection on FacebookProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/34760835:CSCW2(1-30)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3476083
Gonzalez CBollinger BYip JPina LRoldan WNieto Ruiz C(2020)Intergenerational Online Health Information Searching and Brokering: Framing Health Literacy as a Family AssetHealth Communication10.1080/10410236.2020.184744537:4(438-449)Online publication date: 18-Nov-2020
https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2020.1847445
Pina LGonzalez CNieto CRoldan WOnofre EYip J(2018)How Latino Children in the U.S. Engage in Collaborative Online Information Problem Solving with their FamiliesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/32744092:CSCW(1-26)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3274409
Alshehri MSu N(2018)The Beauty of UglinessComputer Supported Cooperative Work10.1007/s10606-018-9331-327:3-6(355-388)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10606-018-9331-3
Jurgens DMcCorriston JRuths D(2017)An Analysis of Individuals’ Behavior Change in Online GroupsSocial Informatics10.1007/978-3-319-67217-5_29(473-498)Online publication date: 3-Sep-2017
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67217-5_29
Samarawickrama SKarunasekera SHarwood AKotagiri R(2017)Search Result Personalization in Twitter Using Neural Word EmbeddingsBig Data Analytics and Knowledge Discovery10.1007/978-3-319-64283-3_18(244-258)Online publication date: 3-Aug-2017
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64283-3_18
Liu ZJansen B(2017)ASKJournal of the Association for Information Science and Technology10.1002/asi.2365568:2(333-347)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1002/asi.23655
Liu ZJansen BBegole BKim JInkpen KWoo W(2015)A Taxonomy for Classifying Questions Asked in Social Question and AnsweringProceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/2702613.2732928(1947-1952)Online publication date: 18-Apr-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2702613.2732928

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents