A fistful of votes: Understanding the voting system in social question and answer websites

Jun Zhang, Houda Labiod, Weizhi Meng

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingArticle in proceedingsResearchpeer-review

Abstract

Recently, there is an increasing trend that people start sharing their comments in online question and answer (QA) websites. For such websites, the ranking of answers is usually determined based on several factors like the received upvotes and downvotes, the publishing time, and the reputation of users, such that a highly ranked answer has much more chances to be propagated over the Internet. Due to the popularity of these QA websites, some public relationship companies try to cheat users by promoting or blocking certain answers. In this paper, we take Quora and Zhihu as two case studies to understand the impact of follower numbers, the publishing time, the upvotes and downvotes on the ranking of answers, and to investigate how these websites are vulnerable to voting spammers. Meanwhile, we propose a scheme to estimate the list of downvotes, which is usually hidden behind such websites.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of 10th IFIP International Conference on New Technologies, Mobility and Security
Number of pages5
PublisherIEEE
Publication date1 Jun 2019
Article number8763775
ISBN (Electronic)9781728115429
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jun 2019
Event10th IFIP International Conference on New Technologies, Mobility and Security - Canary Islands, Spain
Duration: 24 Jun 201926 Jun 2019
Conference number: 10

Conference

Conference10th IFIP International Conference on New Technologies, Mobility and Security
Number10
Country/TerritorySpain
CityCanary Islands
Period24/06/201926/06/2019

Keywords

  • Question and answer community
  • Ranking algorithm
  • Social networks
  • Spammer

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