Negative emotions boost user activity at BBC forum

Anna Chmiel, Pawel Sobkowicz, Julian Sienkiewicz, Georgios Paltoglou, Kevan Buckley, Mike Thelwall and Janusz A. Hołyst

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2011, vol. 390, issue 16, 2936-2944

Abstract: We present an empirical study of user activity in online BBC discussion forums, measured by the number of posts written by individual debaters and the average sentiment of these posts. Nearly 2.5 million posts from over 18 thousand users were investigated. Scale-free distributions were observed for activity in individual discussion threads as well as for overall activity. The number of unique users in a thread normalized by the thread length decays with thread length, suggesting that thread life is sustained by mutual discussions rather than by independent comments. Automatic sentiment analysis shows that most posts contain negative emotions and the most active users in individual threads express predominantly negative sentiments. It follows that the average emotion of longer threads is more negative and that threads can be sustained by negative comments. An agent-based computer simulation model has been used to reproduce several essential characteristics of the analyzed system. The model stresses the role of discussions between users, especially emotionally laden quarrels between supporters of opposite opinions, and represents many observed statistics of the forum.

Keywords: Internet communities; Collective phenomena; Emotions; Agent modeling; Scale-free distributions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:390:y:2011:i:16:p:2936-2944

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2011.03.040

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