Locating domain-specific contents and experts on social bookmarking communities
Simon Kassing, Jasper Oosterman, Alessandro Bozzon, Geert‐Jan Houben · 2015
Social bookmarking communities are now major content production platforms. There, millions of users interact every day on a great variety of knowledge domains, creating new contents, linking to existing ones, and engaging in constructive discussions. Relevant domain-specific content is often mixed with less useful contributions, and domain experts often have to find their way through lurkers and Web trolls. Such a diversity in topics and quality is a distinctive property of this class of Web sites. This diversity interferes with the ability to locate relevant content and users, and this hinders the usage of social bookmarking communities for tasks such as structured knowledge creation, or crowdsourcing. In this paper we investigate how relevant domain-specific content, in the form of submissions shared by (expert) users, can be effectively located in the social bookmarking platform reddit. We contribute with a framework process for the identification and characterisation of domain-specific content and knowledgeable users, and apply it to the reddit platform. Our work provides novel insights into the properties and dynamics of reddit, and represents an important step towards a better use of social bookmarking communities as a source of knowledge and expertise.