Thoughts on Research Papers

No country for old members: User Lifecycle and Linguistic Change in Online Communities

Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil et al. (2013)

I would really like someone to tell me practical applications of this study outside of Online Communities. They try to extrapolate their results to the real-world suggesting that “biological explanations are probably not the main source of adult language stability” even though this was supported by many other studies as well so that purpose is moot as their study is not even conducted in the real world. I never joined any online groups (at least not to provide reviews, comments or suggestions) and I rarely use social media so my dislike towards the paper and trying to find the application of this study to the real world is understandable.

The paper was trying to understand, how do users evolve linguistically with regards to evolving community norms? and the answer was, it depends on the difference of language use between the user and the community. If one can understand how religions work — by group identification — then their answer seems pretty straight forward. The sooner a person stops identifying himself with religion and stops following the rituals (like going to temple, church, following traditions) then “cross-entropy” increases and if everyone in the religion does that then that “religion dies”. A similar principle applies to the “currency” of a country. The novel thing about the paper was how they were able to predict the user life cycle and it has practical application for the group maintainers. Many online communities thrive and fail on a yearly basis and there are a lot of other factors which the paper also mentions might be the reasons for users’ leaving the community. So again, this study is by no means comprehensive.

I dislike the paper for its lack of practical applications in the real world. Their approach in trying to understand and predict the user and community life cycle was interesting and will be helpful to aspiring data scientists to understand and formulate a question in quantitative terms and finding the answers.

Link to the Paper

Pic Credits: Vivek Kulkarni