More Web Proxy on the site http://driver.im/

research-article

Open access

Social Catalysts: Characterizing People Who Spark Conversations Among Others

Authors:

Martin Saveski,

Sylvia Morelli Vitousek,

Bryce Bartlett,

Lada A. AdamicAuthors Info & Claims

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Volume 5, Issue CSCW2

Article No.: 292, Pages 1 - 20

https://doi.org/10.1145/3476023

Published: 18 October 2021 Publication History

Abstract

People assume different and important roles within social networks. Some roles have received extensive study: that of influencers who are well-connected, and that of brokers who bridge unconnected parts of the network. However, very little work has explored another potentially important role, that of creating opportunities for people to interact and facilitating conversation between them. These individuals bring people together and act as social catalysts. In this paper, we test for the presence of social catalysts on the online social network Facebook. We first identify posts that have spurred conversations between the poster's friends and summarize the characteristics of such posts. We then aggregate the number of catalyzed comments at the poster level, as a measure of the individual's "catalystness." The top 1% of such individuals account for 31% of catalyzed interactions, although their network characteristics do not differ markedly from others who post as frequently and have a similar number of friends. By collecting survey data, we also validate the behavioral measure of catalystness: a person is more likely to be nominated as a social catalyst by their friends if their posts prompt discussions between other people more frequently. The measure, along with other conversation-related features, is one of the most predictive of a person being nominated as a catalyst. Although influencers and brokers may have gotten more attention for their network positions, our findings provide converging evidence that another important role exists and is recognized in online social networks.

References

[1]

Paul Adler and Seok-Woo Kwon. 2002. Social capital: Prospects for a new concept. Academy of Management Review 27, 1 (2002), 17--40.

[2]

Luca Maria Aiello, Alain Barrat, Rossano Schifanella, Ciro Cattuto, Benjamin Markines, and Filippo Menczer. 2012. Friendship prediction and homophily in social media. ACM Transactions on the Web 6, 2 (2012), 1--33.

Digital Library

[3]

Sinan Aral and Dylan Walker. 2012. Identifying influential and susceptible members of social networks. Science 337, 6092 (2012), 337--341.

[4]

Eytan Bakshy, Jake Hofman, Winter Mason, and Duncan Watts. 2011. Everyone's an influencer: Quantifying influence on Twitter. In Proceedings of the Fourth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining. 65--74.

Digital Library

[5]

Abhijit Banerjee, Arun Chandrasekhar, Esther Duflo, and Matthew Jackson. 2013. The diffusion of microfinance. Science 341, 6144 (2013).

[6]

Bruce Biddle. 1986. Recent developments in role theory. Annual Review of Sociology 12, 1 (1986), 67--92.

[7]

Stephen Borgatti. 1997. Structural holes: Unpacking Burt's redundancy measures. Connections 20, 1 (1997), 35--38.

[8]

Bernheim Brush, Xiaoqing Wang, Tammara Combs Turner, and Marc Smith. 2005. Assessing differential usage of Usenet social accounting meta-data. In Proceedings of the 2005 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 889--898.

Digital Library

[9]

Cody Buntain and Jennifer Golbeck. 2014. Identifying social roles in Reddit using network structure. In Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on World Wide Web. 615--620.

Digital Library

[10]

Moira Burke and Robert Kraut. 2016. The relationship between Facebook use and well being depends on communication type and tie strength. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 21, 4 (2016), 265--281.

Digital Library

[11]

Ronald Burt. 2005. Brokerage and closure: An introduction to social capital. Oxford university press.

[12]

Ronald Burt. 2009. Structural holes: The social structure of competition. Harvard university press.

[13]

Ronald Burt. 2017. Structural holes versus network closure as social capital. In Social Capital. Routledge.

[14]

Wei Chen, Yajun Wang, and Siyu Yang. 2009. Efficient influence maximization in social networks. In Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. 199--208.

Digital Library

[15]

Aaron Clauset, Mark EJ Newman, and Cristopher Moore. 2004. Finding community structure in very large networks. Physical Review E 70, 6 (2004), 066111.

[16]

James Coleman. 1988. Social capital in the creation of human capital. Amer. J. Sociology 94 (1988), S95--S120.

[17]

Mauro Coletto, Kiran Garimella, Aristides Gionis, and Claudio Lucchese. 2017. Automatic controversy detection in social media: A content-independent motif-based approach. Online Social Networks and Media 3 (2017), 22--31.

[18]

David Easley and Jon Kleinberg. 2010. Networks, crowds, and markets. Vol. 8. Cambridge university press Cambridge.

[19]

Facebook. 2020. Data Policy. https://www.facebook.com/policy.php.

[20]

Ethan Fast, Binbin Chen, and Michael Bernstein. 2016. Empath: Understanding topic signals in large-scale text. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 4647--4657.

Digital Library

[21]

Miroslav Fiedler. 1973. Algebraic connectivity of graphs. Czechoslovak Mathematical Journal 23, 2 (1973), 298--305.

[22]

Danyel Fisher, Marc Smith, and Howard Welser. 2006. You are who you talk to: Detecting roles in Usenet newsgroups. In Proceedings of the 39th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Vol. 3. IEEE, 59b--59b.

Digital Library

[23]

Mathilde Forestier, Anna Stavrianou, Julien Velcin, and Djamel Zighed. 2012. Roles in social networks: Methodologies and research issues. Web Intelligence and Agent Systems: An International Journal 10, 1 (2012), 117--133.

Digital Library

[24]

Jerome Friedman. 2001. Greedy function approximation: A gradient boosting machine. The Annals of Statistics 29, 5 (2001), 1189--1232.

[25]

Eric Gleave, Howard Welser, Thomas Lento, and Marc Smith. 2009. A conceptual and operational definition of 'social role' in online community. In Proceedings of the 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. IEEE, 1--11.

[26]

Scott Golder and Judith Donath. 2004. Social roles in electronic communities. Internet Research 5, 1 (2004), 19--22.

[27]

Vicenç Gómez, Andreas Kaltenbrunner, and Vicente López. 2008. Statistical analysis of the social network and discussion threads in Slashdot. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on World Wide Web. 645--654.

Digital Library

[28]

Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon, Andreas Kaltenbrunner, and Rafael Banchs. 2010. The structure of political discussion networks: A model for the analysis of online deliberation. Journal of Information Technology 25, 2 (2010), 230--243.

[29]

Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon and Ning Wang. 2013. The bridges and brokers of global campaigns in the context of social media. International Network of Analytical Sociologists Conference (2013).

[30]

Todd Graham and Scott Wright. 2014. Discursive equality and everyday talk online: The impact of "superparticipants". Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 19, 3 (2014), 625--642.

Digital Library

[31]

Mark Granovetter. 1973. The strength of weak ties. Amer. J. Sociology 78, 6 (1973), 1360--1380.

[32]

Keith Henderson, Brian Gallagher, Tina Eliassi-Rad, Hanghang Tong, Sugato Basu, Leman Akoglu, Danai Koutra, Christos Faloutsos, and Lei Li. 2012. Rolx: Structural role extraction & mining in large graphs. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. 1231--1239.

Digital Library

[33]

Jack Hessel and Lillian Lee. 2019. Something's brewing! Early prediction of controversy-causing posts from discussion features. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. 1648--1659.

[34]

Itai Himelboim, Eric Gleave, and Marc Smith. 2009. Discussion catalysts in online political discussions: Content importers and conversation starters. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 14, 4 (2009), 771--789.

[35]

Clayton Hutto and Eric Gilbert. 2014. Vader: A parsimonious rule-based model for sentiment analysis of social media text. In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, Vol. 8. 216--225.

[36]

Daniela Iosub, David Laniado, Carlos Castillo, Mayo Fuster Morell, and Andreas Kaltenbrunner. 2014. Emotions under discussion: Gender, status and communication in online collaboration. PloS one 9, 8 (2014), e104880.

[37]

Elihu Katz. 1957. The two-step flow of communication: An up-to-date report on an hypothesis. Public Opinion Quarterly 21, 1 (1957), 61--78.

[38]

Elihu Katz and Paul Felix Lazarsfeld. 1955. Personal Influence: The part played by people in the flow of mass communications. Free Press.

[39]

David Kempe, Jon Kleinberg, and Éva Tardos. 2003. Maximizing the spread of influence through a social network. In Proceedings of the Ninth ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. 137--146.

Digital Library

[40]

David Kim, Alison Hwong, Derek Stafford, Alex Hughes, James O'Malley, James Fowler, and Nicholas Christakis. 2015. Social network targeting to maximise population behaviour change: A cluster randomised controlled trial. The Lancet 386, 9989 (2015), 145--153.

[41]

Masahiro Kimura and Kazumi Saito. 2006. Tractable models for information diffusion in social networks. In Proceedings of the 17th European Conference on Principles of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery. Springer, 259--271.

[42]

Orrin Klapp. 1958. Social types: Process and structure. American Sociological Review 23, 6 (1958), 674--678.

[43]

Paul Felix Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet. 1968. The people's choice: How the voter makes up his mind in a presidential campaign. Columbia University Press.

[44]

David Liben-Nowell and Jon Kleinberg. 2007. The link-prediction problem for social networks. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 58, 7 (2007), 1019--1031.

Digital Library

[45]

Linyuan Lü and Tao Zhou. 2011. Link prediction in complex networks: A survey. Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications 390, 6 (2011), 1150--1170.

[46]

Andrew McCallum, Xuerui Wang, and Andrés Corrada-Emmanuel. 2007. Topic and role discovery in social networks with experiments on enron and academic email. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 30 (2007), 249--272.

Digital Library

[47]

Theodore Newcomb. 1950. Role behaviors in the study of individual personality and of groups. Journal of Personality 18, 3 (1950), 273--289.

[48]

Mark Newman. 2010. Networks. Oxford university press.

[49]

Mark Newman and Michelle Girvan. 2004. Finding and evaluating community structure in networks. Physical Review E 69, 2 (2004), 026113.

[50]

Mark Newman, Steven Strogatz, and Duncan Watts. 2001. Random graphs with arbitrary degree distributions and their applications. Physical Review E 64, 2 (2001), 026118.

[51]

Patrick Park, Joshua Blumenstock, and Michael Macy. 2018. The strength of long-range ties in population-scale social networks. Science 362, 6421 (2018), 1410--1413.

[52]

Alejandro Portes. 1998. Social capital: Its origins and applications in modern sociology. Annual Review of Sociology 24, 1 (1998), 1--24.

[53]

Ryan Rossi and Nesreen Ahmed. 2014. Role discovery in networks. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering 27, 4 (2014), 1112--1131.

Digital Library

[54]

Ryan Rossi, Brian Gallagher, Jennifer Neville, and Keith Henderson. 2012. Role dynamics: fast mining of large dynamic networks. In Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on World Wide Web. 997--1006.

Digital Library

[55]

Martin Saveski, Brandon Roy, and Deb Roy. 2021. The structure of toxic conversations on Twitter. In Proceedings of the Web Conference. 1086--1097.

Digital Library

[56]

Mirit Shoham, Aarti Arora, and Adil Al-Busaidi. 2013. Writing on the wall: An online "community" of YouTube patrons as communication network or cyber-graffiti?. In Proceedings of the 46th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. IEEE, 3951--3960.

Digital Library

[57]

Lu Sun, Robert Kraut, and Diyi Yang. 2019. Multi-level modeling of social roles in online micro-lending platforms. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 3, CSCW (2019), 1--25.

Digital Library

[58]

Mike Thelwall. 2014. Analysing YouTube audience reactions and discussions: A network approach. In Analyzing Social Media Data and Web Networks. Springer, 72--96.

[59]

Tammara Combs Turner and Karen Fisher. 2006. The impact of social types within information communities: Findings from technical newsgroups. In Proceedings of the 39th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Vol. 6. IEEE, 135b--135b.

Digital Library

[60]

Tammara Combs Turner, Marc Smith, Danyel Fisher, and Howard Welser. 2005. Picturing Usenet: Mapping computer- mediated collective action. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 10, 4 (2005), JCMC1048.

[61]

Johan Ugander, Lars Backstrom, Cameron Marlow, and Jon Kleinberg. 2012. Structural diversity in social contagion. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, 16 (2012), 5962--5966.

[62]

Brian Uzzi. 1997. Social structure and competition in interfirm networks: The paradox of embeddedness. Administrative Science Quarterly 42, 1 (1997), 35--67.

[63]

Fernanda Viégas and Marc Smith. 2004. Newsgroup crowds and authorlines: Visualizing the activity of individuals in conversational cyberspaces. In Proceedings of the 37th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. IEEE, 10--pp.

[64]

Stanley Wasserman and Katherine Faust. 1994. Social network analysis: Methods and applications. Vol. 8. Cambridge university press.

[65]

Duncan Watts and Peter Sheridan Dodds. 2007. Influentials, networks, and public opinion formation. Journal of Consumer Research 34, 4 (2007), 441--458.

[66]

Duncan Watts and Steven Strogatz. 1998. Collective dynamics of 'small-world' networks. Nature 393, 6684 (1998), 440--442.

[67]

Howard Welser, Dan Cosley, Gueorgi Kossinets, Austin Lin, Fedor Dokshin, Geri Gay, and Marc Smith. 2011. Finding social roles in Wikipedia. In Proceedings of the 2011 iConference. 122--129.

Digital Library

[68]

Howard Welser, Eric Gleave, Danyel Fisher, and Marc Smith. 2007. Visualizing the signatures of social roles in online discussion groups. Journal of Social Structure 8, 2 (2007), 1--32.

[69]

Diyi Yang, Robert Kraut, Tenbroeck Smith, Elijah Mayfield, and Dan Jurafsky. 2019. Seekers, providers, welcomers, and storytellers: Modeling social roles in online health communities. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1--14.

Digital Library

[70]

Masaki Yuki, William Maddux, Marilynn Brewer, and Kosuke Takemura. 2005. Cross-cultural differences in relationship and group-based trust. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 31, 1 (2005), 48--62.

Cited By

Yu YJiang JDhillon P(2024)Characterizing the Structure of Online Conversations Across RedditProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36869138:CSCW2(1-23)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3686913
Haq EZhu YLin ZWeng HTyson GLee LMogavi RBraud THui PRokne JWang D(2023)Understanding Characteristics of Catalyst Users in the WallStreetBets CommunityProceedings of the 2023 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining10.1145/3625007.3627595(320-324)Online publication date: 6-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3625007.3627595
Bory PGiardullo PTosoni STurrini V(2022)‘We will multiply the fires of resistance’: The catalysts of dissent against institutional science and their interplay with refused knowledge communitiesPublic Understanding of Science10.1177/0963662522111352432:1(2-19)Online publication date: 24-Aug-2022
https://doi.org/10.1177/09636625221113524
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Social Catalysts: Characterizing People Who Spark Conversations Among Others
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Collaborative and social computing
2. Information systems
  1. World Wide Web
    1. Web applications
      1. Social networks

Recommendations

Building social capital with Facebook: Type of network, availability of other media, and social self-efficacy matter^#
Highlights
- Type of friends affects building social capital via Facebook and traditional media.
Abstract
Findings about Facebook's effect on relationships are mixed, possibly due to lack of models that acknowledge differences across users, types of their friends, and use of competing media. To address this, we proposed and tested how ...
Social network site use, mobile personal talk and social capital among teenagers

Mobile personal talk has a positive relationship with network capital among teens.SNS adoption and mobile personal talk jointly predict teens' civic participation.Different SNS activities have different relationships with social capital.Mobile talk ...
The structure of conversations on social networks

Conversations on social media can be dialogic or dialectic.In dialogic conversations, social media users interact among themselves.In dialectic conversations, social media users interact with the company.Modern social media are characterized by dialogic ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction Volume 5, Issue CSCW2

CSCW2

October 2021

5376 pages

EISSN:2573-0142

DOI:10.1145/3493286

Editor:
Jeff Nichols
Apple Inc., United States

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2021 Owner/Author.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 18 October 2021

Published in PACMHCI Volume 5, Issue CSCW2

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

4
Total Citations
View Citations
667
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)199
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)20

Reflects downloads up to 11 Dec 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Yu YJiang JDhillon P(2024)Characterizing the Structure of Online Conversations Across RedditProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36869138:CSCW2(1-23)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3686913
Haq EZhu YLin ZWeng HTyson GLee LMogavi RBraud THui PRokne JWang D(2023)Understanding Characteristics of Catalyst Users in the WallStreetBets CommunityProceedings of the 2023 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining10.1145/3625007.3627595(320-324)Online publication date: 6-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3625007.3627595
Bory PGiardullo PTosoni STurrini V(2022)‘We will multiply the fires of resistance’: The catalysts of dissent against institutional science and their interplay with refused knowledge communitiesPublic Understanding of Science10.1177/0963662522111352432:1(2-19)Online publication date: 24-Aug-2022
https://doi.org/10.1177/09636625221113524
Appling SBruckman ADe Choudhury M(2022)Reactions to Fact CheckingProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35551286:CSCW2(1-17)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3555128

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

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 Article

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Issue’s Table of Contents