TY - GEN
T1 - Is anyone out there? Unpacking Q&A hashtags on twitter
AU - Rzeszotarski, Jeffrey M.
AU - Spiro, Emma S.
AU - Matias, Jorge Nathan
AU - Monroy-Hernández, Andrés
AU - Morris, Meredith Ringel
PY - 2014
Y1 - 2014
N2 - In addition to posting news and status updates, many Twitter users post questions that seek various types of subjective and objective information. These questions are often labeled with "Q&A" hashtags, such as #lazyweb or #twoogle. We surveyed Twitter users and found they employ these Q&A hashtags both as a topical signifier (this tweet needs an answer!) and to reach out to those beyond their immediate followers (a community of helpful tweeters who monitor the hashtag). However, our log analysis of thousands of hashtagged Q&A exchanges reveals that nearly all replies to hashtagged questions come from a user's immediate follower network, contradicting users' beliefs that they are tapping into a larger community by tagging their question tweets. This finding has implications for designing next-generation social search systems that reach and engage a wide audience of answerers.
AB - In addition to posting news and status updates, many Twitter users post questions that seek various types of subjective and objective information. These questions are often labeled with "Q&A" hashtags, such as #lazyweb or #twoogle. We surveyed Twitter users and found they employ these Q&A hashtags both as a topical signifier (this tweet needs an answer!) and to reach out to those beyond their immediate followers (a community of helpful tweeters who monitor the hashtag). However, our log analysis of thousands of hashtagged Q&A exchanges reveals that nearly all replies to hashtagged questions come from a user's immediate follower network, contradicting users' beliefs that they are tapping into a larger community by tagging their question tweets. This finding has implications for designing next-generation social search systems that reach and engage a wide audience of answerers.
KW - Hashtags
KW - Information seeking
KW - Q&A
KW - Social search
KW - Twitter
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84900395109&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84900395109&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/2556288.2557175
DO - 10.1145/2556288.2557175
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84900395109
SN - 9781450324731
T3 - Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings
SP - 2755
EP - 2758
BT - CHI 2014
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
T2 - 32nd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2014
Y2 - 26 April 2014 through 1 May 2014
ER -