Community-based question answering (CQA) platforms are crowd-sourced services for sharing user expertise on various topics, from mechanical repairs to parenting. While they naturally build-in an online social network infrastructure, they carry a very different purpose from Facebook-like social networks, where users "hang-out" with their friends and tend to share more personal information. It is unclear, thus, how the privacy concerns and their correlation with user behavior in an online social network translate into a CQA platform. This study analyzes one year of recorded traces from a mature CQA platform to understand the association between users' privacy concerns as manifested by their account settings and their activity in the platform. The results show that privacy preference is correlated with behavior in the community in terms of engagement, retention, accomplishments and deviance from the norm. We find privacy-concerned users have higher qualitative and quantitative contributions, show higher retention, report more abuses, have higher perception on answer quality and have larger social circles. However, at the same time, these users also exhibit more deviant behavior than the users with public profiles.
's @cite_34 demographic study on privacy concerns among American, Chinese, and Indian social network users shows that American respondents are the most privacy concerned, followed by Chinese. However, there has been no research on privacy concerns and user behavior in CQA platforms. Our previous work @cite_0 on cultures in used Geert Hofstede's cultural dimensions @cite_41 , such as individualism index, and showed that users from higher individualism index countries exhibit higher level of concern about their privacy compared to the users from collectivistic countries. In this study, we focus on understanding how the users' behavior, characterized by broad engagement, accomplishments and deviance metrics, relates to their privacy concerns.
@cite_0 @cite_41 @cite_34
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CQA services are collaborative platforms where users ask and answer questions. We investigate the influence of national culture on people's online questioning and answering behavior. For this, we analyzed a sample of 200 thousand users in Yahoo Answers from 67 countries. We measure empirically a set of cultural metrics defined in Geert Hofstede's cultural dimensions and Robert Levine's Pace of Life and show that behavioral cultural differences exist in community question answering platforms. We find that national cultures differ in Yahoo Answers along a number of dimensions such as temporal predictability of activities, contribution-related behavioral patterns, privacy concerns, and power inequality. This book reveals: * The unexamined rules behind the thoughts and emotions of people of different cultures * Ways in which cultures differ in the areas of collectivism individualism, assertiveness modesty, tolerance for ambiguity, and deferment of gratification * How organizational cultures differ from national cultures, and how they can be managed