An Analysis of Post Contributions in the Hacker Community

We are interested in how the posters in the hacker community contribute and exchange information. Text-mining techniques have been used to learn about the quality nature of the posts. We found that the knowledge exchanges in the hacker community are both interesting and complex. We uncover some interesting knowledge exchange behavioral patterns between initial post contributor and post repliers (initiators vs. followers). Namely, popular threads, i.e., threads with more replies, actually generate lower quality discussions in replies. On the other hand, we observe a higher percentage of quality replies with less popular threads. The results show that thread popularity does not immediately imply valuable discussions. In fact, threads with lower initial post quality are often associated with higher quality yet less popularity discussions