Explorando o compartilhamento de perguntas em redes sociais para fomentar a contribuição em sites Q&A.

Abstract

Q&A sites are those accessed by users who want to find answers to their questions or answer someone else’s questions. Programmers use these kind of website very much in order to exchange questions and answers regarding programming. This behavior was observed in a website called Stack Over flow emPortuguês. Many researchers have been focused on finding out ways to attract more content to those websites and also on the aspects of the behaviors and motivations of their users. In this work our focus was the the practice of sharing Q&A sites questions in social networks as a strategy to increase the content of these websites. Our goals were: extract some lessons about how the users ’behavior look like when they face the functionality of sharing questions in Q&A sites, investigate how to promote this behavior and find out statistical evidence with respect to the advantages of sharing questions in Q&A sites and if this practice helps to increase the number of answers. We conducted two qualitative investigations in which users from Q&A sites and social networks were interviewed and they reported how is their general behavior when they come across with the option of sharing questions in those websites. Then, we performed a quantitative experiment to test different ways of promoting the act of sharing questions from Q&A sites in social networks ,as well as to investigate more deeply the effect of this practice in these websites contents. We concluded that users are very discerning when deciding whether or not to share content in their social networks due to the related social costs. That’s why we believe that it’s necessary to change the current way of promoting the sharing of Q&A sites questions in social networks. Besides, we noticed that sharing of questions may not be a good strategy to increase the contribution in these kind of websites.