Online Community Information Evaluation Mechanisms: Wisdom of the Crowds in the Context of Internet Question and Answer Platforms

Wisdom of the crowds is a fascinating phenomenon. With some requirements satisfied, the collective decision, derived from the aggregation of individual decisions, can be smarter than any individual. Originally that was only an offline phenomenon, yet with the Internet there are also online instances. Therefore, it is important to further understand the mechanisms within cases aiming to harness wisdom of the crowds. Contributing to that may also shed new light on how to improve the phenomenon itself. As Internet technologies have facilitated communication among people, so these have impacted how social influence can take place. Various scholars have pointed out that the social influence could be an important undermining factor the wisdom of the crowds. It is difficult to understand how social influence operates in such online context. This is as the mechanism of reading–evaluating–ranking content has, to some degree, an individual cycle that has been widely encouraged by online content platforms. These typically operate by aggregating, in real-time, individual opinions and this influences in a non-trivial way the mechanism of wisdom of crowds in an online context. The author of this thesis utilises an agent-based simulation research approach and conducted the study in three broad steps. Firstly, I designed and simulated interactions of online users to test echo chamber formation mechanisms. This phenomenon surrounds online individuals, influencing opinion formation and the availability of diverse information online. Secondly, I designed and simulated scenarios where the users’ interaction and evaluation mechanisms can be used to test the quality of the overall content selection based on different voting approaches. Thirdly, I designed and simulated the Birdwatch project as it is currently the closest empirical and decentralised approach to test how to supress social influence. From the tests conducted for this PhD project, I conclude that the wisdom of the crowd does exist online and that there is a salient limiting factor in the quality of this approach: the paradoxical relationship between the users’ finite ability to process information and the continuous overwhelming amount of information awaiting the online user. Thus, the overall contribution to knowledge from this PhD project is that it sheds new light on existing mechanisms and points out how social influence plays a key role in the assessment of online content plus the quality of online wisdom of crowds.