Community Matters more than Anonymity: Analysis of User Interactions on the Quora Q&A Platform

Question-and-answer (Q&A) websites are one of the latest evolutions in crowdsourced knowledge aggregation. Q&A websites provide more diverse opinions, as they involve the entire community. Quora made its reputation out of enhancing the traditional Q&A model with popular aspects of social media and incites its users to provide their names, locations, and references. This model allows higher quality control - including anonymous content, but more importantly, it leads users to form communities based on other criteria (e.g. profession, city) than similar interests. In this paper, we study the interactions among Quorans to unveil how such communities emerge. We perform both quantitative and qualitative analysis on the user-generated content and relate this content to social and demographic features. We show that being anonymous significantly affects the answers' length and subjectivity. On the other hand, most of the user interactions relate to their geographic locations.