Ethnography Results, Week 4

Week 4:
For this weeks study I had the idea to do a short user study that would look into how users commented on scientific material and what other categories they post in. On the science front page nothing looked extreme or out of place. The topics included technology, biology, medical, climate, and space articles. What I did was selected some of the more popular front page articles and viewed the comments. If the user had a popular comment that had a good rating I looked further into that user's profile to see what other topics were commented on.

I picked a total of five users because I wasn't sure what to expect. From each users profile I viewed the last ten comments made to see what category it was in and if the comment was relevant to the subject. I'm sure its not like this for everybody but I got consistent results from all five users. 

User 1:

• Funny x 4
• Pics x 3
• Politics
• WTF
• Science 

User 2:

• Minecraft x 4
• Science x 2
• Videos x 3
• Funny x 4
• Gaming x 2

User 3:

• Funny
• Videos
• Starcraft x 2
• WTF x 2
• Pics x 4
• Science

User 4:

• Science x 2
• Funny x 8

User 5:

• Videos x 3
• Politics x 2
• Science
• Funny x 3
• Pics x 3              

From the results it is obvious that from the users there are not that many posts from the section I took the user from. Another thing to note is that the comments are listed in order of the time they were posted. So, the most recent are on the left.

Discussion:
From these five users it seems pictures and short videos are favored to comment on rather than the lengthy science articles. This also says to me that these users tend to stay in one category for a period of time and read several articles.

Not all of the comments made in the science section from the five users were really relevant to the topic, but the comment were still up-voted and popular. These results are interesting to me because it seems like most of the discussion in the science section is very involved and intelligent. Maybe this happens because the actual population that the a specific science article greatly appeals to is small. Many people probably think the article is interesting but like these witty, short comments better than a more scientific comment.

I think for next week I will continue observing the same five users but also choose five new users to monitor to see if any of the claims I made above remain consistent. Along with this I will do a study on the topics that users post about rather than comment on. The study will probably be done in the same manner as the user comment study.