Ethnography Results, Week 5

Week 5:

During week 4 I did a short study on what kind of content users were commenting about. I did this by searching articles for very popular comments, then following the user that made the comment. This week I did a similar observation but instead I observed what people posted about. I took popular articles from the science section and observed the user that made the post.

I picked 5 users that posted the top 5 articles at the time of this observation. The following data includes the user number and the section that they posted in. From this I will try to see if there are any conclusions that can be drawn or looked into.

User 1:

·         Worldnews x 9

·         Business x 2

·         News x 3

·         Wtf x 3

·         Politics x 1

·         Sports  x 3

User 2:

·         Science x 3

·         Todayilearned x 2

·         Reddit.com x 2

User 3:

·         science x 3

·         worldnews x 7

·         history

·         netsec

·         Politics

·         Truereddit x 2

·         Programming

User 4:

·         Science

·          Worldnews x 5

·         Pics x 2

·         Reddit.com x 5

·         Wtf x 3

·         Funny x 2

User 5:

·         Space x 2

·         Netsec x 2

·         Physics

·         Science

·         Technology x 2

·         Comics

·         Politics

·         Reddit.com x 3

·         Android x 2

·         Pics

·         Geek

Some things to not about the users are the time range for the posts recorded. User 1 was very active and posted all of the articles within 12 hours of each other. User 2's posts are within 3 months. User 3's posts are within 20 days. User 4's posts are within 4 months. User 5's are within 9 days. This just shows how active each user is.

From this study I wanted to see if the articles popularity was possibly linked to the popularity of the user. If the user constantly posted material in the same section, active users might recognize the user's name. From this data it looks like there are several sections that most of the users posted in, not just the science section with the popular article. If a lot of different users browse these similar sections then the users might be well known in the community. In general though if someone just browsed the science section they would most likely not recognize these users. To me this says that the popularity of these articles are based fully on the content and not the popularity of the user. That is not to say though that the credibility of the user that posted the article does not effect the popularity of the article. A user can view another users 'karma' by viewing their profile. The more karma somebody has the higher their credibility and reputation.