An Analysis of Communities in Different Types of Online Forums

The most important feature of Internet forums is their social aspect. Many forums are active for a long period of time and attract a group of dedicated users, who build a tight social community around a forum. With great abundance of forums devoted to every possible aspect of human activity, such as politics, religion, sports, technology, entertainment, economy, fashion, and many more, users are able to find a forum that perfectly suits their needs and interests. In this paper we introduce a micro-community-based model for descriptive characterization of Internet forums. We show how a simple concept of a micro-community can be used to quantitatively assess the openness and durability of an Internet forum. We also show that our model is capable of producing a taxonomy of Internet forums using unsupervised clustering method. We present the micro-community model, the set of basic statistics, and we apply the model to several real-world online forums to experimentally verify the correctness and robustness of the model.