Dear networkdynamics, In your experience with social on-line communities, do brand new users spamming a site with questions for personal gain when they have not contributed at all contribute to a community and engage users? That just stinks. To support an academic project I may still complete the survey but you might have thought about engaging and understanding the community before you asked it to work for you. Perhaps your team will learn from this ham-fisted, loufoque attempt at outreach to a bunch of people that are very internet/social media saavy. There are many people here that are incredibbly experienced and would be very insightful but I doubt this message is going to engage them. sigh
I've been lurking ever since the Reddit debacle and finally had to create an account just to reply to this kind of misinformation. If they would have had funding of this sort, their Institutional Review Board would have required them to state it in this type of consent form, so you would know at least that. It could be different in Canada though (I've only seen the US's requirements). Personally, I don't think this is a particularly loufoque post. Their post is probably from an account they created just for this purpose. My guess is that posting and commenting to social media are not part of their job descriptions so I wouldn't expect them to post from an account with a history even if the team members actually use the site. Who knows if they have personal accounts that they use -- never mix business and pleasure? Hubski is a fantastic community, so I'm honestly surprised by the extreme jadedness of your comments. I'm I'm actually curious to see what they come up with!
I'm a cynical old bastard who has been around long enough to ask uncomfortable questions of people, especially people digging for info. Hubski is neat, and i hope this place stays around a while. The people here are diverse and interesting and the comment threading and sharing system looks like it can hold the line against becoming a circlejerk like Reddit and Digg and Slashdot and hell, even newsgroups.Hubski is a fantastic community, so I'm honestly surprised by the extreme jadedness of your comments.
Kudos for recognizing the loufoqueness, even if we may disagree about the degree of silliness. Welcome! I have no idea what the Canadian academic requirements are for things like this. Perhaps lil could weigh in with her experience.
This could pass for research. The questions were pretty lame. I'd like to see the research proposal that they submitted to these gov. granting agencies. They would have had to include any research already done on the topic of why people join or leave news aggregator websites. Their multiple choice question about "why" one joins these websites seems to miss a lot of the point of hubski. I could have added a dozen more boxes.NSERC Discovery grant; SSHRC Insight Grant