A Study On The Factors Influencing The Usefulness Of Users' Answers In Online Q&A Community Zhihu

With the development of information technology and the spread of knowledge sharing,the online Q&A community,which is designed to meet people's information and knowledge needs,has played an important role in people's daily lives.The online Q&A community focuses on users' questions and answers.Users are highly encouraged to interact and communicate in the community,and build their personal online social network.It provides great convenience for users to conduct online information transmission and interpersonal communication.However,with the rapid growth of the number of users in the community during last several years,there have been questions of uneven quality of answers,which makes it difficult for users to quickly obtain useful information.This study explores the influencing factors of the usefulness of users' answers in the community,in order to help the community improve the efficiency of information transmission and promote the development of the online Q&A community.Zhihu is currently the best online Q&A community in China.This study takes the answers to questions about laptop evaluation in the community as the research object,uses the number of approvals received as the interpreted variable,and adopts the information adoption model as the text.The basic theoretical model of the inquiry is explored from the aspects of answering characteristics and answering the user's personal characteristics.Among them,the answer feature corresponds to the information quality in the information adoption model,and is the central path for reading users to perceive the usefulness of answers.This article mainly uses the length of the text of the answer,the number of pictures included,whether it has been edited again,emotional orientation,and professionalism of the text to measure the quality of answers.The characteristics of the answering user correspond to the credibility of the information source in the information adoption model,which is the edge path for the user to perceive the usefulness of the answer.This article mainly measures the credibility of answering users by answering users' activity level,professional level,and social network in the community.This research uses crawler programs to obtain basic data about answers and answering users,uses text analysis to construct the main text variables,and uses multiple linear regression for empirical analysis to obtain the influencing factors of the usefulness of users' answers.The results of the research show that: in terms of the characteristics of the answer,the length of the text,the re-edited answer,and the professionalism of the text positively affect the usefulness of the user's answer,while the number of pictures used in the answer and the emotional tendency contained in the answer negatively affect the usefulness of the user's answer;in terms of the user's personal characteristics,the number of historical questions and answers of the user,the user's authentication,the user's introverted network centrality and the extroverted network centrality all have positive effects on the usefulness of answers,while the number of columns affects negatively,the impact of the number of historical articles of users is not significant.This study collected real data from the online Q&A community to make up for the limitations of using questionnaires to obtain data in previous studies.The results of this study have certain guiding significance for the platform to improve the answer ranking system and content recommendation system,as well as user-contributed high-quality answers.