ABSTRACT
Bots are estimated to account for well over half of all web traffic, yet they remain an understudied topic in HCI. In this paper we present the findings of an analysis of 2284 submissions across three discussion groups dedicated to the request, creation and discussion of bots on Reddit. We set out to examine the qualities and functionalities of bots and the practical and social challenges surrounding their creation and use. Our findings highlight the prevalence of misunderstandings around the capabilities of bots, misalignments in discourse between novices who request and more expert members who create them, and the prevalence of requests that are deemed to be inappropriate for the Reddit community. In discussing our findings, we suggest future directions for the design and development of tools that support more carefully guided and reflective approaches to bot development for novices, and tools to support exploring the consequences of contextually-inappropriate bot ideas.
- Norah Abokhodair, Daisy Yoo, and David W. McDonald. 2015. Dissecting a Social Botnet: Growth, Content and Influence in Twitter. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW '15). ACM, NY, NY, USA, 839--851. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2675133.2675208 Google ScholarDigital Library
- Sally Adee. 2012. Digital doppelgangers: building an army of you. New Scientist, 215(2877), 38--41. Google ScholarCross Ref
- Amit Agarwal. 2016. How to Write a Twitter Bot in 5 Minutes www.labnol.org/internet/write-twitterbot/27902/Google Scholar
- Alexa -- statistics for Reddit.com http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/reddit.comGoogle Scholar
- Muhammad Asaduzzaman, Ahmed Shah Mashiyat, Chanchal K. Roy, and Kevin A. Schneider. 2013. Answering questions about unanswered questions of stack overflow. In Proceedings of the 10th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR '13). IEEE Press, Piscataway, NJ, USA, 97--100. Google ScholarCross Ref
- Vicky Baker. 2015. Battle of the bots: Fake social media accounts on the attack. Index on Censorship, 44 (2), 127--129. DOI: 10.1177/0306422015591470 Google ScholarCross Ref
- Barbara Rita Barricelli, and Stefano Valtolina. 2015. Designing for end-user development in the internet of things. In International Symposium on End User Development, pp. 9--24. Google ScholarCross Ref
- Yazan Boshmaf, Ildar Muslukhov, Konstantin Beznosov, and Matei Ripeanu. 2011. The socialbot network: when bots socialize for fame and money. In Proceedings of the 27th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC '11). ACM, NY, NY, USA, 93--102. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1145/2076732.2076746 Google ScholarDigital Library
- Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke. 2006. Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3(2), 77--101. Google ScholarCross Ref
- Zi Chu, Steven Gianvecchio, Haining Wang, and Sushil Jajodia. 2010. Who is tweeting on Twitter: human, bot, or cyborg?. In Proceedings of the 26th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC '10). ACM, NY, NY, USA, 21--30. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1920261.1920265. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Maxime Clément and Matthieu J Guitton. 2015. Interacting with bots online: Users' reactions to actions of automated programs in Wikipedia. Computers in Human Behaviour 50 (2015), 66--75 Google ScholarDigital Library
- Clayton Allen Davis, Onur Varol, Emilio Ferrara, Alessandro Flammini, and Filippo Menczer. 2016. BotOrNot: A System to Evaluate Social Bots. In Proceedings of the 25th International Conference Companion on World Wide Web (WWW '16 Companion). International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee, Republic and Canton of Geneva, Switzerland, 273--274. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2872518.2889302 Google ScholarDigital Library
- Nicolas Ducheneaut. 2005. Socialization in an open source software community: A socio-technical analysis. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 14, no. 4, 323--368. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Pelle Ehn, and Morten Kyng, 1991. Cardboard computers in Design at Work: Cooperative Design of Computer Systems. eds Greenbaum. J. & Kyng, M Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ.Google Scholar
- Haakon Faste, Nir Rachmel, Russell Essary, and Evan Sheehan. 2013. Brainstorm, Chainstorm, Cheatstorm, Tweetstorm: new ideation strategies for distributed HCI design. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '13). ACM, NY, NY, USA, 1343--1352. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2470654.2466177 Google ScholarDigital Library
- Uwe Flick, Ernst von Kardoff, and Ines Steinke, (eds.) 2004. A companion to qualitative research. SageGoogle Scholar
- Michelle C. Forelle, Philip N. Howard, Andrés Monroy-Hernández, and Saiph Savage. 2015. Political Bots and the Manipulation of Public Opinion in Venezuela (July 25, 2015) Available at SSRN 2635800Google Scholar
- R. Stuart. Geiger, 2011. The lives of bots. In G. Lovink and N. Tkacz (eds.) In Wikipedia: A Critical Point of View. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures 78--93.Google Scholar
- R. Stuart Geiger and Aaron Halfaker. 2013. When the levee breaks: without bots, what happens to Wikipedia's quality control processes?. In Proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Open Collaboration (WikiSym '13). ACM, NY, NY, USA, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2491055.2491061 Google ScholarDigital Library
- Zafar Gilani, Liang Wang, Jon Crowcroft, Mario Almeida, and Reza Farahbakhsh. 2016. Stweeler: A Framework for Twitter Bot Analysis. In Proceedings of the 25th International Conference Companion on World Wide Web (WWW '16 Companion). International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee, Republic and Canton of Geneva, Switzerland, 37--38. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2872518.2889360 Google ScholarDigital Library
- Eric Gilbert. 2013. Widespread underprovision on Reddit. In Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work (CSCW '13). ACM, NY, NY, USA, 803--808. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2441776.2441866 Google ScholarDigital Library
- Philippe Golle and Nicolas Ducheneaut. 2005. Preventing bots from playing online games. Comput. Entertain. (July 2005), 3--3. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1077246.1077255 Google ScholarDigital Library
- Claire Hewson, and Tom Buchanan. 2013. Ethics guidelines for internet-mediated research. The British Psychological SocietyGoogle Scholar
- Patrick Hogan, and Jorge Rivas. 2015. We built a Twitter bot that corrects people who say "illegal immigrant". http://fusion.net/story/165089/webuilt-illegal-immigrant-bot/ (accessed 16/09/2016)Google Scholar
- Elias Isquith. 2015. Reddit's ugly, racist secret: How it became the most hateful space on the Internet. From: http://www.salon.com/2015/03/18/reddits_ugly_racist_ secret_how_it_became_the_most_hateful_space_on_th e_internet/Google Scholar
- M. Cameron Jones and Elizabeth F. Churchill. 2009. Conversations in developer communities: a preliminary analysis of the yahoo! pipes community. In Proceedings of the fourth international conference on Communities and technologies (C&T '09). ACM, NY, NY, USA, 195--204. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1556460.1556489 Google ScholarDigital Library
- Darius Kazemi. 2016. Bot Summit 2016. http://tinysubversions.com/botsummit/2016/Google Scholar
- Ben Kirman, Conor Linehan, and Shaun Lawson. 2012. Get lost: facilitating serendipitous exploration in location-sharing services. In CHI '12 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '12). ACM, NY, NY, USA, 23032308. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2212776.2223793 Google ScholarDigital Library
- Bence Kollanyi. 2016. Automation, Algorithms, and Politics| Where Do Bots Come From? An Analysis of Bot Codes Shared on GitHub. International Journal Of Communication, 10, 20.Google Scholar
- Anders Olof Larsson, and Moe Hallvard. 2015. Bots or journalists' News sharing on Twitter. Communications - The European Journal of Communication Research, 40 (3), pp. 361--370.Google Scholar
- Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger. 2002. Legitimate peripheral participation in communities of practice. Supporting lifelong learning. 1. 111--126.Google Scholar
- Ben Light. 2016. The rise of speculative devices: Hooking up with the bots of Ashley Madison. First Monday.21 (6). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5210/fm.v21i6.6426 Google ScholarCross Ref
- Bin Lin, Alexey Zagalsky, Margaret-Anne Storey, and Alexander Serebrenik. 2016. Why Developers Are Slacking Off: Understanding How Software Teams Use Slack. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing Companion (CSCW '16 Companion). ACM, NY, NY, USA, 333--336. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2818052.2869117 Google ScholarDigital Library
- Tetyana Lokot, and Nicholas Diakopoulos. 2015. News Bots: Automating news and information dissemination on Twitter. Digital Journalism. 1--18.Google Scholar
- Annette N. Markham and Nancy K. Baym. 2008. Internet Inquiry: Conversations about Method. Sage Publications, Inc., Thousand Oaks, CA, USA.Google Scholar
- Claudia Müller-Birn, Leonhard Dobusch, and James D. Herbsleb. 2013. Work-to-rule: the emergence of algorithmic governance in Wikipedia. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Communities and Technologies (C&T '13). ACM, NY, NY, USA, 80--89. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2482991.2482999. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Bonnie Nardi and Jannis Kallinikos. 2007. Opening the Black Box of Digital Technologies: Mods in World of Warcraft. In Proceedings of 23rd EGOS Colloquium.Google Scholar
- Seyed Mehdi Nasehi, Jonathan Sillito, Frank Maurer, and Chris Burns. 2012. What makes a good code example?: A study of programming Q&A in StackOverflow. In 28th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM), 25--34 Google ScholarDigital Library
- Clifford, Nass and Youngme Moon. 2000. Machines and mindlessness: Social responses to computers. Journal of social issues 56, no. 1. 81--103. Google ScholarCross Ref
- Kawin Ngamkajornwiwat, Dongsong Zhang, A. Gunes Koru, Lina Zhou, and Robert Nolker. 2008. An exploratory study on the evolution of oss developer communities." In , Proceedings of the 41st Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. 305--305. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Charith Perera, Saeed Aghaee, and Alan Blackwell. 2015. Natural Notation for the Domestic Internet of Things. In International Symposium on End User Development, pp. 25--41. Google ScholarCross Ref
- Sarah Perez. 2016. Microsoft silences its new A.I. bot Tay, after Twitter users teach it racism [Updated]. www.techcrunch.com/2016/03/24/microsoft-silencesits-new-a-i-bot-tay-after-twitter-users-teach-it-racism/Google Scholar
- Daniel Peterschmidt. 2016. How to Make a Twitter Bot in Under an Hour Even if you don't code that often! From www.medium.com/science-fridayfootnotes/how-to-make-a-twitter-bot-in-under-an-hour259597558acf#.5ewopdxjtGoogle Scholar
- Alexander Repenning, and Andri Ioannidou. 2006. What makes end-user development tick'13 design guidelines. In End User Development, pp. 51--85. Google ScholarCross Ref
- Roopika Risam. 2015. Toxic femininity 4.0. First Monday, 20(4). DOI: 10.5210/fm.v20i4.5896 Google ScholarCross Ref
- Yong Rui and Zicheg Liu. 2003. Excuse me, but are you human?. In Proceedings of the eleventh ACM international conference on Multimedia (MULTIMEDIA '03). ACM, NY, NY, USA, 462--463. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/957013.957113 Google ScholarDigital Library
- Aviva Rutkin. 2014. Twitter bots grow up and take on the world. New Scientist. 223(2980). 20--21. Google ScholarCross Ref
- Saiph Savage, Andres Monroy-Hernandez, and Tobias Höllerer. 2016. Botivist: Calling Volunteers to Action using Online Bots. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW '16). ACM, NY, NY, USA, 813--822. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2818048.2819985 Google ScholarDigital Library
- Shilpa V. Shukla, and David F. Redmiles. 1996. Collaborative learning in a software bug-tracking scenario. In Workshop on Approaches for Distributed Learning through Computer Supported Collaborative Learning, pp. 16--20.Google Scholar
- Philipp Singer, Fabian Flöck, Clemens Meinhart, Elias Zeitfogel, and Markus Strohmaier. 2014. Evolution of reddit: from the front page of the internet to a selfreferential community?. In Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW '14 Companion). ACM, NY, NY, USA, 517522. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2567948.2576943 Google ScholarDigital Library
- Statista - statistics for Reddit.com http://www.statista.com/statistics/443332/redditmonthly-visitors/Google Scholar
- Thomas Steiner. 2014. Bots vs. wikipedians, anons vs. logged-ins. In Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW '14 Companion). ACM, NY, NY, USA, 547--548. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2567948.2576948 Google ScholarDigital Library
- Cristiano Storni. 2014. The problem of de-sign as conjuring: empowerment-in-use and the politics of seams. In Proceedings of the 13th Participatory Design Conference: Research Papers - Volume 1 (PDC '14), Vol. 1. ACM, NY, NY, USA, 161--170. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2661435.2661436 Google ScholarDigital Library
- Sysomos.com. 2009. An In-Depth Look at the Most Active Twitter User Data from https://sysomos.com/inside-twitter/most-active-twitteruser-dataGoogle Scholar
- Alex S. Taylor. 2009. Machine intelligence. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '09). ACM, NY, NY, USA, 2109--2118. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1518701.1519022 Google ScholarDigital Library
- John Vines, Mark Blythe, Stephen Lindsay, Paul Dunphy, Andrew Monk, and Patrick Olivier. 2012. Questionable concepts: critique as resource for designing with eighty somethings. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '12). ACM, NY, NY, USA, 1169--1178. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2207676.2208567 Google ScholarDigital Library
- Alex Hai Wang. 2010. Don't follow me: Spam detection in twitter. In Proceedings of the 2010 International Conference on Security and Cryptography (SECRYPT). 1--10. IEEEGoogle Scholar
- Samuel C. Woolley and Philip N. Howard. 2016. Automation, Algorithms, and Politics| Political Communication, Computational Propaganda, and Autonomous Agents' Introduction. International Journal of Communication 10 9.Google Scholar
- www.andfestival.org.uk/events/art-of-bots-london/Google Scholar
- www.cheapbotsdonequick.comGoogle Scholar
- www.donotpay.co.ukGoogle Scholar
- www.ifttt.comGoogle Scholar
- www.meya.aiGoogle Scholar
- www.reddit.com/dev/apiGoogle Scholar
- www.reddit.com/r/botrequestsGoogle Scholar
- www.reddit.com/r/botrequests/comments/29z0nt/mergi ng_with_rrequestabotGoogle Scholar
- www.reddit.com/r/botwatch/Google Scholar
- Yunwen Ye and Kouichi Kishida. 2003. Toward an understanding of the motivation Open Source Software developers. In Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE '03). IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, 419--429.Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- "Could You Define That in Bot Terms"?: Requesting, Creating and Using Bots on Reddit
Recommendations
"Welcome!": social and psychological predictors of volunteer socializers in online communities
CSCW '13: Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative workVolunteer socializers are members of a community who voluntarily help newcomers become familiar with the popular practices and attitudes of the community. In this paper, we explore the social and psychological predictors of volunteer socializers on ...
Who Uses Bots? A Statistical Analysis of Bot Usage in Moderation Teams
CHI EA '20: Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsAdopting new technology is challenging for volunteer moderation teams of online communities. Challenges are aggravated when communities increase in size. In a prior qualitative study, Kiene et al. found evidence that moderator teams adapted to challenges ...
Technological Frames and User Innovation: Exploring Technological Change in Community Moderation Teams
Management of technological change in organizations is one of the most enduring topics in the literature on computer-supported cooperative work. The successful navigation of technological change is both more challenging and more critical in online ...
Comments