Understanding social costs in online question asking

Various social media sites and online communities provide new channels for people in need to ask questions and seek help. However, individuals may still encounter psychological barriers that deter solicitation for assistance, which is more formally described as “social costs”. For example, it can be the concerns of burdening others, the obligation of reciprocation, etc. To understand what could reduce social costs, we conducted a study in the context of Question-Answering (QA) and investigated the following three factors inspired by literature: anonymity (posting a question anonymously), recommendation (having the system handle the question routing), and ephemerality (allowing questions to be visible only for a short period). We built a QA platform to support these three features and conducted a randomized within-subject experiment to test their effects on social costs of posting questions. Results suggest the presence of anonymity, recommendation, and ephemerality reduces the social costs which provides design implications for future community building.