Archetypes of influential users in social question-answering sites

Purpose This paper seeks to address the following two research questions. RQ1: What are the influential user archetypes in the social question-answering (SQA) community? RQ2: To what extent does user feedback affect influential users in changing from one archetype to another? Design/methodology/approach Based on a sample of 13,840 influential users drawn from the Covid-19 community on Zhihu, the archetypes of influential users were derived from their ongoing participation behavior in the community using the Gaussian mixture model. Additionally, user feedback characteristics such as relevance and volume from 222,965 commenters who contributed 546,344 comments were analyzed using the multinomial logistic regression model to investigate the archetype change of influential users. Findings Findings suggest that influential users could be clustered into three distinctive archetypes: touch-and-go influential users, proactive influential users and super influential users. Moreover, feedback variables have various impacts on the influential user archetype change, including a shift toward creating higher-quality content and fostering increased interaction, a shift toward generating lower-quality content and decreased interaction but improved speed and having mixed effects due to differences in information processing among these archetypes. Originality/value This study expands the existing knowledge of influential users and proposes practical approaches to cultivate them further.