Deciphering digital popularity from question quality: the preeminence of social attributes over textual dimensions in driving CQA platform traffic

Community Question Answering (CQA) sites, now navigating through millions of daily user visits, hinge significantly on the quality of user-generated questions to bolster user satisfaction and, consequently, website traffic – crucial for platform sustainability. While the quality of questions ostensibly sets the stage for insightful answers, thereby attracting substantial traffic, existing research has predominantly sidelined the significance of questions, favoring a focus on traditional factors, such as answer quality, to elucidate traffic determinants. In this study we quantified the interrelation between question quality and traffic by extracting 15 relevant question-quality features and corresponding traffic (i.e. pageview) data from a leading Chinese CQA platform. Utilizing Grey Relational Analysis, we assessed these attributes’ relative influence on pageviews and created a ranking list of features of questions. Based on the rankings, our findings spotlight the paramount influence of a question's digital popularity and attributes tied to the questioner – central pillars of social features – surpassing the impact of textual elements. This study further delineates the underlying reasons for such patterns based on traffic sourced from diverse channels. Our revelations offer pivotal insights for optimizing CQA platform engagement and furnish avenues for prospective research.