Fig. 4

Heatmaps of the communication intensity in (a) low-to-high and (b) low-to-low social status classes of users for the StackExchange English dataset. The columns represent three society forms based on similarity: open, modular and closed, whereas rows show three social status society forms: egalitarian, ranked and stratified. The colors depict the intensity of the communication between users (i.e., percentages of the successful meetings taking place). In the plot in a, we notice that the communication intensity from low- to high-status users is decreased by increasing either the influence of user similarity (switch from open to modular society) or the social status (switch from egalitarian to ranked society). In b, we see that by switching from an open to a modular society the communication intensity from low- to low-status users is decreased. But for optimal consensus building, the communication in this class of users should not be disturbed. When we switch from an egalitarian to a ranked society, the intensity of the communication between users in the low-to-low class remains unchanged. This is one of the factors that in the ranked societies we observe fast opinion convergence rates. To summarize, through the increase in similarity the communication channel from low-status users to other low-status users is being closed and this slows down the consensus building process. a Low-to-High, b Low-to-Low