A decision analytics framework for interpreting trust signals in decentralized digital communities

Abstract

Public discourse plays a critical role in shaping trust, legitimacy, and governance dynamics within decentralized Web3 ecosystems. However, existing studies often examine Web3 discourse through isolated lenses such as sentiment or topic modeling, which limits their ability to capture how emotional expression and communicative purpose jointly convey strategic intent. This study proposes a three-stage decision analytics framework that transforms unstructured Web3 discourse into diagnostic signals by jointly modeling industry domain, emotional tone, and communicative purpose. The analysis draws on 10,840 user-generated posts collected from X, Reddit, YouTube, and the ENS DAO forum, using a human-in-the-loop annotation process combined with transformer-based text classification models. The framework is evaluated using a domain-adapted language model and a general-purpose baseline, with robustness assessed through five-fold cross-validation. The results indicate that curiosity and optimism frequently align with promotional intent in infrastructure and application-oriented domains, whereas skepticism and concern are more prevalent in governance-related discourse. These findings demonstrate that emotional tone and communicative intent operate as structured, decision-relevant signals rather than incidental sentiment. The proposed framework supports systematic, diagnostic monitoring of narrative dynamics as decision support, enabling organizations, platform operators, and governance stakeholders to identify emerging legitimacy risks and shifts in community trust within decentralized environments.