ABSTRACT
Often, attention to “community” focuses on motivating core members or helping newcomers become regulars. However, much of the traffic to online communities comes from people who visit only briefly. We hypothesize that their personal characteristics, design elements of the site, and others' activity all affect the contributions these "one-timers" make. We present the results from an experiment asking Amazon Mechanical Turk (“AMT”) workers to comment on the AMT participation agreement in a discussion forum. One-timers with stronger ties to other Turkers or feelings of trust for Amazon are more likely to leave more --- but shorter and less relevant --- comments, while those with higher self-efficacy leave longer and more relevant comments. The phrasing of prompts also matters; a general appeal for personally-reflective contributions leads to comments that are less relevant to community discussion topics. Finally, activity matters too; synchronous activity begets responses, while pre-existing content tends to suppress them. These findings suggest design moves that can help communities harness this “long tail” of contribution.
- Albert Bandura. 1997. Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. Macmillan.Google Scholar
- John A Bargh, Mark Chen, and Lara Burrows. Automaticity of social behavior: Direct effects of trait construct and stereotype activation on action. Journal of personality and social psychology 71, 2 (1996), 230.Google Scholar
- Steven L Blader and Tom R Tyler. Testing and extending the group engagement model: linkages between social identity, procedural justice, economic outcomes, and extrarole behavior. Journal of Applied Psychology 94, 2 (2009), 445–464.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Susan L Bryant, Andrea Forte, and Amy Bruckman. 2005. Becoming Wikipedian: transformation of participation in a collaborative online encyclopedia. In Proceedings of the 2005 international ACM SIGGROUP conference on Supporting group work. ACM, 1–10. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Gian Vittorio Caprara, Michele Vecchione, Cristina Capanna, and Minou Mebane. Perceived political self-efficacy: Theory, assessment, and applications. European Journal of Social Psychology 39, 6 (2009), 1002–1020.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Gilad Chen, Stanley M Gully, and Dov Eden. Validation of a new general self-efficacy scale. Organizational research methods 4, 1 (2001), 62–83.Google Scholar
- Justin Cheng, Christian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, and Jure Leskovec. 2014. How Community Feedback Shapes User Behavior. In Proc. ICWSM. AAAI.Google Scholar
- Robert B Cialdini. Crafting normative messages to protect the environment. Current directions in psychological science 12, 4 (2003), 105–109.Google Scholar
- Robert B Cialdini, Raymond R Reno, and Carl A Kallgren. A focus theory of normative conduct: recycling the concept of norms to reduce littering in public places. Journal of personality and social psychology 58, 6 (1990), 1015.Google Scholar
- E Gil Clary, Mark Snyder, Robert D Ridge, John Copeland, Arthur A Stukas, Julie Haugen, and Peter Miene. Understanding and assessing the motivations of volunteers: a functional approach. Journal of personality and social psychology 74, 6 (1998), 1516.Google Scholar
- Dan Cosley, Dan Frankowski, Loren Terveen, and John Riedl. 2007. SuggestBot: using intelligent task routing to help people find work in wikipedia. In Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces. ACM, 32–41. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Cynthia R Farina, Dmitry Epstein, Josiah Heidt, and Mary J Newhart. Designing an online civic engagement platform: Balancing more vs.better participation in complex public policymaking. International Journal of E-Politics (IJEP) 5, 1 (2014), 16–40. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Eric Gilbert and Karrie Karahalios. 2010. Understanding Deja Reviewers. In Proc. of the ACM 2010 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. ACM. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Libby Hemphill and Andrew Roback. 2014. Tweet Acts: How Constituents Lobby Congress by Twitter. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing. ACM. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Khe Foon Hew and Noriko Hara. Knowledge sharing in online environments: A qualitative case study. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 58, 14 (2007), 2310–2324. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Gary Hsieh, Youyang Hou, Ian Chen, and Khai N Truong. 2013. Welcome!: social and psychological predictors of volunteer socializers in online communities. In Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work. ACM, 827–838. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Tanja Jadin, Timo Gnambs, and Bernad Batinic. Personality traits and knowledge sharing in online communities. Computers in Human Behavior 29, 1 (2013), 210–216. Google ScholarDigital Library
- M Kent Jennings and Vicki Zeitner. Internet use and civic engagement: A longitudinal analysis. Public Opinion Quarterly 67, 3 (2003), 311–334.Google Scholar
- Gerald Jordan, Megan Pope, Patrick Wallis, and Srividya Iyer. The Relationship Between Openness to Experience and Willingness to Engage in Online Political Participation Is Influenced by News Consumption. Social Science Computer Review (2014), 0894439314534590. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Elisabeth Joyce and Robert E Kraut. Predicting continued participation in newsgroups. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 11, 3 (2006), 723–747.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Dan M Kahan, Paul Slovic, Donald Braman, John Gastil, and Geoffrey L Cohen. Affect, values, and nanotechnology risk perceptions: an experimental investigation. GWU Legal Studies Research Paper 261 (2007).Google Scholar
- Michal Kosinski, David Stillwell, and Thore Graepel. Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110, 15 (2013), 5802–5805.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Robert E Kraut and Paul Resnick. Encouraging contribution to online communities. Building successful online communities: Evidence-based social design (2011), 21–76.Google Scholar
- Robert E Kraut, Paul Resnick, Sara Kiesler, Moira Burke, Yan Chen, Niki Kittur, Joseph Konstan, Yuqing Ren, and John Riedl. 2012. Building successful online communities: Evidence-based social design. Mit Press. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Travis Kriplean, Michael Toomin, Jonathan Morgan, Alan Borning, and Andrew Ko. 2012. Is This What You Meant? Promoting Listening on the Web with Reflect. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems. ACM, Austin, TX. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Nicole C Krmer and Stephan Winter. Impression management 2.0: The relationship of self-esteem, extraversion, self-efficacy, and self-presentation within social networking sites. Journal of Media Psychology: Theories, Methods, and Applications 20, 3 (2008), 106.Google Scholar
- Cliff Lampe and Erik Johnston. 2005. Follow the (slash) dot: effects of feedback on new members in an online community. In Proceedings of the 2005 international ACM SIGGROUP conference on Supporting group work. ACM, Sanibel Island, FL, 11–20. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Cliff Lampe and Paul Resnick. 2004. Slash (dot) and burn: distributed moderation in a large online conversation space. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems. ACM, 543–550. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Kimberly Ling, Gerard Beenen, Pamela Ludford, Xiaoqing Wang, Klarissa Chang, Xin Li, Dan Cosley, Dan Frankowski, Loren Terveen, Al Mamunur Rashid, and others. Using social psychology to motivate contributions to online communities. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 10, 4 (2005).Google ScholarCross Ref
- Pamela J Ludford, Dan Cosley, Dan Frankowski, and Loren Terveen. 2004. Think different: increasing online community participation using uniqueness and group dissimilarity. In Proc. of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems. ACM, 631–638. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Meethu Malu, Nikunj Jethi, and Dan Cosley. 2012. Encouraging personal storytelling by example. In Proceedings of the 2012 iConference. ACM, 611–612. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Lena Mamykina, Bella Manoim, Manas Mittal, George Hripcsak, and Björn Hartmann. 2011. Design lessons from the fastest Q&A site in the west. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems. ACM, 2857–2866. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Abraham Harold Maslow, Robert Frager, James Fadiman, Cynthia McReynolds, and Ruth Cox. 1970. Motivation and personality. Vol. 2. Harper & Row New York.Google Scholar
- Jonathan T Morgan, Siko Bouterse, Heather Walls, and Sarah Stierch. 2013. Tea and sympathy: crafting positive new user experiences on wikipedia. In Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work. ACM, 839–848. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Elizabeth L Murnane, Bernhard Haslhofer, and Carl Lagoze. 2013. RESLVE: leveraging user interest to improve entity disambiguation on short text. In Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on World Wide Web companion. International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee, 1275–1284. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Oded Nov. What motivates wikipedians? Commun. ACM 50, 11 (2007), 60–64. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Katherine Panciera, Aaron Halfaker, and Loren Terveen. 2009. Wikipedians are born, not made: a study of power editors on Wikipedia. In Proceedings of the ACM 2009 international conference on Supporting group work. ACM, Sanibel Island, FL, 51–60. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Jenny Preece, Blair Nonnecke, and Dorine Andrews. The top five reasons for lurking: improving community experiences for everyone. Computers in human behavior 20, 2 (2004), 201–223.Google Scholar
- Daniele Quercia, Michal Kosinski, David Stillwell, and Jon Crowcroft. 2011. Our Twitter profiles, our selves: Predicting personality with Twitter. In Privacy, Security, Risk and Trust (PASSAT) and 2011 IEEE Third International Conference on Social Computing (SocialCom). 180–185.Google Scholar
- Daphne R Raban, Mihai Moldovan, and Quentin Jones. 2010. An empirical study of critical mass and online community survival. In Proceedings of the 2010 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work. ACM, 71–80. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Matthew J Salganik, Peter Sheridan Dodds, and Duncan J Watts. Experimental study of inequality and unpredictability in an artficial cultural market. Science 311, 5762 (2006), 854–856.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Wolfram Schulz. Political Efficacy and Expected Political Participation among Lower and Upper Secondary Students. A Comparative Analysis with Data from the IEA Civic Education Study. Online Submission (2005).Google Scholar
- Clay Shirky. 2008. Here comes everybody: The power of organizing without organizations. Penguin.Google Scholar
- M. Six Silberman, Lilly Irani, and Joel Ross. Ethics and Tactics of Professional Crowdwork. XRDS: Crossroads, The ACM Magazine for Students 17, 2 (2010), 39–43. Google ScholarDigital Library
- M. Six Silberman, Joel Ross, Lilly Irani, and Bill Tomlinson. 2010b. Sellers' Problems in Human Computation Markets. In Proceedings of the SIGKDD-Human Computation (HCOMP). ACM. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Diane Slaouti and Gary Motteram. Reconstructing practice: Language teacher education and ICT. Teacher education in CALL (2006), 81–97.Google Scholar
- Jacob Solomon and Rick Wash. 2012. Bootstrapping wikis: developing critical mass in a fledgling community by seeding content. In Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. ACM, 261–264. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Kate Starbird and Leysia Palen. 2011. Voluntweeters': Self-organizing by Digital Volunteers in Times of Crisis. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems. Vancouver, BC, Canada. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Abhay Sukumaran, Stephanie Vezich, Melanie McHugh, and Clifford Nass. 2011. Normative influences on thoughtful online participation. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 3401–3410. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Aaron Swartz. 2006. Who Writes Wikipedia? (2006). www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipediaGoogle Scholar
- Tom R Tyler. 1990. Why people obey the law: Procedural justice, legitimacy, and compliance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
- Luis Von Ahn and Laura Dabbish. 2004. Labeling images with a computer game. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems. ACM, 319–326. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Rick Wash and Cliff Lampe. 2012. The power of the ask in social media. In Proc. of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. ACM, 1187–1190. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Anbang Xu and Brian Bailey. 2012. What do you think? A case study of benefit, expectation, and interaction in a large online critique community. In Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. ACM, Seattle, Washington. Google ScholarDigital Library
Recommendations
A Community Rather Than A Union: Understanding Self-Organization Phenomenon on MTurk and How It Impacts Turkers and Requesters
CHI EA '17: Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing SystemsThis paper aims to understand the self-organization phenomenon among the workers of Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), a well-known crowdsourcing platform. Specifically, we explored 1) why MTurk workers self-organize into online communities (Turker ...
Talk amongst yourselves: inviting users to participate in online conversations
IUI '07: Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Intelligent user interfacesMany small online communities would benefit from increased diversity or activity in their membership. Some communities run the risk of dying out due to lack of participation. Others struggle to achieve the critical mass necessary for diverse and ...
Non-public and public online community participation: Needs, attitudes and behavior
Nonpublic participation within an online community, often called lurking, occurs when an individual joins a community, but does not post. This study examines the nature of lurking, why people lurk and the differences in attitudes between lurkers and ...
Comments