TY - GEN
T1 - The impact of membership overlap on the survival of online communities
AU - Zhu, Haiyi
AU - Kraut, Robert E.
AU - Kittur, Aniket
N1 - Copyright:
Copyright 2014 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2014
Y1 - 2014
N2 - If people belong to multiple online communities, their joint membership can influence the survival of each of the communities to which they belong. Communities with many joint memberships may struggle to get enough of their members' time and attention, but find it easy to import best practices from other communities. In this paper, we study the effects of membership overlap on the survival of online communities. By analyzing the historical data of 5673 Wikia communities, we find that higher levels of membership overlap are positively associated with higher survival rates of online communities. Furthermore, we find that it is beneficial for young communities to have shared members who play a central role in other mature communities. Our contributions are two-fold. Theoretically, by examining the impact of membership overlap on the survival of online communities we identified an important mechanism underlying the success of online communities. Practically, our findings may guide community creators on how to effectively manage their members, and tool designers on how to support this task.
AB - If people belong to multiple online communities, their joint membership can influence the survival of each of the communities to which they belong. Communities with many joint memberships may struggle to get enough of their members' time and attention, but find it easy to import best practices from other communities. In this paper, we study the effects of membership overlap on the survival of online communities. By analyzing the historical data of 5673 Wikia communities, we find that higher levels of membership overlap are positively associated with higher survival rates of online communities. Furthermore, we find that it is beneficial for young communities to have shared members who play a central role in other mature communities. Our contributions are two-fold. Theoretically, by examining the impact of membership overlap on the survival of online communities we identified an important mechanism underlying the success of online communities. Practically, our findings may guide community creators on how to effectively manage their members, and tool designers on how to support this task.
KW - Membership overlap
KW - Online communities
KW - Survival analysis
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84900453588&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.1145/2556288.2557213
DO - 10.1145/2556288.2557213
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84900453588
SN - 9781450324731
T3 - Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings
SP - 281
EP - 290
BT - CHI 2014
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
T2 - 32nd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2014
Y2 - 26 April 2014 through 1 May 2014
ER -