Abstract
Online communities can help people form productive relationships Unfortunately, this potential is not always fulfilled: many communities fail, and designers don't have a solid understanding of why. We know community activity begets activity. The trick, however, is to inspire participation in the first place. Social theories suggest methods to spark positive community participation. We carried out a field experiment that tested two such theories. We formed discussion communities around an existing movie recommendation web site, manipulating two factors: (1) similarity - we controlled how similar group members' movie ratings were; and (2) uniqueness - we told members how their movie ratings (with respect to a discussion topic) were unique within the group. Both factors positively influenced participation. The results offer a practical success story in applying social science theory to the design of online communities.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages | 631-638 |
| Number of pages | 8 |
| State | Published - Oct 1 2004 |
| Event | 2004 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings, CHI 2004 - Vienna, Austria Duration: Apr 24 2004 → Apr 29 2004 |
Other
| Other | 2004 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings, CHI 2004 |
|---|---|
| Country/Territory | Austria |
| City | Vienna |
| Period | 4/24/04 → 4/29/04 |
Keywords
- Online communities
- Recommender systems
- Similarity
- Social psychology
- Uniqueness
