User- and Community-Adaptive Rewards Mechanism for Sustainable Online Community

Abundance of user contributions does not necessarily indicate sustainability of an online community. On the contrary, excessive contributions in the systems may result in “information overload” and user withdrawal. We propose an adaptive rewards mechanism aiming to restrict the quantity of the contributions, elicit contributions with higher quality and simultaneously inhibit inferior ones. The mechanism adapts to the users preferences with respect to types of contributions and to the current needs of the community depending on the time and the number of existing contributions.