Posters, Lurkers, and in Between: A Multidimensional Model of Online Community Participation Patterns

Existing research divides online community participants into two separate groups: posters, who publicly participate in the community’s activities, and lurkers, who read but do not post or respond to ongoing conversations. The current study expands the concept of participation patterns in online communities from the standard binary distinction to a broader perspective of participation behaviors. We propose a model with two continuous dimensions, publicity and intensity, over which participants can be located. Intensity indicates the frequency of total activities performed by a participant in the community. Publicity represents the degree of exposure in a participant’s activities: their ratio of public activities as posting to non-public activities as reading. We examined a corporate online community with a variety of discussion groups. In October 2003, the management of the corporation decided to turn participation in the discussion groups from anonymous to identifiable. To understand the effects of this change, we used several techniques, including calculating posting and visiting frequencies before and after the change and analyzing discussion group posts. We also developed open-ended questionnaires for community participants. The findings suggest that the change had a crucial impact on shaping participation patterns in the community. A variety of publicity and intensity behaviors were observed before as well as after the anonymity removal. A decrease was observed over the publicity dimension. However, users did not report that they moved categorically from posting to lurking behavior. An increase was observed in intensity, indicated by an increase in the number of visits to the community’s website. This kind of understanding of the complex effect of such a change would not have been possible with a simple binary model, and shows the value of a richer behavior representation.