This study contributes to the understanding of online communities by examining why community members are willing to make active contributions to their community. A model of motivation for such contributions was developed and tested within the context of an online travel community. The results of a factor analysis and a series of reliability tests indicate that the motivation model is valid and ...

Hypothesis Hypothesis1: Trust is positively related to empathy in patient online communities (POC). Hypothesis2: Social identity is positively related to expressions of empathy within patient online communities. Hypothesis 3: Development of shared social identity is positively related to the likelihood that an individual will share personal knowledge or experiences in a POC. Hypothesis 4: Empat...

In an online community, new words come and go: today’s haha may be replaced by tomorrow’s lol. Changes in online writing are usually studied as a social process, with innovations diffusing through a network of individuals in a speech community. But unlike other types of innovation, language change is shaped and constrained by the system in which it takes part. To investigate the links between s...

User contributions in the form of posts, comments, and votes are essential to the success of online communities. However, allowing user participation also invites undesirable behavior such as trolling. In this paper, we characterize antisocial behavior in three large online discussion communities by analyzing users who were banned from these communities. We find that such users tend to concentr...

Understanding and forecasting the health of an online community is of great value to its owners and managers who have vested interests in its longevity and success. Nevertheless, the association between community evolution and the behavioural patterns and trends of its members is not clearly understood, which hinders our ability of making accurate predictions of whether a community is flourishi...

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 a userand communityadaptive reward mechanism aiming to regulate the quantity of the contributions and encourage users to moderate the quality of contributions themselves. Th...

This paper reports the findings of a study which developed a theoretical framework for studying the growth policies in a special kind of virtual communities: open online collaboration communities. The study made use of dynamic feedback modeling and simulation, and a series of interviews with the members of an open online collaboration community that specializes on instructional material develop...

There is a broad agreement, that the establishment of communities among users of online platforms can contribute significantly to the success of the platform. This provoked the demand for guidelines on how to build an online community. Currently, guidelines available in literature emphasize social and economic aspects of community building and neglect technical aspects. The main hypothesis of t...

This paper presents the results from a study on issues for sociability and usability for legitimate peripheral participation in online communities. Informal learning is considered to occur within the individual in a selforganized way and within the community as consensus knowledge building. A catalogue for usability and sociability evaluation criteria was developed, in order to identify the two...

Even though online communities enjoy a growing number of members, their success and popularity are regularly diminished by infringements of user trust. Consequently, community operators implement IT-based trust-promoting features to regain user trust. Not knowing if their efforts are effective, for community operators the question remains: how do trust-promoting IT-features contribute to user p...