Persistence and lurkers in discussion lists: a pilot study

Nonnecke, Blair; Preece, Jennifer

doi:10.1109/hicss.2000.926714

Cited by 38 publications

(33 citation statements)

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“…Research in engagement focused early on non-participant observers, who have been cast in a particular light by the pejorative term "lurker" [24,25] commonly used in the Usenet vernacular and academic literature [10]. Recently the question of engagement has been revisited as a problem of creating incentives for users to engage in community applications [5,27], and in some cases specifically structured communication groups [32].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Preferential behavior in online groups

Bäckström

Kumar

Marlow

et al. 2008

Proceedings of the International Conference on Web Search and Web Data Mining - WSDM '08

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Online communities in the form of message boards, listservs, and newsgroups continue to represent a considerable amount of the social activity on the Internet. Every year thousands of groups flourish while others decline into relative obscurity; likewise, millions of members join a new community every year, some of whom will come to manage or moderate the conversation while others simply sit by the sidelines and observe. These processes of group formation, growth, and dissolution are central in social science, and in an online venue they have ramifications for the design and development of community software.In this paper we explore a large corpus of thriving online communities. These groups vary widely in size, moderation and privacy, and cover an equally diverse set of subject matter. We present a broad range of descriptive statistics of these groups. Using metadata from groups, members, and individual messages, we identify users who post and are replied-to frequently by multiple group members; we classify these high-engagement users based on the longevity of their engagements. We show that users who will go on to become long-lived, highly-engaged users experience significantly better treatment than other users from the moment they join the group, well before there is an opportunity for them to develop a long-standing relationship with members of the group.We present a simple model explaining long-term heavy engagement as a combination of user-dependent and groupdependent factors. Using this model as an analytical tool, we show that properties of the user alone are sufficient to explain 95% of all memberships, but introducing a small amount of per-group information dramatically improves our ability to model users belonging to multiple groups.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Early work in online community analysis focused on both Usenet [13,20,29,33,6], listservs [7,25], and email groups in the workplace [12,17]. The relationships produced by online groups range from strong ties, as with social support groups [2] to weak ties, as with fan groups [4].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Preferential behavior in online groups

Bäckström

Kumar

Marlow

et al. 2008

Proceedings of the International Conference on Web Search and Web Data Mining - WSDM '08

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“…Until publication of our earlier work [2,6,7] and several recent works [8][9][10], many online community researchers showed little interest in lurking behavior, preferring to focus on those who actively post. Others believed that lurking was "free-riding"; that those who do it should not be considered members of the community; and as such, efforts should be taken to prevent lurking [11].…”

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confidence: 99%

Non-public and public online community participation: Needs, attitudes and behavior

Nonnecke

Andrews²,

Preece

2006

Electron Commerce Res

251

192

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Nonpublic participation within an online community, often called lurking, occurs when an individual joins a community, but does not post. This study examines the nature of lurking, why people lurk and the differences in attitudes between lurkers and posters. The results indicate significant differences between people who lurk and those who post in an online community.We conclude that when people lurk they are observing, which in no way is a negative behavior. This introverted or passive behavior affects lurkers' attitudes about the benefits of the community, their expectations, and opinions of themselves and others who lurk. In general lurkers are less optimistic and less positive than those who post.Earlier work on nonpublic participation in online communities, called lurking, found that there are a variety of different reasons why people don't participate publicly and that this behavior differs according to the type of community. For example, the average number of lurkers in technical support communities is almost twice as high as in medical support communities [1,2]. The work that we report here builds on this earlier work. Our primary objective was to better understand the nature of lurking. We wanted to understand lurkers' B. Nonnecke

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“…Viewed from the standpoint of those members of an online community who actively participate in online discussions, lurking is often seen as undesirable behavior, as lurkers do not contribute to the ongoing discussions. Form the lurkers' perspective, however, lurking is often viewed as a kind of participation, and lurkers may experience a sense of community with those persons who contribute to online discussions, even if they do not participate in the discussions for various reasons (Nonnecke and Preece 2000).…”

Section: Closing Remarksmentioning

confidence: 99%

3. Mailing list communication

Gruber¹

2013

Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated Communication

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Preliminary remarksLinguistic pragmatic investigations of email communication have a long research tradition in the investigation of computer-mediated discourse (CMD, Herring 2001), because email was the first available means for message exchange between computer users. Unlike traditional mail, which is predominantly used in person-toperson communication, emails could be sent easily to more than one recipient from the very beginning. With the advent of mailing list programs and the establishment of Usenet newsgroups, this many-to-many (n:n) mode of communication 1 soon gained popularity among computer users. Furthermore, the n:n communicative mode and the automatic storage possibilities of email programs made -and still make -email communication easily accessible data for linguists interested in new communicative practices. This chapter reviews research on email communication that took its data from electronic mailing lists (also known as "discussion lists") in order to investigate communicative practices in the "new media" in general, as well as studies that explicitly investigate communicative features of mailing list communication. Investigations of person-to-person email communications or their cognitive and socio-organizational effects are not the focus of this chapter (see the chapter by Dürscheid in this volume and the overview in Ducheneaut and Watts 2005), nor are the (numerous) investigations of discussion lists in educational settings as a tool for achieving certain educational outcomes rather than on the communicative practices used to achieve those outcomes (for an overview of this strand of research, see Lamy and Hampel 2007). The chapter first characterizes mailing list communication with regard to several technical and communicative parameters, then provides a working definition of "pragmatics", and then proceeds to review several research areas related to the pragmatics of mailing list communication. Defining mailing list communicationIn this section, following a short historical overview of email discussion groups, mailing list communication is contrasted with other forms of n:n asynchronous CMD, such as Usenet communication. On the basis of its most relevant communicative features, listserv communication is then characterised as a specific kind of email communication.Brought to you by |

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Persistence and lurkers in discussion lists: a pilot study

Abstract: In email-based discussion lists (DLs)

Cited by 38 publications

References 10 publications

Preferential behavior in online groups

Preferential behavior in online groups

Non-public and public online community participation: Needs, attitudes and behavior

3. Mailing list communication

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