The path to success

Abstract

Maintaining online communities is vital in order to increase and retain their economic and social value. That is why community managers look to gauge the success of their communities by measuring a variety of user behaviour, such as member activity, turnover and interaction. However, such communities vary widely in their purpose, implementation and user demographics, and although many success indicators have been proposed in the literature, we will show that there is no one-ts-all approach to community success: Di erent success criteria depend on di erent user behaviour. To demonstrate this, we put together a set of user behaviour features, including many that have been used in the literature as indicators of success, and then we de ne and predict community success in three di erent types of online communities: Questions & Answers (Q&A), Healthcare and Emotional Support (Life & Health), and Encyclopaedic Knowledge Creation. The results show that it is feasible to relate community success to speci c user behaviour with an accuracy of 0.67-0.93 F1 score and 0.77-1.0 AUC.

How Founder Motivations, Goals, and Actions Influence Early Trajectories of Online Communities

“…This research shows that community members and moderators have multiple goals, though common aspects of a community valued by users include community quality, information exchange, and opportunities to connect with others [24,47]. Some scholars have thus suggested changes in how we conceptualize community success, such as using multiple metrics or aligning metrics with community goals [2,30]. Prior studies have focused on users and moderators of existing communities; there are reasons to believe that attitudes to a community may differ at its inception.…”

“…Following Baglin[4], we opt for polychoric over Pearson correlations for these ordinal measures 2. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin test (𝑀𝑆𝐴 = 0.88) and Bartlett's test of sphericity (𝑝 < 0.001) confirmed the data's suitability for factor analysis.…”