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Online communities
âOur online community provides a dynamic forum for you to discuss current topics and concerns with the wider education community.â
This quote is taken from the Teachernet website [ ], but could be claimed to apply to any number of education sites. Increasingly, online content is being complemented by with opportunities for readers to interact with each other or participate in debate. This article will look at the proliferation of such âonline communitiesâ. It will consider how they might be used to support teachers and school managers, how they might be most effectively used and how âvirtualâ communication complements and overlaps with the âreal worldâ. Finally it challenges the very notion of this dichotomy.
What then is an online community? Simply it is community, a collection of people, who are communicating or working together online. Often the term is used to describe the software or online space â âClick here to enter our communityâ â but if it is a true âcommunityâ then it must involve a defined membership, however loose that definition
Loyalty in Online Communities
Loyalty is an essential component of multi-community engagement. When users
have the choice to engage with a variety of different communities, they often
become loyal to just one, focusing on that community at the expense of others.
However, it is unclear how loyalty is manifested in user behavior, or whether
loyalty is encouraged by certain community characteristics.
In this paper we operationalize loyalty as a user-community relation: users
loyal to a community consistently prefer it over all others; loyal communities
retain their loyal users over time. By exploring this relation using a large
dataset of discussion communities from Reddit, we reveal that loyalty is
manifested in remarkably consistent behaviors across a wide spectrum of
communities. Loyal users employ language that signals collective identity and
engage with more esoteric, less popular content, indicating they may play a
curational role in surfacing new material. Loyal communities have denser
user-user interaction networks and lower rates of triadic closure, suggesting
that community-level loyalty is associated with more cohesive interactions and
less fragmentation into subgroups. We exploit these general patterns to predict
future rates of loyalty. Our results show that a user's propensity to become
loyal is apparent from their first interactions with a community, suggesting
that some users are intrinsically loyal from the very beginning.Comment: Extended version of a paper appearing in the Proceedings of ICWSM
2017 (with the same title); please cite the official ICWSM versio
Using Wikis to Create Online Communities
A wiki allows anyone the ability to take part in the creation and editing of web content. With its simplified text-formatting rules that anyone can easily learn, it truly puts experienced web designers and web novices on equal footing. In public libraries, where the technological skills of employees can range from high to non-existent, wikis can allow everyone the ability to develop the website. The resulting website would reflect the imagination and good ideas of the entire organization, not just a select few with the requisite "tech-savvy." The possibilities for what libraries can do with wikis are endless. At their least, they are spaces for quick and easy collaborative work. At their best, they can become true community resources that can position the library as an online hub of their local community
Emotional persistence in online chatting communities
How do users behave in online chatrooms, where they instantaneously read and
write posts? We analyzed about 2.5 million posts covering various topics in
Internet relay channels, and found that user activity patterns follow known
power-law and stretched exponential distributions, indicating that online chat
activity is not different from other forms of communication. Analysing the
emotional expressions (positive, negative, neutral) of users, we revealed a
remarkable persistence both for individual users and channels. I.e. despite
their anonymity, users tend to follow social norms in repeated interactions in
online chats, which results in a specific emotional "tone" of the channels. We
provide an agent-based model of emotional interaction, which recovers
qualitatively both the activity patterns in chatrooms and the emotional
persistence of users and channels. While our assumptions about agent's
emotional expressions are rooted in psychology, the model allows to test
different hypothesis regarding their emotional impact in online communication.Comment: 34 pages, 4 main and 12 supplementary figure
Distributed leadership, trust and online communities
This paper analyses the role of distributed leadership and trust in online communities. The team-based informal ethos of online collaboration requires a different kind of leadership from that in formal positional hierarchies. Such leadership may be more flexible and sophisticated, capable of encompassing ambiguity and rapid change. Online leaders need to be partially invisible, delegating power and distributing tasks. Yet, simultaneously, online communities are facilitated by the high visibility and subtle control of expert leaders. This paradox: that leaders need to be both highly visible and invisible as appropriate, was derived from prior research and tested in the analysis of online community discussions using a pattern-matching process. It is argued that both leader visibility and invisibility are important for the facilitation of trusting collaboration via distributed leadership. Advanced leadership responses to complex situations in online communities foster positive group interaction and decision-making, facilitated through active distribution of specific tasks
Antisocial Behavior in Online Discussion Communities
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
concentrate their efforts in a small number of threads, are more likely to post
irrelevantly, and are more successful at garnering responses from other users.
Studying the evolution of these users from the moment they join a community up
to when they get banned, we find that not only do they write worse than other
users over time, but they also become increasingly less tolerated by the
community. Further, we discover that antisocial behavior is exacerbated when
community feedback is overly harsh. Our analysis also reveals distinct groups
of users with different levels of antisocial behavior that can change over
time. We use these insights to identify antisocial users early on, a task of
high practical importance to community maintainers.Comment: ICWSM 201
Life in the "Matrix": Human Mobility Patterns in the Cyber Space
With the wide adoption of the multi-community setting in many popular social
media platforms, the increasing user engagements across multiple online
communities warrant research attention. In this paper, we introduce a novel
analogy between the movements in the cyber space and the physical space. This
analogy implies a new way of studying human online activities by modelling the
activities across online communities in a similar fashion as the movements
among locations. First, we quantitatively validate the analogy by comparing
several important properties of human online activities and physical movements.
Our experiments reveal striking similarities between the cyber space and the
physical space. Next, inspired by the established methodology on human mobility
in the physical space, we propose a framework to study human "mobility" across
online platforms. We discover three interesting patterns of user engagements in
online communities. Furthermore, our experiments indicate that people with
different mobility patterns also exhibit divergent preferences to online
communities. This work not only attempts to achieve a better understanding of
human online activities, but also intends to open a promising research
direction with rich implications and applications.Comment: To appear at The International AAAI Conference on Web and Social
Media (ICWSM) 201
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