Regulating Behavior in Online Communities

In thriving communities, a rough consensus eventually emerges about the range of behaviors the managers and most members consider acceptable, what we will call normative behaviors, and another range of behaviors that are beyond the pale. A Rape In Cyberspace, the newspaper report by Julian Dibbell (1993), describes a classic example of unacceptable behavior in LamdaMoo, an early virtual environment. Mr. Bungle, an avatar in the online community, wrote a program that forced two avatars controlled by other participants to have virtual sex with him and with each other, and to do brutal things to their own bodies. In describing the event online the next day, one of the victims begged “"I am requesting that Mr. Bungle be toaded for raping Starsinger and I [stet],” where “toad” is the command that would turn Bungle’s avatar into a toad, annihilating the character’s original description and attributes. Within 24 hours, 50 other characters also called for his toading. Three days later the community had a real-time discussion of the issue. An system administrator who observed this discussion eventually ran the toad command to eliminate the Mr. Bungle character. Although LamdaMoo did not have a policy against cyberrape, when one occurred in its midst, this action instigated widespread discussion and crystallized a view among many inhabitants of what were correct and incorrect types of behavior in this community.</p

Building Member Attachment in Online Communities: Applying Theories of Group Identity and Interpersonal Bonds

Online communities are increasingly important to organizations and the general public, but there is little theoretically based research on what makes some online communities more successful than others. In this article, we apply theory from the field of social psychology to understand how online communities develop member attachment, an important dimension of community success. We implemented and empirically tested two sets of community features for building member attachment by strengthening either group identity or interpersonal bonds. To increase identity-based attachment, we gave members information about group activities and intergroup competition, and tools for group-level communication. To increase bond-based attachment, we gave members information about the activities of individual members and interpersonal similarity, and tools for interpersonal communication. Results from a six-month field experiment show that participants’ visit frequency and self-reported attachment increased in both conditions. Community features intended to foster identity-based attachment had stronger effects than features intended to foster bond-based attachment. Participants in the identity condition with access to group profiles and repeated exposure to their group’s activities visited their community twice as frequently as participants in other conditions. The new features also had stronger effects on newcomers than on old-timers. This research illustrates how theory from the social science literature can be applied to gain a more systematic understanding of online communities and how theory-inspired features can improve their success