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
