Title
Proximate Social Factors in First-Time Contribution to Online Communities
Abstract
In the course of every member's integration into an online community, a decision must be made to participate for the first time. The challenges of effective recruitment, management, and retention of new users have been extensively explored in social computing research. However, little work has looked at in-the-moment factors that lead users to decide to participate instead of "lurk", conditions which can be shaped to draw new users in at crucial moments. In this work we analyze 183 million messages scraped from chatrooms on the livestreaming platform Twitch in order to understand differences between first-time participants' and regulars' behaviors and to identify conditions that encourage first-time participation. We find that presence of diverse types of users increases likelihood of new participation, with effects depending on the size of the community. We also find that information-seeking behaviors in first-time participation are negatively associated with retention in the short and medium term.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1145/3313831.3376151
CHI '20: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Honolulu HI USA April, 2020
DocType
ISBN
Citations 
Conference
978-1-4503-6708-0
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Joseph Seering1287.68
Jessica Hammer26825.95
Geoff F. Kaufman32113.00
Diyi Yang458748.52