Growing and managing your online community

1. What is an online community?

• At its root, “online communities are defined through their features as associations of participants who share a common language, world, values, and interests, obey a commonly defined organizational structure, and communicate and cooperate ubiquitously connected by electronic media and possibly represented by avatars” (Stanoevska-Slabeva and Schmid, 2001). For many, online communities may feel like home, consisting of a “family of invisible friends”. Those who wish to be a part of an online community usually have to become a member via a specific site and thereby gain access to specific content or links.
• An online community can act as an information system where members can post, comment on discussions, give advice or collaborate, and includes medical advice or specific health care research as well. Commonly, people communicate through social networking sites, chat rooms, forums, email lists, and discussion boards, and have advanced into daily social media platforms as well. This includes Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. People may also join online communities through video games, blogs, and virtual worlds, and could potentially meet new significant others on dating sites or dating virtual worlds.
• Online communities have their own set of guidelines and needs, like online community engagement, moderation, and management.
• Hagel and Armstrong, considered online communities and broadly partitioned the online space into four areas (Plant, 2004)
  • Communities of interest (Communities of practice), of which the popular finance website Motley Fool is an example (http://www.motleyfool.com): Communities of interest involve the online interaction of people with specific knowledge on a certain topic.
  • Communities of relationship, e.g., the forum for cancer-related issues (http://www.cancerpage.com): Communities of relationship often reveal or at least partially protect someone’s identity while allowing them to communicate with others, such as in online dating services.
  • Communities of fantasy, e.g., communities interested in Dungeons and Dragons or Multi-User Dungeons (MUDS) (http://www.well.com/user/hlr/vcbook/): Communities of fantasy encourage people to participate in online alternative forms of reality, such as games where they are represented by avatars.
  • Communities of transaction, e.g., online business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) communities such as eFoods.com (http://www.efoods.com): Communities of transaction emphasize the importance of buying and selling products in a social online manner where people must interact in order to complete the transaction.

2. Principles for building an inclusive community

According to Dorine C. Andrews, author of Audience-Specific Online Community Design, there are three parts to building an online community:

• starting the online community
• encouraging early online interaction,
• moving to a self-sustaining interactive environment.

When starting an online community, it may be effective to create web pages that appeal to specific interests. Online communities with clear topics and easy access tend to be the most effective. In order to gain early interaction by members, privacy guarantees and content discussions are very important. Successful online communities tend to be able to function self-sufficiently.

2.1. Participation

• There are two major types of participation in online communities: public participation and non-public participation also called lurking. Lurkers are participants who join a virtual community but do not contribute. In contrast, public participants, or posters, are those who join virtual communities and openly express their beliefs and opinions. Both lurkers and posters frequently enter communities to find answers and to gather general information. For example, there are several online communities dedicated to technology. In these communities, posters are generally experts in the field who can offer technological insight and answer questions, while lurkers tend to be technological novices who use the communities to find answers and to learn.

• Legitimate peripheral participation (LPP) describes how newcomers become experienced members and eventually old-timers of a community of practice or collaborative project (Lave & Wenger 1991). LPP identifies learning as a contextual social phenomenon, achieved through participation in a community practice.[1] According to LPP, newcomers become members of a community initially by participating in simple and low-risk tasks that are nonetheless productive and necessary and further the goals of the community. Through peripheral activities, novices become acquainted with the tasks, vocabulary, and organizing principles of the community’s practitioners. Gradually, as newcomers become old-timers and gain a recognized level of mastery, their participation takes forms that are more and more central to the functioning of the community. LPP suggests that membership in a community of practice is mediated by the possible forms of participation to which newcomers have access, both physically and socially. In the case of a mentor-mentee relationship between older timers and newcomers, the old timer has both the power to confer legitimacy to the newcomer and to control the newcomer’s level of access to different community practices and experiences.[1] If newcomers can directly observe the practices of experts, they understand the broader context into which their own efforts fit. Conversely, LPP suggests that newcomers who are separated from the experts have limited access to their tools and community and therefore have limited growth. As participation increases, situations arise that allow the participant to assess how well they are contributing through their efforts, thus legitimate peripheral participation provides a means for self-evaluation (Lave & Wenger 1991).

• In general, virtual community participation is influenced by how participants view themselves in society as well as norms, both of society and of the online community.

2.2. Who is in an online community?

Although online societies differ in content from real society, the roles people assume in their online communities are quite similar. Elliot Volkma points out several categories of people that play a role in the cycle of social networking, these include:

• Community architect – Creates the online community, sets goals and decides the purpose of the site.
• Community manager – Oversees the progress of society. Enforces rules, encourages social norms, assists new members, and spreads awareness about the community.
• Professional member – This is a member who is paid to contribute to the site. The purpose of this role is to keep the community active.
• Free members – These members visit sites most often and represent the majority of the contributors. Their contributions are crucial to the sites’ progress.
• Passive lurker – These people do not contribute to the site but rather absorb the content, discussion, and advice.
• Active lurker – Consumes the content and shares that content with personal networks and other communities.
• Power users – These people push for new discussion, provide positive feedback to community managers, and sometimes even act as community managers themselves. They have a major influence on the site and make up only a small percentage of the users.

2.3. Critical Success Factors

This collection of critical success factors summarizes best practices found by Kollock (1998), Lazar and Preece (2002), and Kindsmüller et al. (2009).

• Good Usability enables more activity and ideally makes the system more fun to use. If users already fail in the registering process there will be few new members.
• Responsible Moderation enhances community activity and minimizes harmful behaviour. Rojo and Ragsdale (1997) show that an active moderator can, to some extent, compensate for the lack of active members in an online community.
• A Reason to talk about: Community Members need a reason for communication which relates to shared experiences, interests or goals. Without this common ground, no community activity will develop.
• System Availability: If your carrier system is not available or not responding fast enough your community will not develop.
• Find the right barrier to membership: The hurdles for registering and participating have to be adjusted thoroughly. They have to be low enough to get easily involved, but high enough to keep out troublemakers.
• Community-Centered Design: Community members should be involved in the design processes.
• Identifiability and System Memory: The identifiability of members enhances the responsibility for their contributions. Personal histories derived from the system memory enhance social relationships between members.
• Reciprocity: People are willing to help or cooperate with others if they can expect a future quid pro quo.
• Reputation and Stickiness: A reputation system is a collected feedback history of the behaviour of a member in order to manage trust between people that have not interacted with each other before (Resnick et al., 2000). Reputation is an important part of an online identity of a member and enhances stickiness (loyalty). This can be improved by showing an aggregated history of activities on the members’ profiles.

Considering these critical success factors can help to build and maintain stable online communities. In all cases, it is not the technology, it is the people that make an online community work. Employing the most advanced methods and technologies is neither sufficient nor, as early BBS approaches show, necessary to assure the building of a stable online community. People tend to make creative use of technology by using it in other ways than were originally intended by the designers.

2.4. Steps for building an online community

Here are the 7 steps to build your own online community.

• Define the purpose and goal.

  • This is the first step in building an online community. If your community doesn’t have a purpose, people won’t understand why they should join it. Your community is giving something to your members; the question is: What experience is it giving your users?
  • For example, your community could be for people who are backpacking through Europe and want to know tips, tricks, and recommendations from others who have backpacked through the same cities. Your purpose is to give them access to firsthand information it would otherwise be hard to find online. Your members will ask each other for hostel and hotel recommendations, where the walking tours start, or if it was worth it to go to a faraway landmark.

• Select a community platform.

  • Now that you have your purpose, you have to find its home. An important question to ask yourself right now is, “How many people do I want to grow this community to?” If you’re looking to create a 10-person community, you could create a WhatsApp group chat, a Telegram group, or an Instagram group DM. If you’re looking to create a community of 100,000+ people, you’ll want to look at other platforms, like Reddit or a Facebook group. Nobody wants to be in a group chat with 100,000 people. If you’re looking to create a community of 100-1000 people, a self-managed platform like Mastodon is a good choice.

• Build a member profile.

  Your goal is to fill your community with members of your target audience. Your member profile should mirror your customer avatar’s profile and answer the question: Who is this community serving?

  • Is your community serving backpackers travelling through Europe?
  • Is it serving coffee enthusiasts who want to talk about the notes behind their cup of coffee?
  • Is it helping eCommerce business founders who want to be more savvy with their strategies?

  Once you know who your ideal member is, you want to ask:

  • What does this community give them that they didn’t have before?
  • How do they feel before joining it (before-state)?
  • How do they feel after joining it (after-state)?

  That’s your member persona, and it will inform the copy you’ll use to convince them to become a member of your community.

• Develop rules and norms.

  • Before people are official members, show them the ground rules and norms for entry and have them agree to abide by them. If they don’t, tell them that they will be removed from the group.
  • A code of conduct (CoC) is about what actions are acceptable on a network, which is absolutely necessary but not sufficient on its own for establishing a culture. A CoC perhaps implies certain values but it mostly states what is NOT acceptable rather than what IS encouraged. Some codes of conduct do state things like “please engage with people courteously” etc.
  • A good CoC should be specific enough that it is actively repulsive to some people. And frankly, the more people who are repulsed by it the better. Perhaps the simple anti-racist sentiment is enough to repulse a small number of explicitly white supremacist people, but if you add in sentiment like “no TERFs allowed”, suddenly a lot of people who consider themselves leftists will also decide not to join. As an example, Friend Camp is anti-free-speech, at least in the sense that freedom of speech is commonly understood as a value. This is repulsive to some people on both the left and the right, and it’s important that people with that core value find somewhere other than Friend Camp to set up their online home.
  • Again this is a good thing. I remember one code of conduct I read for a chat forum where they stated that “before posting here, ask yourself if what you are saying is necessary for the health of the discourse”. And I saw that and thought, “Wow, I would never feel comfortable posting on that forum because I am always doubting the necessity of what I have to say.” This is good, though. The forum clearly signalled that they wanted a certain kind of person, one who is confident in the necessity of their speech. And that is not me, and I was able to steer clear. Did I feel excluded? Sure. But ultimately that feeling of pre-emptive exclusion is better than joining a community and THEN realizing that I don’t belong there (Kazemi, 2019).

• Set up your community.

  You have the purpose of your community, the member persona, and the rules that all members need to follow. Now, it’s time to bring this community to life and set it up on the platform of your choice.

  • Create initial community categories:

    Your community can be one large forum, or it can be categorized by topics. For example, you could have a forum for travelling and then categorize topics by location (Paris, Rome, Berlin, etc.). If your community is for business owners, your categories might look like Accounting, Marketing, Automation, HR, etc.

    Depending on your services, you can create categories inside of your community showcasing how they’re a great solution to a community member’s problems. This can also help you understand which community members are interacting with which categories most often, and what products would be best suited for them.

  • Review the sign-in process for members

    The sign-in process for your members needs to be easy and convenient. Review the process before launching your group to:

    • make sure it’s working as it should, and
    • experience your members’ journey to become part of the community.

    Some questions for you to consider:

    • Do you need to add more questions to ensure members are qualified to be in this type of community?
    • Do you need to ask fewer questions to keep members from procrastinating on their application?
    • Do you want to ask them what they want to get out of the community?

  • Define the roles of your staff and members

    Figuring out who handles specific situations now is going to save you later when a problem occurs. Each team member associated with the community should fully understand their role and how it fits into the larger team. For example:

    • Who responds if somebody complains about your product inside of the community?
    • Who decides if a member has violated the rules and needs to be removed?
    • Who is in charge of starting conversations inside the community?

    Whether your goal is to always moderate your community or to eventually have your members hold their own conversations, you’ll want to figure out what you need from your members to make the community successful. For example, do you need them to talk about how they’re using your product?

    If your group is for backpackers in Europe and your product is a backpack organizer, your moderator can ask, “How do you keep your backpack organized? Send a photo of your backpack and your FAVORITE organizing product that you don’t want to live without.”

• Promote your community.

  • It’s time to go live. The backend of your community is set up and now it’s time to get people to want to be members. Promoting your community is just like promoting a product. You’re going to be showing people why they want to be part of this community by pushing on the pain point that the community solves.

  • Here are 3 ways to promote your community:

    • Partner with influencers: Partnering with influencers promotes your community to their community. The influencer should have a community of people who are like your ideal member — and they already have their attention. This is a faster method of finding your target member than trying to run paid traffic campaigns, retarget to people and hope you’re able to get enough conversions to cover your acquisition cost.
    • Invite your contacts: Who do you know that would want to be part of this community? Your contacts include a list of people who all have one thing in common: they all know more people. By telling your contact list about your community, they’ll be able to spread the word to their friends, and so on. Your web of target members just grew through organic networking.
    • A referral program: Referral programs give members rewards for referring people into your community. Your rewards can be a free product, a discount code, a prize (like a new laptop), etc. This is the same idea as that of your contact list—your current community members know people who would also want to be part of the community. You just have to motivate them to want to spread the word for you.

2.5. Sustaining an online community

The popularity of social media has led to exponential growth in the volume and significance of online communities. However, research to date showed that managing online communities has met with difficulties in user participation (e.g., [8]), membership retention (e.g. [29]), and hence community sustainability (e.g. [30],). In an open communal environment, participants can join and leave freely without obligation [22], with accounts usually managed and run by the members [67] without commonly accepted organizers [31]. Community activities can become hit-or-miss affairs [32] and consequentially weaken members’ willingness to contribute valuable information ([2,19,30];). As most participants probably have not met in person, it is difficult to develop strong individual trust [33] and attachment to the community [34]. Despite the increasing popularity of online communities, relatively few have been successful in enhancing user participation and interactivity. Previous studies indicated that for an online community to survive, it’s important to stir up and maintain the member’s participation. Robert E.Kraut and Paul Resnick (2011), in their book Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design, provide specific tactics to motivate the participation of online community members including contribution and commitment. Furthermore, Lee et al. (2019) go on to highlight the role of online leaders in sustaining community activities.

2.5.1. How big is big enough?

• Size and growth are often natural indicators of whether an online community is sustainable and successful. Many of the benefits that people seek from online communities—such as information, entertainment, or novelty—seem to increase with size. a “successful” online community often evokes an image of hundreds of thousands of users, and practitioners and researchers alike have sought to devise methods to achieve growth and thereby, success. On the other hand, small online communities exist in droves and many persist in their smallness over time. Wellman et al. suggested that individuals who participate in small communities tend to seek relational exchange (e.g., friendship and social support) and have strong social trust and close relationships, whereas membership in large communities often serves goal-oriented purposes.

• When we set out to create an online community, we often seek to attract people to join in, to generate engagement. One of the features of online communities is that you need a certain critical mass to make it all work. Large communities seem to provide two main kinds of benefits through their size: (1) from higher volumes of activity, the ability to produce a sense of liveliness and maintain a flow of content that can attract and retain users; and (2) drawing from a larger pool of participants, the ability to not only obtain diverse knowledge and information from different participants but also, in turn, meet a broader set of needs (Hwang and Foote 2021).

• When members are a primary source of resources, the size of a structure’s membership provides a measure of resource availability. Larger voluntary associations typically have access to more economic resources. Likewise, by aggregating their member’s knowledge, larger decision-making groups have access to more information about the problem at hand. In larger social structures it is more likely that there is a member who knows the needed information, has the ability to provide social support, or has the time to coordinate collective efforts. When members are able to benefit from interactions both directly as active participants and in-directly as passive observers, larger groups will be able to provide greater benefits as a result of the exponential increase in the number of possible interactions. Membership size is also a measure of the level of “audience resources” that a social structure can provide. For individuals making announcements, seeking visibility, or looking for an audience for their ideas, accessible listeners are a resource. Larger audiences are preferred over smaller ones with similar members. The value of a structure’s“audience resource” is dependent, at least in part, on the size of its membership. In each of these ways, larger social structures will tend to have access to more resources than smaller structures. Because resource availability is an aspect of benefits provision, larger groups are expected to be more able to provide valuable benefits to members, and hence be sustainable, over time (Butler 2001).

• At this point, the maximum size of a community can come into play. Is there a maximum size that works? Well, to an extent, the answer must be both yes and no. Communities are largely self-organizing. When people join, they take familiar and predictable roles. Some people step in as leaders, some as trusted sidekicks, some as comics, some as observers, some rude, some nurturing and so on. Large communities can be viewed as being made up of smaller ones, linked by the common interests of common individuals. In essence, the community is just made up of a series of personal networks. Bigger is not always better (Stodd, 2011).

• One of the less explored facets is that if it gets too big, it might stop working. The question of ‘how big is big enough is, of course, subjective, but there are certain things that we can bring to bear. For example, most people maintain meaningful relationships with about 100 people. Some a few more, some less, but the reality is that you can’t develop an endless number of meaningful social relationships, be it at work, in the pub or online. You might get to 200, but not 20,000. There comes a point at which you are just broadcasting to the masses. While increasing size provides access to more resources, it can also have significant adverse effects on the process of converting those resources into valued benefits (Butler 2001). In large online gaming communities, the number of possible interaction partners increases non-linearly with size, making it substantially more difficult to know the rest of the members. This, in turn, may affect the chances that individuals will form personal relationships and receive benefits such as social support or information. It also decreases the likelihood that individuals will know the entire membership well, increasing the chances that they will not be able to fully access the resources that are available within the structure. These problems can significantly hinder the processes by which resources are transformed into benefits, ultimately affecting a social structure’s ability to attract and retain members. size may also have a negative impact on the benefits provision process because it affects individuals’ perceptions and attitudes. Individuals will tend to contribute less time, energy, and resources because they expect that other members will provide enough to achieve the desired benefits. Thus, while larger structures may have more potential resource providers, the number of contributions per person (and overall) may be lower than in smaller social collectives. If adequate resources are not contributed by the current membership, then the social structure will not be able to provide the benefits necessary to continue to attract and retain members. The undersupply of resources (and hence lower benefit levels) in larger structures is reflected in the general finding that individuals in larger structures tend to be less committed, less satisfied and hence less likely to join or remain members (Butler 2001).

• According to Darius Kazemi (2019), it is absolutely necessary to have no more than 50 to 100 active users who log in to your online community. In small online gaming communities (i.e., those with fewer than 200 members), each player tends to know everybody else, and interpersonal trust appears to be strong. Therefore, central players with structural advantages can effectively achieve a consensus among members in small guilds. With such consensus, community trust can be well developed. On the other hand, in large guilds (i.e., those with more than 300 members), it is difficult for central players to build trust among a great number of self-interested and anonymous players with different perspectives. To maintain community solidarity, the central players in small guilds are more likely to express their feelings of trust toward members than those in large guilds (Hsiao and Chiou 2012). Small communities have a marked advantage in encouraging bonds between users: in small communities the same two individuals are more likely to interact repeatedly, fostering opportunities for deeper social and interpersonal bonds. Alternatively, we might speculate that small communities are appealing not because they provide benefits unavailable in large communities but because they avoid the troubles that plague them. With increased membership, interpersonal conflict becomes more likely and more difficult to resolve, as do undesirable contributions such as spam and posts or comments by trolls or newcomers who don’t know the community rules. At times, the governance work of these communities requires a substantial amount of time, coordination, and labour across a team of moderators. Larger communities typically deal with greater heterogeneity amongst members and must deal with attempts to shift the boundaries of their community—both topical and normative—in ways that generate intra-group conflict. All of these issues fundamentally influence the types of experiences, interactions, and relationships participants might have in a community, and small communities have a distinct advantage with respect to community management (Hwang and Foote 2021).

• First, smaller communities may similarly help contributors partition what spaces are appropriate for sharing certain information. As users can manage the flow of information they encounter by curating smaller communities, they can also manage what audiences they provide information to. This ability to choose a community that mirrors the content you want to share may be important to motivating users to contribute. Depending on the kind of content shared, or the type of experience sought, users may actually prefer a smaller, more predictable audience. Second, in general, smaller communities are easier to manage and see fewer undesirable contributions such as spam and trolls. More broadly, for users, the high specificity in the content matter of small communities additionally provides users with a more granular level of control over what content they choose to expose themselves to. Third, the personal-but-not-the-person tension highlights how interpersonal interactions in online communities like those on Reddit, even very small ones, are not necessarily about dyadic relationships but more about finding specific experiences that resonate in a community for a user. This resonance is likely to foster identity-based attachments to the group at large, which in turn might generate a sense of belonging—a major factor in motivating participation (Hwang and Foote 2021). Forth, on a small social network site, you can set hyper-specific norms. For example, Mastodon allows for “content warnings”, where you hide content behind a text tag that you define for your post. It’s often things like “NSFW” or “mental health discussion”. This acts as a warning so people who don’t want to read about that kind of stuff won’t click through to see it. You also don’t need to implement some kind of draconian filtering system to have norms: you simply model the behaviour you want to see and remind people to act a certain way when they post outside of those norms. This kind of thing does not work well in a forum of even 200 people, but in the 50-ish range, it is entirely doable.

• Your small social network site can have its own rules about, for example:

  • what speech is acceptable
  • what actions are considered violence
  • what actions are considered protected speech or expression

• Having a tight-knit group where lots of people know each other is key to the principle of maintaining hyper-specific norms. Furthermore, having a small number of active users means moderation is completely achievable by a single person. Even tricky matters like delineating what is and is not acceptable speech become easier when you’re dealing with a small community. For example, there may be some inalienable right for expression of disagreeable political speech, but if it is speech that all the people on your corner of the network agree you don’t want to see, you can simply ban it internally and filter or block it externally. And when your community is small, you can use powerful tools that would be irresponsible to wield in a larger community. For example, when you discover a user on someone else’s site engaging in speech that violates your local norms, you can often mute or ban the entire server that hosts the user in question on behalf of all the people in your small community. This would be inadvisable on a huge network like Twitter.

• In addition, an interconnected network also helps with conflict resolution, so when things go “wrong” it’s hardly noticeable. That kind of conflict resolution doesn’t easily happen between strangers, even in a group where people share values with one another. But when the chance of any two people being complete strangers is close to zero, this happens way more frequently (Kazemi, 2019).

2.5.2. Motivations for contribution:

To be successful, online communities need the people who participate in them to contribute the resources on which the group’s existence is built. The types of resource contributions needed differ widely across different types of groups.

• Ask and Ye Shall Receive.

  • Making the list of needed contributions easily visible increases the likelihood that the community will provide them.
  • Providing easy-to-use tools for finding and tracking work that needs to be done increases the amount that gets done.

• Structuring Requests to Enhance Motivation.

  • Compared to asking people at random, asking people to perform tasks that interest them and that they are able to perform increases contributions.
  • Compared to broadcasting requirements for contributions to all community members, asking specific people to make contributions increases the likelihood that they will do so.
  • Simple requests lead to more compliance than do complex ones for decisions about which members do not care strongly. lengthy and
  • Messages stressing the benefits of contribution have a larger effect on people who care about the domain of the contribution.
  • Fear campaigns lead members to increase contributions in response to persuasive appeals. Alternatively, managers can use the nature of the request itself to increase people’s involvement in decision-making. In general, messages with the strong fear appeal are compelling (Witte and Allen 2000). In addition, because such messages cause people to take the decision process more seriously, they cause them to be especially sensitive to the evidence and rationale for the decision.
  • Fear campaigns cause people to evaluate the quality of persuasive appeals. When creating persuasive messages to appeal to casual visitors, it makes sense to rely on heuristics that influence people who will not think deeply about the decision or the persuasive appeal.
  • Requests from high-status people in the community lead to more contribution than anonymous requests or requests from low-status members.
  • People are more likely to comply with requests the more they like the requester.
  • People will be more likely to comply with requests if they come from others who are familiar to them, similar to them, are attractive, are of high status or have other noticeable socially desirable characteristics.
  • People are more likely to comply with a request when they see that other people have also complied.
  • Providing members with specific and highly challenging goals, whether self-set or system-suggested, increases contribution.
  • Coupling goals with specific deadlines leads to increases in contribution as the deadlines approach.
  • Goals have greater effects when people receive frequent feedback about their performance with respect to the goals.

• Enhancing Intrinsic Motivations

  Many members of online communities are motivated because either effort toward the task or successful completion of the task is intrinsically rewarding, independent of other downstream consequences of performing the task. It is intrinsically rewarding to communicate with others in a health support group, solve programming challenges in an open-source community, or kill monsters in an online game. Intrinsically motivated actions are ones that directly fulfill some basic desire.

  • Combining contribution with social contact with other contributors causes members to contribute more. Social contact is a powerful motivator. Studies that correlate the tasks people are engaged in with their moods show that for most people, being engaged socially is associated with positive moods. A national sample shows that the most positive moods of the day occur when teens are talking and doing activities with their best friends, and the lowest moods of the day occur when they are alone (Csikszent- mihalyi and Hunter 2003). the greatest happiness occurs when people are interacting with others (Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi 1990). It is possible to make otherwise-tedious tasks more engaging by combining them with social interaction.

  • Immersive experiences with clear goals, feedback, and challenges that exercise people’s skills to their limits but still leave them in control are intrinsic motivation cally motivating.

  • Performance feedback—especially positive feedback—can enhance to perform tasks.

  • Site designs that encourage systematic, quantitative feedback generate more verbal feedback as well.

  • Performance feedback enhances motivation only when it is considered to be sincere.

  • Comparative performance feedback can enhance motivation, as long as high performance is viewed as desirable and potentially obtainable.

  • Performance feedback—especially comparative performance feedback—can create a game-like atmosphere that may have undesirable consequences in some communities.

• Enhancing Extrinsic Motivations

  • Rewards—whether in the form of status, privileges, or material benefits—motivate contributions.
  • With task-contingent rewards for small, discrete tasks, larger rewards motivate people to take on tasks but do not produce higher effort on accepted tasks.
  • Rewards cause some people to “game the system,” undertaking counterfeit actions that will be rewarded but that do not actually contribute to the community.
  • Rewards that are task-contingent but not performance-contingent lead to members gaming the system by performing the tasks with low effort.
  • Performance-contingent rewards can be set in a way that prevents gaming; this is true even if performance evaluation is imperfect, as long as it is somewhat informative.
  • Status and privileges are less likely to lead people who are not invested in a community to game the system than are tangible rewards.
  • Nontransparent eligibility criteria and unpredictable reward schedules lead to less gaming of the system than do predictable rewards.
  • Adding a task-contingent reward (for doing or finishing a task, regardless of performance) to an already interesting task causes people to be less interested in the task. The effect is larger for monetary rewards than for prizes, status rewards, and charitable donations.
  • Small tangible rewards are likely to reduce contributions for intrinsically interesting tasks; larger rewards are likely to increase contributions.

• Enhancing the Expectancy Value of Group Outcomes

  • Commitment to an online community group increases willingness to contribute to it.
  • People will be more willing to contribute in an online group when the group is small rather than large. According to the collective effort model, people will contribute more to a group if they think their contributions make a difference to the group’s performance. One way to influence beliefs about the efficacy of individual effort on group performance is to reduce or cap the size of the group. Clearly, there are trade-offs in online communities between having large numbers of participants, each of whom can provide content or make some other type of contribution, and capping their size, so that each participant contributes more and likes the communities better. Creating subcommunities by partitioning a larger one into interest groups or separate forums addresses this dilemma. Thus, both Facebook and LinkedIn get the best of both worlds by exploiting a huge membership base subdivided into subcommunities based on the college from which members graduated, their prior employers, issues around which they rally, or their personal social networks. Beyond the necessity of growth for Mastodon’s basic survival, federation emphasizes horizontal growth between instances, rather than growth within instances. Specifically, when asked about the ideal size of their instances, none of the moderators interviewed for this project expressed a desire for their instances to exponentially grow. Instead, the scaling focus was mostly tied to the number of active participants—those who regularly engaged on the site—and the ability to manage the instance. (Diana Zulli et al., 2020)
  • People will be more willing to contribute in an online group when they think that they are unique and that others in the group cannot make contributions similar to theirs.
  • People will be more willing to contribute in an online community if they see that others are making complementary or contingent contributions than if they see others making substitute contributions.

2.5.3. Motivations for commitment:

• For most online communities, commitment is crucial. Committed members work harder, say more, do more, and stick with a community after it becomes established. They care enough to help with community activities and to sustain the group through problems. Committed members are those most likely to provide the content that others value, such as answers to people’s questions in technical and health support groups (Blanchard and Markus 2004; Fisher et al. 2006; Rodgers and Chen 2005), code in open source projects (Mockus et al. 2002), and edits in Wikipedia (Kittur et al. 2007). They are more likely to exercise their voice, demanding change and improvement when dissatisfied, than to exit (Hirschman 1970).

• Commitment to the community makes people care enough to respond to and to enforce norms of appropriate behaviour (Smith, McLaughlin, and Osborne 1997); thus, commitment is a building block for regulation. Commitment to the community makes people motivated to exert effort behind the scenes to keep the online community going (Butler et al. 2007), and commitment is thus a building block for motivating contributions. And the commitment to a new community leads people to overlook growing pains or outside alternatives during a community startup phase.

• Three types of commitment that we can apply to online communities:

  • (1) Affective commitment, based on feelings of closeness and attachment to a group or members of the group. Social psychologists who study groups distinguish between two bases for the affective commitment that people have toward groups. Identity-based affective commitment is a feeling of being part of the community and helping to fulfill its mission. In contrast, bond-based affective commitment is feeling close to individual members of the group.
  • (2) Normative commitment, based on feelings of rightness that one has obligations to the community, to be loyal and act on its behalf.
  • (3) Need-based or continuance commitment, based on an incentive structure in the group and alternatives available to members from outside that increase the net costs of leaving the group (Allen and Meyer 1996; Meyer and Allen 1991; Meyer, Stanley, Herscovitch, and Topolnytsky 2002). According to needs-based models of social cohesion, people stay in a group only as long as they perceive the group and other members as being attractive and instrumental in fulfilling their personal goals (Homans 1961)

• Enhance Identity-based commitment

  • Instilling identity-based attachment leads people to continue their participation in the group in the face of membership turnover.
  • Identity-based commitment norms than does bonds-based commitment. makes people more compliant with
  • Recruiting or clustering those who are similar to each other into homogeneous groups fosters an identity-based commitment to a community.
  • Providing a collection of individuals with a name or other indicator that they are members of a common group increases their identity-based commitment to the community.
  • A name and tagline that articulate the shared interests of a community’s members increase the members’ identity-based commitment to the community. A clearly articulated scope with a clever name and tagline helps to define a community’s niche and differentiate it from competitors. It also helps potential new members assess whether they fit well. And, it induces identity-based attachment. Good examples are Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org), “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”; Dogster (http://www.dogster.com), “for the love of dog”; or Hattrick (http://www.hattrick.org), a multiplayer fantasy European football (i.e., soccer) site whose motto is “Everybody deserves their own football team.”
  • Creating named groups within a larger online community increases members’ commitment to the subgroups.
  • Making community fate, goals, or purpose explicit increases members’ identity-based commitment to the community.
  • Providing community members with interdependent tasks increases their identity-based commitment to the community and reduces conflict among subgroups.
  • Making group members anonymous will foster identity-based. Generally, the anonymity of individual group members fosters community identity and strong group norms because it deemphasizes individual distinctions. By contrast, making personal identity salient or individual members identifiable decreases identity-based attachment, although it may increase bond-based attachment (Postmes et al. 2005; Postmes et al. 2001; Sassenberg 2002; Sassenberg et al. 2003; Sassenberg and Postmes 2002).

• Enhance Bonds-Based Commitment

  • Recruiting participants who have existing social ties to be members of the community increases their bonds-based commitment to the community.
  • Facilitating interaction with “friends of friends” can enhance bonds-based commitment.
  • Displaying photos and information about individual members and their recent activities promotes bonds-based commitment
  • Providing opportunities for members to engage in personal conversation increases bonds-based commitment in online communities.
  • Providing user profile pages and flexibility in personalizing them increases self-disclosure and interpersonal liking and thus bonds-based commitment. For example, Mastodon allows its users to personalize their profiles by providing empty metadata boxes so that users can type in any information they want.
  • Allowing participation under a pseudonym will increase self-disclosure and interpersonal liking and thus bond-based commitment in communities where sensitive information is shared.
  • Highlighting interpersonal similarity fosters closeness among individual members and bonds-based commitment.
  • People feel more committed to smaller groups than to larger ones (Carron and Spink 1995).
  • Large communities with a large volume of communication reduce bonds-based commitment unless some means of clustering communications is used.
  • Diversity of members’ interest in an online community can drive away members, especially those with identity-based commitment.
  • Off-topic communication reduces identity-based commitment and increases bonds-based commitment to an online community.
  • Going off-topic together (describe situations where something that would normally be considered off-topic (such as fundraising or politics) becomes on-topic—at least temporarily) can increase both bonds-based commitment and identity-based commitment.
  • Personalized filters, which differentially expose members to communications that match their personal interests, reduce the negative effects that offtopic communication has on identity-based commitment.

• Enhance Normative Commitment

  • Highlighting a community’s purpose and successes at achieving that purpose can translate members’ commitment to the purpose into a normative commitment to the community.
  • Testimonials about people’s normative commitment to the community increase others’ normative commitment.
  • Priming norms of reciprocity by highlighting concepts that get people to think of their normative obligations increases normative commitment to an online community.
  • Showing people what they have received from the community increases their normative commitment to it. Because Mastodon instances are not only self-managing but also self-designing in pursuit of social connections and a common social identity as well as mutual learning and knowledge development, they can be considered as a community of practice. Therefore, rather than providing strict accounting, designers can highlight more general benefits that members receive. For example, when soliciting support for Wikipedia in 2010, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales emphasized generalized reciprocity when he said that “It stopped being just a website a long time ago. For many of us, most of us, Wikipedia has become an indispensable part of our daily lives” (Wikimedia Foundation 2010).
  • Highlighting opportunities to return favors to specific others increases normative commitment to the community.

• Enhance Needs-Based Commitment

  • Providing participants with experiences that meet their motivations for participating in the community increase their needs-based commitment to the community.
  • Showing information about other communities in the same ecological niche reduces needs-based commitment.
  • Making it difficult for members to export assets or transfer them to other members increases needs-based commitment.
  • Entry barriers and other opportunities for members to make community-specific investments, even if they are merely sunk costs that do not create valuable assets, increase needs-based commitment.

2.5.4. Leadership in sustaining an online community

• Leaders play an important role in sustaining an online community, evidenced by the increasing growth of research on identifying the roles of leaders in an online community, the interactions between leaders and other members, and the driving forces from leaders that influence others’ participation and retention.

• When looking closely at leaders’ individual behaviours regarding the degree of their participation and involvement, researchers have pointed out that online leaders participate actively in communication activities and thus have higher visibility within the community. Their active participation and involvement in discussions identify them as leaders adding value to the community and playing more critical roles than other participants. Studies have also highlighted how leaders are frequent contributors who actively diffuse information and knowledge. They can be “super-posters” who post a large bulk of messages and can dominate collective opinions in particular discussion groups. Thus, within an online community, free members and power users can be considered as leader.

• Nevertheless, Wasko and Faraj noticed that online leaders are not necessarily “chatty.” They can be silent leaders who encourage others to express their opinions and facilitate information exchange rather than posting a substantial number of messages. Researchers have also addressed the issue of “active lurkers” those whose presence within a community is invisible but who can still diffuse online content to a wide audience, thus leading to knowledge transfer. Lurkers are a key part of an online community despite their silence. Clearly, different forms of online leadership can be found in online communities, and thus, the level of participation defining an online leader remains an open question.

• In addition to the above literature concerning online leadership at the individual level, another important research stream has addressed the interpersonal processes concerning how online leaders influence others’ participation. From this perspective, online leaders are those capable of inducing a large number of members to participate, thereby enhancing the exchange of information and knowledgeable conversations. They can spark dialogues, prompt feedback, and shape how participants discuss a subject. They also encourage others to “talk” and engage in conversations. In addition to the leader’s capability for enhancing information and knowledge exchange, research shows that a good leader in a community provides social and emotional support to the participants, thus demonstrating how the community can be valuable to those who use it. Huy and Shipilov’s investigation found that a leader developing emotional capital (i.e., feelings of authenticity, pride, attachment, and fun) results in a successful community in work settings. Through the development of interpersonal bonds, participants’ attachment to the community can be enhanced. Indeed, high responsiveness and interactivity among participants are beneficial for community members and thus online communities can continue to flourish under such conditions. With the emphasis on user participation and community sustainability, an online leader is an emerging role and, in this study, defined as a participant recognized by others as being influential in determining what activity the community does and how (Lee et al. 2019).

• Thus, community managers or group moderators should develop better recommendation systems. If new users join a community, they might be recommended to a local leader, who can welcome them, fostering a sense of belonging, which some scholars have shown to be associated with greater participation. Indirectly, these recommendations would serve as a reputation system, which helps users evaluate content integrity and user status (Huffaker 2010). For leaders, feeling that they have a good reputation impacts their willingness to help others, especially over time. Recommendation systems are especially useful when interests or content contributions are connected with users. For example, a system can identify the various topic areas based on the language of leaders, mark those as expertise areas, and recommend other users to these experts. Or, given that leaders in a community are influential, systems might be able to detect which products or ideas could be most attractive to other users. At a higher level, matching users based on their participation rates, interaction patterns and language could result in ideal recommendations for a friendship or a possible romantic relationship (Huffaker 2010).

• Furthermore, it is important for community managers or group moderators to determine who are the leaders and emerging leaders within the community. Thus, community managers can encourage or reward the behaviors of those who are targeted as emerging leaders. Take, for example, a virtual work group where no leader has been assigned. An analysis of the interactions within the group over a set period time of time would reveal which workers emerge as leaders, which gives management insight into the talent pool and employees a chance for promotion (Huffaker 2010).

2.6. Dealing with conflicts in an online community

To encourage growth in your community and avoid it turning stale, you need to maintain a healthy range of opinions and a diversity of thought. Of course, there is a line where the constructive and robust debate becomes conflict, which potentially destroys your carefully nurtured online community.

2.6.1. Causes of Conflict in an Online Community

• Expectations-related causes of conflict: Your community members may have expectations that aren’t being met, or don’t match up with other members’ expectations. These can include:

  • Differing principles & mismatching values: Are your community principles prominently displayed and are you attracting the right people to your online community?
  • Diversity of perspectives: do you have such a diverse membership that their perspectives are clashing too much?
  • Lack of focus: Is your community wandering aimlessly or do they know what the purpose of engaging is?
  • Disagreement over strategy or execution: does your membership agree with where you want to take your online community and how you are going about doing so?

• Personality-driven causes of conflict: We’re all very different and have our own unique personalities. While this makes your online community interesting and encourages a range of debates, sometimes personalities and ways of communicating clash, for example:

  • Limitations of reading and writing capabilities: are some of your community members less literate, or less careful about how they write or make sure they understand the message they are responding to than others?
  • Immovable opinions: Have participants decided their personal positions in a debate and are incapable of flexible debate?
  • In-articulation of differing values: Are participants in the community not making different sets of values clear enough for productive discussions to take place?
  • Dismissiveness: Is there an element of patronizing, demeaning or condescending language being used in the debate?

• Environmental causes of conflict

  • Sometimes, the environment you provide for your community can cause problems. When communicating we rely on tools, both interpersonal as well as functional. When these are lacking in some way, the following can happen:
  • No physical communication cues: Are the lack of non-verbal visual cues causing problems for your membership in identifying mood and tone?
  • Impersonality of the medium: Are your community members losing their inhibitions and saying things they would not dare say face to face?
  • Misinterpreted silences: Is the inherent asynchronicity of the medium your community uses to communicate resulting in the time delay in-between responses blowing issues out of proportion?
  • Perceptions of public vs private spaces online: Do individuals amongst your membership have differing understandings of how public or private their discussions are on the web?

• Emotional causes of conflict: Over time, underlying emotional issues will develop among your online community’s membership which will affect how they communicate.

  • Historical problems: Do certain community members have previous personal arguments affecting their ongoing interactions?
  • Prejudice: Are there personal prejudices at play when people butt heads in your online community?
  • Perception of injustice: Is one member in particular complaining of being persecuted by other elements in the community?
  • Power dynamics: Have a few cliques developed and are they vying for supremacy and control over your community?

2.6.2. What should you do?

• As a Community Manager, your first reaction to conflict might be stamp on it through moderation and banning, but you must remember that you don’t want to create an atmosphere where people feel their views are being suppressed.
• What makes our lives as Community facilitators complex is that resolving conflict isn’t always as black and white as straightforward moderation of content and exclusion of a or several users. So we end up having to carefully balance allowing robust debate, promoting a variety of points of view, whilst allowing just enough conflict to allow the community members to grow, but not so much it implodes.
• Ultimately, when we are faced with conflict within our online community, we have to remember that it’s generally a conflict between people, and not between concepts of ideas. Here are a few steps you can take as the referee Community Manager to defuse conflict and move the discussion onwards.
  • The first step is to try and identify what might be causing the conflict. This can range from a massive number of possibilities, but you can check out a few examples here: 16 causes of conflict in your online community.
  • Once you have an idea of what the cause might be, you can start asking questions of the participants to try and help clear up any misunderstandings. Hopefully, the problem is simply one of miscommunication and can be easily resolved.
  • Take a step back once you have identified the probable cause and have investigated the issue a bit deeper. Giving yourself a bit of distance will help you see the bigger picture and identify whether it’s a storm in a teacup or something that may cause your online community damage.
  • Address the emotional aspect of the argument. Anger and reconciliation don’t make good bedfellows and will result in simmering bitterness and resentment, which will ultimately explode in another debate. Shutting down the discussion temporarily will give everyone involved a chance to breathe and reflect.
  • If the problem stems from cultural or other background differences, then you can privately encourage participants to try and take into account the context of someone’s position in a debate.
  • Limiting the escalation of the conflict into name-calling territory may be necessary, and this is where the tricky question of when and how much to moderate and/or ban overly troublesome community members comes in. The important part is to make sure you stick to your guidelines so you are not accused of favouritism, but I always find a lighter hand works best.
  • Encourage communication in a non-judgmental way. Sometimes people need to get things off their chest, and you can ask them to do it in a non-accusatory manner. Whether you ask your members to do this publicly or privately is your call, as it depends on the dynamics of your community.

2.6.3. Some tips for managing conflict within your community

• Don’t hide conflict:

  • It’s important when conflict arises to ensure it is visible to the community and moderators. Negative comments and seeds for conflict that start beneath the surface can result in bigger and worse confrontations.
  • The way we communicate is totally open within the community, so any potential conflict that’s brewing will emerge. This avoids the secret building up of issues under the carpet. That way, the visibility and accountability factors just kick in and shape both individual and collective behaviour.”

• Focus on the person, not the negativity:

  • When conflict arises, focus on the person it’s coming from. Sometimes, the frustration is inspired by the community but began somewhere else entirely.
  • When managing conflict, try focusing on the member and not the negativity. This gives the community manager an opportunity to connect with that person on a deeper level.
  • Instead of jumping straight to the problem, start with the person. How are they feeling? What do they say? What are they going through? We use empathic communication techniques to help with this and to help shape our response. We bear their emotional state in mind when handling the issue, trying as hard as possible to make moderation constructive. There’s a fine balance between encouraging the person to take a step back and look at their own well-being and balancing our responsibility toward the rest of the community.

• Establish ground rules for moderators:

  • Sure, everything in your community is going well right now, but what happens if conflict does arise? Ensure moderators and managers are prepared when something comes up and have ground rules in place before conflict arises. Then, managing conflict won’t be as daunting, and the team will be prepared.
  • Volleying ideas off of [other moderators] to evaluate a set of ground rules on posts is normally the de facto guide for us. We compiled those rules from years of being trolled so we restate them often and that stops most conflicts

• Reframe and rephrase what you’re hearing:

  • Assuming positive intent is absolutely necessary when managing conflict in a community. Conflict often arises from passionate people misunderstanding one another, and it’s important for a community manager to understand that.
  • It’s good to try and capture what they mean in rephrasing things so they feel heard, and explain your point of view. Focusing always on ideas and concepts and not the person. People make a mistake in conflict in not understanding that emotions are very individual. You may not intend to insult me, but I could feel insulted. Being aware and empathetic to that is a good first step in resolving conflict. In the end, people just want to be heard and understood.

• Remember: Rules are there for a reason:

  • It’s important as the community manager to remind members of the community rules. Rules are there for a reason, and each member agreed to them when they joined the community.
  • Most members won’t read the rules, and the ones that do will forget. It’s up to you to remind them. Sometimes that means shooting them a kindly worded personal message when they break a rule, reminding them without judging them. Other times that might mean posting to the general community reminding them of the rules. I do this whenever I see a rule being broken more often. It’s a good opportunity to remind the whole community of what the rules are and why they exist: To keep your community safe and valuable for every member.”

• Stop conflict before it starts:

  • Wouldn’t it be nice if conflict just didn’t even happen in the first place? One way to avoid managing conflict altogether is to reward good behaviour and acknowledge when members are having a positive impact on the community.
  • The most important thing has to happen when there is no conflict. Reward the behaviour you want to see, and strengthen the members who are role models. People learn by copying behaviours, so if you make sure good behaviour is present in your community, you can avoid conflict.”

• Make sure people know why they are there.

  • Another way to try to avoid conflict is to ensure members know why they are there. People self-identify and have a strong understanding of why they want to join this community. That way, once they are members, there aren’t many rules.
  • This framework has inherently forced us to be very flexible. In order for the community to survive in terms of entry, participation, and engagement, it has to be an open, welcoming space with no strings attached. Also, the rules being quite minimal, this also means that reasons for conflict hardly exist at all, since expectations are almost zero and anything that gets created is a bonus by definition.

• Don’t be afraid to lock a thread

  • Sometimes a thread can get away from you. People get passionate about the topic, and the conflict ensues. In the event, a thread within the community is not manageable and members are not open to having their minds changed or being talked down, locking a thread or the comments is always an option.
  • Locking a thread is useful for hot-button issues. Those issues tend to accrete rage and irregular contributors. There are tools to keep the fires at bay for Reddit, but oftentimes we let the users work it out with each other and try to keep things civil even if people disagree.

• Bans are a last resort, but still an option As a last resort, when conflict arises and becomes unmanageable, or if the same member has been reminded of the rules and warned of consequences but aren’t changing, bans are always an option. It’s important to remember that first and foremost, you serve the community, and the safety of a community is incredibly important. Bans are a last resort but can happen when the balance of harm shifts too far. At that point, it’s about signposting them into a place where they may get further help.

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