Motivations for Participating in Online Communities

As someone who has only ever considered a user’s perspective of online communities, it was really interesting to see a different point of view, and get some insights into why networks, forums, and other online groups functioned the way they do. This week’s readings offered many such insights, including an approach from a business perspective, something I never thought to connect to an activity that seemed so purely personal to me. While the role of business in running a community and making profit from it by selling advertising space or from users directly (such as offering paid accounts with special features), the idea of companies creating and managing communities for their own purposes still seems foreign to me, so it would be really interesting to see anyone who has experience with that sort of thing share some more information about it.

Another aspect of the readings I found curious is the way they all seemed to agree on the types of motivations at work in keeping online communities active, even though thee authors had different mind-sets and used different approaches to reach their conclusions. Ridings and Gefen examined the different reasons for joining a group, the desire for information exchange and friendship being most important, with social support and recreation less significant, and came up with three main motivation factors: being part of a group, reaching goals, and being rewarded. They introduce the concept of lurkers being part of a community as well, despite their lack of interaction, and the idea that while many users enter communities with the goal of gaining knowledge, in line with the original design of the internet as an information exchange, connecting to others with the purpose of gaining social support or finding friendship have become major aspects of online interaction as well.

Ling et al. examine the role of motivation in a more complex way, questioning if social science theories predicting user behavior can be useful to designers in order to create communities that remain active and encourage participation. They introduce the concept of social loafing, something that can be commonly seen in groups when the majority of members remain passive or contribute less than they would as individuals, and the collective effort model, which explains factors that can reduce social loafing, such as user’s belief in the importance, uniqueness and recognition of their contribution, as well as their affinity to the group. One significant conclusion of their research is the finding that motivation needs to happen internally, with extrinsic efforts such as the promise of benefits to users rarely generating lasting participation.
Tedjamulia et al. analyze motivation from a business perspective, in order for community “managers” to create a productive group environment by providing feedback and rewards and prevent loss of funding through problems such as disorganization and unstable membership. They describe several levels of participation from lurker to veteran, suggesting that a balance between them is necessary for a thriving community. In order to increase motivation and sidestep knowledge-sharing dilemma, the authors suggest personal and environmental factors such as high self efficacy, trust in the community, interesting content, and visibility of contribution, as well as goals and rewards, showing some overlap with ideas put forward by Ridings and Ling.

Schrock addresses motivation from a personality perspective, suggesting different user patterns between introverts and extroverts, with the former using text-based communities to overcome offline difficulties of expressing themselves, while the latter prefer more visual resources that offer more disclosure, such as youtube. He also examines gender differences of online community use and motivations, indication that males use such sites to expand their social networks while females tend to maintain close ties to already existing connections.
Java et all concentrate on the new concept on microblogging, which fulfills a need for ever fast modes of communication and higher number of updates. The authors propose a high reciprocity between users, with previously existing social networks making up a majority of the active user base, and point out different user roles depending on this reciprocity, with members acting as information source or seeker. They also show that switching between roles and directing various types of posts at different audiences with the clear division between friends and communities, or categorizing/filtering tools that exists in other online communities such as Facebook or Livejournal, can make interaction confusing.

Having observed many of the motivations and behaviors described by these authors, I find myself agreeing with much of their eventual results, if not all of their original proposals. For example, Ling at al.’s observation of group goals being more effective motivators of contribution that individual goals reminded me of several instances where Livejournal communities I joined initiated fundraising events, for example for victims of the Haiti earthquake, and were able to collect thousands of dollars as a group, while only a few of those who contributed would probably have donated purely on their own incentive (this also confirms the value of a clearly stated goal in motivation, as the this effort also included a set amount of donations to be reached, which probably encouraged members to continually work toward that number).

While personal experiences such as this generally confirmed the concepts and conclusions addressed in the readings, I do disagree with some of the basic approaches and specific premises used. In general, it seems to me that all this research is based on perspectives and interests other than that of the users themselves, who after all represent an essential part of the equation. Managers and designers of communities can only be efficient if user’s needs are taken into consideration, and sometimes the best way to find out what motivates contribution is simply to listen to what members have to say and observe what they do. Social theories and business practices are certainly concepts to take into consideration, but if they clash with the actual needs of a certain member base, sticking to them as the only tools to run a community can do more harm than good. I have experience this numerous times on Livejournal, where the most active member groups (which are usually also the ones who invest the most money in the site) are very vocal about their ideas and motivations yet are repeatedly ignored in the implementation of new features that go against community mentality. This not only leads to an unhappy community and in many instances the need for designers to adjust features in the face of protests, but also to a loss of revenue due to users retracting their financial support of the site.
Specifically, I also found myself to question assumptions such as Schrock’s concerning female users being less tech-savvy and therefore in more danger of falling prey to online predators or similar pitfalls of community interaction. Conclusions such as this make me doubt the usefulness of surveys that identify women and girls as less knowledgeable of technology, and make me wonder if the problem doesn’t lie in a different approach to answering questions regarding such topics, or cultural norms that lead to them assessing their own skills at a lower level then they actually might be at. To point out the high number of female users in online communities and yet continue to rate their skills of using online technologies as less than males should really lead us to question where this discrepancy really comes from rather than what it may lead to.


For the second part of the assignment, I observed the forum of F1 Fanatic, a blog that is usually my news source for anything Formula 1 related (Formula 1 or F1 is an international car racing world championship). While I visit the blog regularly, I’ve never paid attention to the forum until now, so searching posts and examining participation and contributions in this environment that was connected to something familiar but yet completely new was really interesting.

Modes of Participation
I realized quickly that the basic setup of the forum was very simple. This could be part of the close connection to the blog itself, as several aspects were not directly part of the forum itself, but linked through the interactivity of the blog. I included those modes in the list because they’re still important to the participation on the forum. Forum users are able to:

- post content
- comment on posts
- tag posts by subject
- track favorite posts (this is not visibly to other users in the individual posts, only on the user’s profile)
- post guest entries on the main blog
- comment in polls on the main blog

How is participation encouraged?
- users’ contributions are identified
(example: they can create accounts, upload a user icon, profiles show posting activity, date of joining & favorites)

- performance rewards/social recognition
(example: blog owner picks “comment of the day” displayed on main blog)

- forum is organized for easy viewing and use
(example: search function available, users can create rss feed of favorite threads)

- members offer easy ways to become part of the group and contribute
(example: many open-ended questions/discussion, “introduce yourself” post)

- members post interactive content
(example: meme, trivia, “what’s your favorite…” posts)

What content gets the most responses?
These results really surprised me, but the reason for the pattern may be that most news items, and even specific drivers or races are usually discussed in comments to main blog posts by the owner of the site. Numbers would also differ not quite so much if I had taken into account the amount of time for which posts had been up in the forum, but I could find no easy way to include both types of posts, ones that had been up for months but were still active, and those that were more numerous but very short-lived. It was obvious to me though that even if I would divide the high comment numbers by the amount of time the post had been up, they would still outnumber the type of post that stops receiving comments after a day or two. In general, recreational topics had a much higher rate of response and stayed current even after months of the original post dates, while posts relating to news, particular drivers, technology, or other discussions only gathered responses in a short time-frame.

1. trivia,meme, games
# of posts:13
# of comments: 5872

2. requests to share experiences, favorites etc.
# of posts:10
# of comments: 1074

3. news discussions
# of posts:13
# of comments: 185

4.general discussions of individual drivers, races, etc.
# of posts:5
# of comments: 90

5. F1 game discussions
# of posts:6
# of comments: 46

The results were really surprising to me, since I had expected much more technical and general discussion, the content I was used to from reading comments on the main blog. But this definitely makes sense, as followers of the blog obviously use the forum to connect to others and even form friendships rather than repeating the more information-heavy exchange from the blog. This conforms with Riding’s and Gefen’s ideas of communities staring out as places of information exchange, but often leading to further connections and friendship. It also made me remember how, when the forum was unavailable for a few months due to technical site issues, users would continually comment on the main blog with questions about the forum’s status. So for many followers, being able to have those personal connections in addition to the information exchange on the blog itself had already become an essential part of their experience of this particular site.

It also shows that microblogging may constitute a form of online communities somewhat different from traditional forums or journal sites, as the type of connections formed is the direct opposite of Java et al.’s observations of pre-existing social networks with high reciprocity. Here the mode of connection is completely based on a shared interest, with users having no previous connections, and while personal information not directly related to the shared interest (in this case F1) is exchanged and some friendships develop, much of the interaction is more recreational and less personal. This also constitutes an online environment very different from what I personally participate in, where shared interests play a role but social support and the simple daily life interactions make up a far more essential part of the community experience. Which is probably one of the reasons why I have never used this forum, despite being a daily visitor and occasional commenter on the main blog, and why, despite joining many similar communities throughout my years online, I’ve never become an active contributor in any of them.