Article

Talk to me: foundations for successful individual-group interactions in online communities

Authors:

Jaime Arguello,

Brian S. Butler,

Elisabeth Joyce,

Kimberly S. Ling,

Xiaoqing WangAuthors Info & Claims

CHI '06: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Pages 959 - 968

https://doi.org/10.1145/1124772.1124916

Published: 22 April 2006 Publication History

Abstract

People come to online communities seeking information, encouragement, and conversation. When a community responds, participants benefit and become more committed. Yet interactions often fail. In a longitudinal sample of 6,172 messages from 8 Usenet newsgroups, 27% of posts received no response. The information context, posters' prior engagement in the community, and the content of their posts all influenced the likelihood that they received a reply, and, as a result, their willingness to continue active participation. Posters were less likely to get a reply if they were newcomers. Posting ontopic, introducing oneself via autobiographical testimonials, asking questions, using less complex language and other features of the messages, increased replies. Results suggest ways that developers might increase the ability of online communities to support successful individual-group interactions.

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Index Terms

Talk to me: foundations for successful individual-group interactions in online communities
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Collaborative and social computing

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cover image ACM Conferences

CHI '06: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 2006

1353 pages

ISBN:1595933727

DOI:10.1145/1124772

Editors:
Rebecca Grinter
Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
,
Thomas Rodden
University of Nottingham, UK
,
Paul Aoki
Intel, USA
,
Ed Cutrell
Microsoft, USA
,
Robin Jeffries
Google, USA
,
Gary Olson
University of Michigan, USA

Copyright © 2006 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 22 April 2006

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CHI06: CHI 2006 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 22 - 27, 2006

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Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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