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What makes users rate (share, tag, edit...)?: predicting patterns of participation in online communities

Published: 11 February 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Administrators of online communities face the crucial issue of understanding and developing their user communities. Will new users become committed members? What types of roles are particular individuals most likely to take on? We report on a study that investigates these questions. We administered a survey (based on standard psychological instruments) to nearly 4000 new users of the MovieLens film recommendation community from October 2009 to March 2010 and logged their usage history on MovieLens. We found that general volunteer motivations, pro-social behavioral history, and community-specific motivations predicted both the amount of use and specific types of activities users engaged in after joining the community. These findings have implications for the design and management of online communities.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CSCW '12: Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work
February 2012
1460 pages
ISBN:9781450310864
DOI:10.1145/2145204
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: 11 February 2012

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Author Tags

  1. motivation
  2. online communities
  3. participation
  4. surveys
  5. volunteers

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CSCW '12
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CSCW '12: Computer Supported Cooperative Work
February 11 - 15, 2012
Washington, Seattle, USA

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CSCW '12 Paper Acceptance Rate 164 of 415 submissions, 40%;
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