Article

Think different: increasing online community participation using uniqueness and group dissimilarity

Authors:

Pamela J. Ludford,

Dan Frankowski,

Loren TerveenAuthors Info & Claims

CHI '04: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Pages 631 - 638

https://doi.org/10.1145/985692.985772

Published: 25 April 2004 Publication History

Abstract

Online communities can help people form productive relationships. Unfortunately, this potential is not always fulfilled: many communities fail, and designers don't have a solid understanding of why. We know community activity begets activity. The trick, however, is to inspire participation in the first place. Social theories suggest methods to spark positive community participation. We carried out a field experiment that tested two such theories. We formed discussion communities around an existing movie recommendation web site, manipulating two factors: (1) similarity-we controlled how similar group members' movie ratings were; and (2) uniqueness-we told members how their movie ratings (with respect to a discussion topic) were unique within the group. Both factors positively influenced participation. The results offer a practical success story in applying social science theory to the design of online communities.

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Index Terms

Think different: increasing online community participation using uniqueness and group dissimilarity
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Collaborative and social computing
    1. Collaborative and social computing theory, concepts and paradigms
      1. Computer supported cooperative work
2. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Computing and business
      1. Computer supported cooperative work

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cover image ACM Conferences

CHI '04: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 2004

742 pages

ISBN:1581137028

DOI:10.1145/985692

Conference Chairs:
Elizabeth Dykstra-Erickson
Kinoma
,
Manfred Tscheligi
CURE, Austria

Copyright © 2004 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: 25 April 2004

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CHI04: CHI 2004 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 24 - 29, 2004

Vienna, Austria

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

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3544548.3581015
Ko EChoi EJang JKim J(2022)Capturing Diverse and Precise Reactions to a Comment with User-Generated LabelsProceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202210.1145/3485447.3512243(1731-1740)Online publication date: 25-Apr-2022
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Pan SLi DGu HLu TLuo XGu N(2022)Accurate and Explainable Recommendation via Review RationalizationProceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202210.1145/3485447.3512029(3092-3101)Online publication date: 25-Apr-2022
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