skip to main content
10.1145/985692.985772acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PageschiConference Proceedingsconference-collections
Article

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

Published:25 April 2004Publication 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.

References

  1. Butler, B. Membership Size, Communication Activity, and Sustainability: A Resource-Based Model of Online Social Structures. Information Systems Research 12, 4 (2001), 346--362. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  2. Cosley, D., Lam, S.K., Albert, I., Konstan, J., & Riedl, J. Is Seeing Believing? How Recommender Systems Influence Users' Opinions. Proc. CHI 2003, 585--592. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  3. Cosley, D., Ludford, P., & Terveen, L. Studying the Effect of Similarity in Online Task-Focused Interactions. Proc. GROUP 2003, 321--329. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  4. Fehr, E. & Schmidt, K. A Theory of Fairness, Competition and Cooperation. Quarterly Journal of Economics 114 (1999), 817--868.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  5. Fischer, C. To Dwell Among Friends: Personal Networks in Town and City. University of Chicago Press, 1982.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  6. Fischer, C., et al. Networks and Places: Social Relations in the Urban Setting. New York: Free Press, 1977.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  7. Fishkin, J.S. The Voice of the People. Yale University Press, 1997.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  8. Friedman, E. & Resnick, P. The Social Cost of Cheap Pseudonyms. Journal of Economics and Management Strategy 10, 2 (2001), 173--199.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  9. Girgensohn, A., & Lee, A. Making Web Sites Be Places for Social Interaction. Proc. CSCW 2002, 136--145. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  10. Guerin, B. Language use as social strategy: A review and an analytic framework for the social sciences. Review of General Psychology 7, 3 (2003), 251--298.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  11. Hemetsberger, A., & Pieters, R. Fostering cooperation on the Internet: social exchange processes in innovative virtual consumer communities. Proc. Association for Consumer Research (2001).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  12. Ingham, A.G., Levinger, G., Graves, J., & Peckham, V. The Ringelmann effect: Studies of group size and group performance. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 10, 4 (1974), 371--384.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  13. Jackson, R.M. Social Structure and Process in Friendship Choice. In Fischer et al.: Networks and Places. New York: Free Press, 1977, 59--78.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  14. Karau, S.J., & Williams, K.D. Social loafing: A meta-analytic review and theoretical integration. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology 65, 4 (1993), 681--706.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  15. Kim, A.J. Community Building on the Web. Peachpit Press, Berkeley, CA, 2000.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  16. Kollock, P. Design Principles for Online Communities. Proc. Harvard Conf. on the Internet and Society (1996). Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  17. Kraut, R.E. Applying Social Psychological Theory to the Problems of Group Work. In J. Carroll (ed): HCI Models, Theories, and Frameworks. 2003, 325--356.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  18. Millen, D.R., & Patterson, J.F. Stimulating Social Engagement in a Community Network. Proc CSCW 2002, 306--313. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  19. Oliver, P.E., & Marwell, G. The Paradox of Group Size in Collective Action: A Theory of the Critical Mass. II. American Sociological Review 53, 1 (1998), 108.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  20. Parks, M., & Floyd, K. Making Friends in Cyberspace. Journal of Communication 46, 1 (1996), 80--97.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  21. Preece, J. Empathic communities: reaching out across the Web. Interactions 5, 2 (1998), 32--43. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  22. Preece, J. Online Communities: Designing Usability, Supporting Sociability. John Wiley and Sons, Ltd., England, 2000. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  23. Putnam, R. Bowling Alone. Simon & Schuster, 2000.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  24. Resnick, P., & Varian, H.R., guest editors, CACM, Special issue on Recommender Systems 40, 3 (1997). Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  25. Rabin, M. Incorporating Fairness into Game Theory and Economics. American Economic Review 83 (1993), 1281--1302.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  26. Resnick, P. Beyond Bowling Together: SocioTechnical Capital <http://www.si.umich.edu/~presnick/papers/stk/index.html>. In J. Carroll (ed): HCI in the New Millenium. Addison-Wesley, 2002, 247--272. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  27. Sarwar, B.M., Karypis, G., Konstan, J.A., & Riedl, J. Item-based collaborative filtering recommendation algorithms. Proc. WWW 2001, 285--295. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  28. Sproull, L., & Kiesler, S. Transforming Public Volunteer Work. Proc. Intl. Conf. on the Economic and Social Implications of Information Technology (2003).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  29. Van Alstyne, M. & Brynjolfsson, E. Electronic Communities: Global Village or Cyberbalkans? Proc. 17th International Conf. on Information Systems (1996).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  30. Verbrugge, L.M. The Structure of Adult Friendship Choices, Social Forces 56, 2 (1977).Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref

Index Terms

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

      Recommendations

      Comments

      Login options

      Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

      Sign in
      • Published in

        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

        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]

        Publisher

        Association for Computing Machinery

        New York, NY, United States

        Publication History

        • Published: 25 April 2004

        Permissions

        Request permissions about this article.

        Request Permissions

        Check for updates

        Qualifiers

        • Article

        Acceptance Rates

        Overall Acceptance Rate6,199of26,314submissions,24%

        Upcoming Conference

        CHI '24
        CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
        May 11 - 16, 2024
        Honolulu , HI , USA

      PDF Format

      View or Download as a PDF file.

      PDF

      eReader

      View online with eReader.

      eReader