Part I
In the paper Virtual Community Attraction: Why People Hang Out Online the authors addressed the question of what aspects of online communities (OCs) attract people to join. The study showed that besides the reason of utilitarian information exchange, people's social need of having friends and getting social support was also an important reason. This conclusion is supported by the paper Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities. In this paper, the authors pointed out that there are three main categories of users on Twitter, information source, friends, and information seeker. In this study, researchers found that people use microblogging to talk about their daily activities and to seek or share information. Users with similar intentions connect with each other. Learning how and why people use such OC tools can be helpful in improving these tools and adding new features that would motivate more users.
My own online experience agrees with these opinions, seeking for social support and friendship is definitely one of the main reasons that people participate on OCs. Like the paper, Virtual Community Attraction: Why People Hang Out Online, mentioned, social support was a popular reason for members in communities with health/wellness and professional/occupational topics. I visit online technical support communities for questions all the time. For example, when I switched my operating system from Windows to Linux for the first time, I had a lot of questions. Many of them are trivial and other people had experienced these problems as well. I was able to get the answers that I was looking for quickly. Without the help of these OCs, I would have to read a couple of books or take some courses in order to obtain the needed information.
In the paper Using Social Psychology to Motivate Contributions to Online Communities the authors hypothesized that individuals contribute when they are reminded of their uniqueness and when they are given specific and challenging goals. The messages in this study were passed to the OC users in the form of emails. The results showed that reminding participants of the benefits that either they or others receive from contributions depressed the number of ratings they made. The author concluded that overall, it is clear that calling users' attention to their uniqueness and to the benefits they provide through their action has an impact on their rating effort.
My own online experience would disagree with the opinion. The amount of email, which inform me the uniqueness of my participation or helping me setting goals of contributing on a particular OC, would not affect the activity level of mine on that OC. In fact their field study result didn't agree with their hypothesis either. The researchers found a decreased number of rating from the users after these emails.
Amazon.com has the emailing system to inform their users to rate products and sellers the users have encountered. When I purchase stuff from Amazon.com, I would rate the product if it fully meets my satisfaction or the quality is extremely poor. Basically, I won't rate products that are just so so. This is not being affected by Amazon's emails that remind me of rating. Meanwhile when I want to rate a product, I wouldn't wait until Amazon's email.
Part II
For the empirical study of this session, I observed an OC called huaren.us/computer & IT. This is an American Chinese CS related forum. Although I've never joined this site, I heard about huaren.us as one of the most popular American Chinese forums. So, motivation of participation is not a problem for this OC. Copied below is a sreenshot of this OC.
I've collected two pages of the most current discussions. Since the posts are mostly in Chinese, I've translated and summarized them as below:
Share-Resources type of threads:
- Useful open-source software I've used
- Oracle DBA two-day tutorial
- Useful Oracle tutorial videos I found.
- Yoga Mama software download.
- <Calibre - E-book Management 0.7.35> download
- A great PDF to Word/PPT/Excel/Epub/HTML converting tool: AnyBizSoft 2.5.0
- This year's top 10 star hardware.
- Link to download Macworld magazine.
- 26 tips for using iPad
- download Apple.iLife.2011.MAC.OSX-HOTiSO.
- This is how I DIYed my passport picture.
- How to decode .rar file password.
- Nvidia GTX 560 first hand information
- Use ContactDel to Save Time when Cleaning up Your Address Book!
- My experience negotiating with Apple for repairing.
- Recommend a video game.
- iOS 4.1 (iPhone and iPod touch) jail break.
- Windows phone 7 user experience.
- Looking for a part time iPhone developer.
- Postdoc position available
- AMD Fusion is in store!
- Dell's first 21.5 inch touch screen IPS is released.
- 384SP, GeForce GTX560 report.
- Try out this iPhone game: crazy coin (developed by the author)
- Try out this iPhone game: tip guide (developed by the author)
- livespace is closed?
- Dropbox's new education plan. The storage pace is increased to 18G.
- Lenovo CPP is giving 20% off.
- Why is Mac popular among young people?
- What do you guys think about these deals?
- My top 10 IT technologies that are diminishing.
- I can't open my facebook for iPhone app?
- Are there any differences regarding security between using wireless and wired Internet accessing?
- How do I connect my iTouch to the comcast wireless?
- A silly question: how do I shrink my email in to one page and print it?
- Any recommendation of SAP studying materials?
- What are the difference of iTouch 2G and 4G?
- Can I do iPhone facetime with iPhone in China?
- What does programmer analyst do? Is it harder than programmer?
- What software adds subtitle on YouTube videos?
- Which one should I buy: HP Probook T410 or T510?
- What happens if I don't turn off my computer for a long time?
- I can't open Skype face chat on my iTouch 4G, ideas?
- My hotmail account was stolen, what should I do?
- Is there a good way to google search images?
- My computer doesn't read my USB flash drive.
- How to delete SYSTEM TOOL 2001
- Which one is better, Kindle or iPad
- Does Kindle display Chinese?
- I cannot log in my MSN.
- What does this error message mean in MATLAB.
- How to take screenshots
- Start a new thread
- Respond to an existing thread
- Send private messages
- Blog
Question 2: How is participation encouraged
- The visibility is great, and the system is easy to use. People see their posts immediately and it doesn't take any effort to figure out how to start a new thread or respond to others.
- It appears like people in this OC have general trust of other members and this community.
- Questions are usually answered in a reasonable amount of time. This encourages more questions.
- People develop friendships with other members, so sometimes they start to chat.
- The administrator remove inappropriate posts as an encouragement of the rest of the people. For example Internet robot advertisements are considered inappropriate.
Question 3: Which types of content draw the most responses
- Easy help calls attract a large number of responses. Many members could answer or have their own opinions obout how things should be done.
- Resource sharing also attracts people's attention. If the resource is valuabel, there would be many “thanks” posts. Also, there would be people asking for clarification and related questions in the same thread.
The paper Motivating Content Contributions to Online Communities: Toward a More Comprehensive Theory mentioned self-efficacy, needs to achieve, goals, and intrinsically motivation. This paper credit these characteristics of a person as the motivation of him to participate on OCs. In general, this paper holds the idea that a sel-efficacy person with greater need to achieve and has more intrinsically motivation would tend to set higher goals and hence contribute to the OCs more. This paper also covered other criteria that affects a person's OC contribution, such trust, group identity, and visibility.
From observing huaren.com forum, I would disagree with some of the opinions presented in the Motivating Content Contributions to Online Communities: Toward a More Comprehensive Theory paper. The amount of participation on OCs doesn't seem to be directly related to a person's self-efficacy, intrinsically motivation, or need of achievement. Based on my observation from huaren.com, those personal characteristics are probably not related with a person's online contribution at all. Since this is a popular OCs, many people developed friendship in a similar way the Virtual Community Attraction: Why People Hang Out Online paper mentioned. The majority of posts are people's chatting, sometimes related to the topic, sometimes not. We sure wouldn't consider these members have higher self-motivation.
Not just for huaren.com, I think this is in general true. Would we consider the kind of people, who rate a lot on Amazon.com or IMDb.com, more self-efficacy or have higher goals than the rest of us? When I have a point to make, I contribute my opinion. But that's not the case for many core contributors on many OCs. They just tend to share more things with others, important or not. Let's take Twitter as an another example, the paper Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities pointed out that most of the posts on Twitter are about the users daily lives. We sure don't think sharing these information about yourself is a demonstration of self-efficacy and intrinsically motivation.
Susu: In part I of your post: I agree with you – email reminders informing me about the uniqueness of my participation or helping me to set goals of contributing on a particular OC would not motivate me to participate more on the particular OC either. As a matter of fact the emails would probably get on my nerves (I’m sure all of our in-boxes are always flooded) to the point where I may even participate less. I also do the same in terms of “rating” and was told once by a professor when we were doing professor end-of-the-semester evaluations to only rate if the quality or service was outstanding or very poor – the in-between stuff has little impact.
ReplyDeleteChris, making sure to have 2-3 open-ended questions on the Final Evaluation will help more than the rating evaluation. While I realized that at the end of semester, sometime students are too exciting with the end of the course and reluctant to spend some time for giving the evaluation, especially when the evaluation are online. However, I do get a sense that students are like to have a space for sharing their personal thought about the course and personal relationship with the instructors and their peers in class. Having some open-ended question help me on obtaining more information to improve the course than only multiple choice evaluation.I even never think that Online evaluation for course can be something add to our discussion about OC.
ReplyDeleteYour comment about amazon is interesting, "When I purchase stuff from Amazon.com, I would rate the product if it fully meets my satisfaction or the quality is extremely poor. Basically, I won't rate products that are just so so." It sounds like high quality or low quality is a motivator for sharing for you. I have often wondered why lots of reviews/ratings for products on amazon are always at the tail ends of the bell curve, perhaps more people are motivated similarly.
ReplyDeleteYou also mentioned that "The majority of posts are people's chatting, sometimes related to the topic, sometimes not. We sure wouldn't consider these members have higher self-motivation." Maybe, there was a higher self motivation, just not what most people think is a more "normal" motivation. Perhaps, the is a high motivation to share, converse and chat. It is the motivation to socialize and feel like one belongs to a group.
I think this sentiment also applies to your statement, "We sure don't think sharing these information about yourself is a demonstration of self-efficacy and intrinsically motivation." I think that sharing is intrinsically motivated. We are motivate to belong, and sharing is one way of belonging.
I am glad that we look for answers on our own on the Internet. I realized that virtually any question we have will have an answer somewhere on the Internet, it all depends on how we ask the question (information retrieval). Esp. when it comes to tech questions, I just type in my query to the google box and answers from many OCs will appear. To make sure I get sort-of the right answer, I check a few forums to find a consistent string of answers.
ReplyDeleteThis one of my online 'hangout' activity; surfing from one forum to another to learn or get answers - most of the time without contributing much. When there is a simple button to click to say thanks, I would. But if it requires registration etc, no thanks. I have one too many logins anyway.
My activity illustrates a typical lurking where I obtain information from an OC but dont contribute to it. However, I am active in several OCs (mostly unrelated to tech) and I see this like a 'cyber karma', I take from here, I contribute there.
Very nice post, and you challenged the Ling et al. paper well--in an era where we're all deluged with email, reminders of anything probably aren't going to make us positively disposed toward the community that sent them.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure I speak for everyone when I say thanks for translating the posts from Chinese! You did an outstanding job of grouping the posts into categories, though it's interesting that discussion starter questions didn't generate as much response as easy help or resource sharing posts. Based on your observations it looks like you've found a more fact-focused community, while others on the same basic topic might attract much more discussion and controversy as the more common mode of participation. It's easy to theorize about people's motivations as some of the readings did, but you did well to challenge their conclusions with your own observations here.
It's interesting that you found a lot of examples to contradict Motivating Content Contributions. I have observed similar things too, like for instance I know some senior citizens who claim they are "terrible with computers" but absolutely love being on Facebook, even if they had an extremely difficult time getting used to it at first. The draw of being able to reconnect with old friends is much more powerful for them, and it drives them to conquer low self-efficacy.
ReplyDeleteNice post, and I completely agree with you that emails aren't a very good tool to encourage people to contribute to anything. Actually they do the opposite, because oftentimes finding "useless" emails like that cluttering up your inbox will just annoy you and therefore discourage you to do anything suggested by it. Maybe it's just that mass email messages don't do much to make anyone feel unique, and users know that no large internet site would actually send out unique messages to individual users. So in order to really encourage people to participate, sites would definitely have to come up with something better. Like on Netflix I rate movies simply because they promise ratings will help them to suggest other movies I might enjoy... which has actually pretty unsuccessful so far but yet I keep rating everything I watch in the hope that it may lead to a good recommendation someday. It's really interesting how motivation like that can work sometimes, just like you mention self-efficacy may not always be a factor, but it deefinitely seems more complex and less "a leads to b" process than some of the readings made it sound like.
ReplyDeleteI feel the same way about email motivation. When I receive emails asking me to participate in something (like rating products on amazon), the only reason they get me to actually participate is if I intended to participate, but forgot about it (and the email acted as a reminder). If I didn't rate it of my own volition the first time around, asking me to vote through email isn't likely to change my mind. Thus for me, my opinion about the study was the same: It didn't really seem like an accurate way to gauge participation.
ReplyDeleteI've also noticed that people typically only rate things if they love it or hate it -- there is no in-between. In fact, it is because of this that I value the opinions of the people who step up and post an "average" opinion. To me, this signifies that the person cares enough to post the truth and write about things that I (or if not I, the average person) would care about. Opinions not on one end of the extreme are also less likely to be written by a company as positive or negative propaganda.
I liked how you wrote the layout for your OC discussion. It was clean, easy to read, and told me everything I'd want to know about the OC in a nutshell.