User Roles and Contribution Patterns in Online Communities: A Managerial Perspective

Abstract

Online communities are one of the powerful digital sources for businesses to analyze online users' behavioral data. In this sense, it is important for practitioners to know how to motivate community members, to keep them amused and regularly engaged in the community. But, practitioners should be aware that different user types exist in online communities, and they should understand these members' diverse needs to manage these communities successfully and to give a better service to their members. Concordantly, this study focuses on the problem of the existence of different user types in online communities and development of different strategies for their motivation, involvement, and communication. Unlike previous studies, this study considers theories across managerial and social domains, conducts social network analysis, and considers users' contribution patterns in an online community to identify particular user types in an online community. The study also presents motivational strategies for practitioners to keep each type of users frequently amused in online communities.

Users roles identification on online crowdsourced Q&A platforms and encyclopedias: a survey

“…The modern platforms, including Reddit and Stack Exchange, provide the feature of users voting for answers to enable the good quality content to be brought to the top and make it more visible, while the lower quality and incorrect content will lose the visibility. 2 These platforms also implement some form of point-scoring for the users based on their activity and contributions, such as the points-system on Stack Exchange and karma on Reddit.…”

“…İnci Sözlük platform More active users in terms of contributing content and motivating others to do so tend to have more information flowing through them. Akar and Mardikyan [2] analyzed İnci Sözlük, i.e., a Turkish online discussion forum, using betweenness centrality [30] that measures the importance of a node based on how often that particular node lies on the shortest path between any two nodes in a network. The authors highlighted the greater betweenness centrality of Content Generators and Socializers compared to the Passive Members and Visitors.…”

“…K-Means clustering was then used to identify the emergent user roles based on the user profiles constructed using the number and type of edits made by the users. They obtained seven user roles: (1) All-Round Contributors, (2) Copy-Editors, (3) Content Shapers, (4) Quick-and-Dirty Editors, (5) Layout Shapers, (6) Vandals, and ( 7) Watchdogs, which were observed to be stable roles over time through comparison of clusters obtained on Wikipedia data belonging to different time periods. By applying the ANOVA model [26], Arazy et al [7] observed that in the beginning phase of a particular article, All-Round Contributors, and Content and Layout Shapers constitute a high proportion of roles, however, it declines as the article matures, and the proportion of Quickand-Dirty Editors increases.…”

The Relationship Between Persuasion Cues and Idea Adoption in Virtual Crowdsourcing Communities

“…This typically takes the form of bonus points, rewards, or recognition badges awarded by community management in the user's personal profile (Qin & Liang, 2019). Community management typically rewards users for their active contribution in answering and asking questions, writing posts, or sharing opinions in the community; therefore, the number of points a user receives may indicate, to some degree, the community's appreciation and interest in the user's contributions (Akar & Mardikyan, 2018;Akman et al, 2019). As VCCs accumulate a wealth of user-generated ideas, the evaluation of ideas and supporting elements consumes a large amount of intellectual resources and effort.…”

Designing for Every Student: Practical Advice for Instructional Designers on Applying Social Justice in Learning Design

“…Similarly, Füller et al (2014) identified six user types that they called socializers, idea generators, masters, efficient contributors, and passive idea generators. More recently, Akar and Mardikyan (2018) found that users could be either visitors, socializers, content generators, or passive members.…”