Session 3: Motivation for Participation online communities

This week, I read some papers on the reasons why people participate in online communities. Java et al. explain 3 reasons why people join microblogs such as Twitter. These reasons are in order to 1) talk about their daily experiences 2) share information, interests or opinions 3) seek information. While Java et al. said that the most common reason for joining Twitter is to talk about daily routine, Tedjamulia et al. said the most common type of participant of online communities is a lurker who consumes information but rarely contributes. I think the difference may come from the different types of online communities or individuals. Based on my experience, I agree more with Tedjamulia because I joined Twitter not to tweet my daily life but to follow other users as an information seeker.

Tedjamulia et al. explain that people have both the intrinsic motivation of being interested in contributing and increasing the value of community by creating and sharing information and the extrinsic motivation of getting rewards offered by communities such as gifts and social recognition. The quote about extrinsic motivation, “Extrinsic rewards can increase a person's intrinsic motivation under some conditions” (Tedjamulia et al.), reminds me of my past experience of online game websites. I played online games by incorporating or competing with other users and then leveled up when I won the game. After winning many online battles, the game company gave gifts to users such as cyber money or items usable in game battles. Therefore, I kept participating in the online game to win and receive these kinds of rewards. Ridings and Gefen also talk about the intrinsic motivation of people wanting to have fun and contributing to communities. In addition to the above authors, Ling et al. explain intrinsic motivation by giving an example of a MovieLens member who rates movies to have fun as well as to help other people.

Schrock explains 3 psychological factors that lead to people having motivation for online community participation. The first factor is extroversion, which means the desire for socialization with others; “Extroverts may be more likely to be interested in activities that involve interacting and being around others, such as social network sites, writing on a blog, and sharing digital pictures”. Next is self disclosure which means revealing oneself to others. The last psychological factor is self–efficacy which can be defined as the belief that one is capable of performing in online communities to attain one’s goals such as getting information or other reasons.

In order to find out more specifically about the motivation for online community participation, I observed allkpop.com which provides its own content on Korean Music and a forum where you can discuss and share information on k-pop.

--What modes of participation are there?

Create user profiles or signatures or avatars.

Post topics and leave comments.

Add other members as friends who are noticeable and searchable.

Send an email or private message to another member.

Create and vote in polls.

Subscribe the site contents to RSS feeds and share contents via Facebook or Twitter.

--How is participation encouraged?

The number of posts appears below the user’s profile or avatar which shows how many contributions the user made to the forum.

“Recently Added Topics” and “Active content in the last 24 hours” are located on the main menu of the forum, so users can easily participate in new posts.

“Today's Top 20 Posters” and “Overall top posters” list members and sort them by number of posts in descending order.

A reputation System allows users to rate other members based on the quality of their posts or comments. 

The forum has markers to indicate the type of threads that are already read or not read by users, so users can see if there are new posts since their last visit.

--Which types of content draw the most responses?

General discussions of Kpop - 42 posts, 3204 responses

Discussions of individual artists - 20 posts, 1150 responses

Korean Movies and TV programs discussions - 10 posts, 335 responses

Celebrity photos - 9 posts, 302 responses

Celebrity gossip -25 posts, 842 responses

Through my observation, I was surprised that allkpop.com, which is such a large online community with about 200,000 joined members, is so easy to get information from. Allkpop also challenges the statement “when communities become too large and chaotic, members will find the amount of information overwhelming and harder to search” (Tedjamulia et al.). I think this is because the designer of allkpop.com created a user-friendly website with useful functions such as “Recently Added Topics” and advanced searches so people can search for information by users, dates of topic created, and etc. I was also surprised that allkpop users took care about reputation power and how many friends they have. They sent invitations by viewing other members’ profiles. In addition, many users revealed their emotions frankly and even talked about their problems in online communities, which reminds me of Ridings and Gefen’s statement that people want to get emotional support from other users by revealing themselves; “Friendships in virtual communities can provide additional benefits beyond that of information exchange and social support … Friendship in this context is about the value of being together, unlike social support that deals with seeking emotional help or helping others”.

In conclusion, the motivation for online community participation is a mixture of people wanting to talk about daily activities, find and share information, and get extrinsic rewards and emotional support.

References

Ridings, Catherine and David Gefen (2004). Virtual Community Attraction: Why People Hang Out Online. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 10(1).

Ling, K., G. Beenen, P. Ludford, X. Wang, K. Chang, X. Li, D. Cosley, D. Frankowski, L. Terveen, A.M. Rashid, P. Resnick and R. Kraut (2005). Using Social Psychology to Motivate Contributions to Online Communities. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 10(4), article 10.

Tedjamulia, Steven J.J., David R. Olsen, Douglas L. Dean, Conan C. Albrecht (2005). Motivating Content Contributions to Online Communities: Toward a More Comprehensive Theory. Proceedings of the 38th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

Schrock, Andrew (2009). Examining Social Media Usage: Technology Clusters and Social Network Site Membership. First Monday 14(1).

Java, Akshay, Xiaodan Song, Tim Finin and Belle Tseng (2007). Why We Twitter: Understanding the Microblogging Effect in User Intentions and Communities. Joint 9th WEBKDD and 1st SNA-KDD Workshop, 12 August 2007, San Jose, California.