Many benefits of online communities---such as obtaining new information, opportunities, and social connections---increase with size. Thus, a ``successful'' online community often evokes an image of hundreds of thousands of users, and practitioners and researchers alike have sought to devise methods to achieve growth and thereby, success. On the other hand, small online communities exist in droves and many persist in their smallness over time. Turning to the highly popular discussion website Reddit, which is made up of hundreds of thousands of communities, we conducted a qualitative interview study examining how and why people participate in these persistently small communities, in order to understand why these communities exist when popular approaches would assume them to be failures. Drawing from twenty interviews, this paper makes several contributions: we describe how small communities provide unique informational and interactional spaces for participants, who are drawn by the hyperspecific aspects of the community; we find that small communities do not promote strong dyadic interpersonal relationships but rather promote group-based identity; and we highlight how participation in small communities is part of a broader, ongoing strategy to curate participants' online experience. We argue that online communities can be seen as nested niches: parts of an embedded, complex, symbiotic socio-informational ecosystem. We suggest ways that social computing research could benefit from more deliberate considerations of interdependence between diverse scales of online community sizes.
翻译:在线社区的许多好处 — — 比如获得新的信息、机会和社会联系 — — 许多在线社区的好处 — — 比如获得新的信息、机会和社会联系 — — 随规模的增加而增长。 因此,一个“成功”的在线社区常常给数十万用户带来一个图像,而实践者和研究人员都试图设计实现增长和成功的方法。另一方面,小型在线社区存在动力,许多人在时间上长期保持其小小点。转向由数十万个社区组成的广受欢迎的讨论网站Redddit,我们进行了一次定性的访谈研究,研究人们如何和为什么参与这些持续存在的小型社区,以便了解为什么这些社区存在,而流行的方法会认为它们是失败的。我们从20个访谈中了解到了为什么这些社区存在。 这份文件做出了一些贡献:我们描述了小社区如何为参与者提供独特的信息和互动空间,而参与者则从社区的特殊性方面被吸引;我们发现小社区并不促进强大的双人关系,而是促进群体身份;我们强调,参与小型社区如何成为更广泛、持续的战略的一部分,以弥补参与者的在线经验。我们指出,在线社区可以被视为一个复杂的社会网络空间的深层次,我们从网络空间中推算出一个复杂的社会空间的考虑。