Online participation is used to describe the interaction between users and online communities on the web. Online communities often involve members to provide content to the website or contribute in some way. Examples of such include wikis, blogs, online multiplayer games, and other types of social platforms. Online participation is currently a heavily researched field. It provides insight into fields such as web design, online marketing, crowdsourcing, and many areas of psychology. Some subcategories that fall under online participation are: commitment to online communities, coordination and interaction, and member recruitment.
Knowledge sharing infrastructures Some key examples of online knowledge sharing infrastructures include the following: Wikipedia: An online, publicly editable encyclopedia with hundreds of thousands of editors Slashdot: A popular technology-related forum, with articles and comments from readers. Slashdot subculture has become well known in Internet circles. Users accumulate a "karma score" and volunteer moderators are selected from those with high scores. Usenet: Established in 1980 as a "distributed Internet discussion system",From Usenet to CoWebs: interacting with social information spaces, Christopher Lueg, Danyel Fisher, Springer (2003), , it became the first medium for Internet communities. Volunteer moderators and votetakers contribute to the community. Etc. (the Web 2.0 is also referred to as the "writable web" for indicating that many people participate to the creation of its content)
In the past important online knowledge sharing infrastructures included: AOL: The largest of the online service providers, with chat rooms which for years were voluntarily moderated by community leaders. Rooms and most message boards are no longer moderated, however. The WELL: A pioneering online community established in 1985. The WELL's culture has been the subject of several books and articles. Many users voluntarily contribute to community building and maintenance (e.g., as conference hosts).
Motivations
Many online communities (e.g. Blogs, Chat rooms, Electronic mailing lists, Internet forums, Imageboards, Wikis), are not only knowledge-sharing resources but also fads. Studies have shown that committed members of online communities have reasons to remain active. As long as members feel the need to contribute, there is a mutual dependence between the community and the member.
Although many researchers have come up with several motivational factors behind online contribution, these theories can all be categorized under intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Intrinsic motivation refers to an action that is driven by personal interests and internal emotions in the task itself while extrinsic motivation refers to an action that is influenced by external factors, often for a certain outcome, reward or recognition. The two types of motivation contradict each other but often go hand-in-hand in cases where continual contribution is observed.
Several motivational factors lead people to continue their participation to these online communities and remain loyal. Peter Kollock researched motivations for contributing to online communities. Kollock (1999, p. 227) outlines three motivations that do not rely on altruistic behavior on the part of the contributor: anticipated reciprocity; increased recognition; and sense of efficacy. Another motivation, in which Marc Smith mentions in his 1992 thesis Voices from the WELL: The Logic of the Virtual Commons is "Communion"—a "sense of community" as it is referred to in social psychology. In a simple sentence we can say it is made by people for the people.
Anticipated reciprocity A person is motivated to contribute valuable information to the group in the expectation that one will receive useful help and information in return. Indeed, there is evidence that active participants in online communities get more responses faster to questions than unknown participants. The higher the expectation of reciprocity, the greater the chance of there being high knowledge contribution intent in an online community. Reciprocity represents a sense of fairness where individuals usually reciprocate the positive feedback they receive from others so that they can in return get more useful knowledge from others in the future.
Research has shown that self esteem needs of recognition from others lead to expectations of reciprocity. Self-esteem plays such an important role in the need for reciprocity because contributing to online communities can be an ego booster for many types of users. The more positive feedback contributors get from other members of their community, the closer they may feel to being considered an expert in the knowledge they are sharing. Because of this, contributing to online communities can lead to a sense of self-value and respect, based on the level of positive feedback reciprocated from the community In addition, there is evidence that active participants in online communities get more responses faster to questions than unknown participants.
A study on the participation in eBay's reputation system demonstrated that the expectation of reciprocal behavior from partners increases participation from self-interested eBay buyers and sellers. Standard economic theory predicts that people are not inclined to contribute voluntarily to the provision of such public goods but, rather, they tend to free ride on the contributions of others. Nevertheless, empirical results from eBay show that buyers submit ratings to more than 50% of transactions. The main takeaways from their conclusion were that they found that experienced users tend to rate more frequently, and motivation for leaving comments is not strongly motivated by pure altruism targeted towards the specific transaction partner, but from self-interest and reciprocity to "warm glow" feeling of contribution.
Some theories support altruism as being a key motivator in online participation and reciprocity. Although evidence from sociology, economics, political science, and social psychology shows that altruism is part of human nature, recent research reveals that the pure altruism model lacks predictive power in many situations. Several authors have proposed combining a "joy-of-giving" (sometimes also referred to as "warm glow") motive with altruism to create a model of impure altruism. Different from altruism, reciprocity represents a pattern of behavior where people respond to friendly or hostile actions with similar actions even if no material gains are expected.
Voluntary participation in online feedback mechanisms seems to be largely motivated by self-interest. Because their reputation is on the line, the eBay study showed that some partners using eBay's feedback mechanism had selfish motivations to rate others. For example, data showed that some eBay users exhibited reciprocity towards partners who rated them first. This caused them to only rate partners with hopes the increase the probability of eliciting a reciprocal response.
Recognition
Recognition is important to online contributors such that, in general, individuals want recognition for their contributions. Some have called this Egoboo. Kollock outlines the importance of reputation online: " in his discussion of the WELL (an early online community) lists the desire for prestige as one of the key motivations of individuals' contributions to the group. To the extent this is the concern of an individual, contributions will likely be increased to the degree that the contribution is visible to the community as a whole and to the extent there is some recognition of the person's contributions. ... the powerful effects of seemingly trivial markers of recognition (e.g. being designated as an 'official helper') has been commented on in a number of online communities..."
One of the key ingredients of encouraging a reputation is to allow contributors to be known or not to be anonymous. The following example, from study of the computer underground illustrates the power of reputation. When involved in illegal activities, computer hackers must protect their personal identities with pseudonyms. If hackers use the same nicknames repeatedly, this can help the authorities to trace them. Nevertheless, hackers are reluctant to change their pseudonyms regularly because the status and fame associated with a particular nickname would be lost.
On the importance of online identity: Profiles and reputation are clearly evident in online communities today. Amazon.com is a case in point, as all contributors are allowed to create profiles about themselves and as their contributions are measured by the community, their reputation increases. Myspace.com encourages elaborate profiles for members where they can share all kinds of information about themselves including what music they like, their heroes, etc. Displaying photos and information about individual members and their recent activities on social networking websites can promote bonds-based commitment. Because social interaction is the primary basis for building and maintaining social bonds, we can gain appreciation for other users once we interact with them. This appreciation turns into increased recognition for the contributors, which would in turn give them the incentive to contribute more.
In addition to this, many communities give incentives for contributing. For example, many forums award Members points for posting. Members can spend these points in a virtual store. eBay is an example of an online marketplace where reputation is very important because it is used to measure the trustworthiness of someone you potentially will do business with. This type of community is known as a reputation system, which is a type of collaborative filtering algorithm which attempts to collect, distribute, and aggregate ratings about all users' past behavior within an online community in an effort to strike a balance between the democratic principles of open publishing and maintaining standards of quality. These systems, like eBay's, promote the idea of trust that relates to expectations of reciprocity which can help increase the sense of reputation for each member. With eBay, you have the opportunity to rate your experience with someone and they, likewise, can rate you. This has an effect on the reputation score. The participants may therefore be encouraged to manage their online identity in order to make a good impression on the other members of the community.
Other successful online communities have reputation systems that do not exactly provide any concrete incentive. For example, Reddit is an online social content-aggregation community which serves as a "front page of the Internet" and allows its users to submit content (e.g. text, photos, links, news-articles, blog-posts, music or videos) under sometimes ambiguous usernames. It features a reputation system by which users can rate the quality of submissions and comments. The total votecount of a users' submissions are not of any practical value—however when users feel that their content is generally appreciated by the rest of the Reddit-community (or its sub-communities called "subreddits") they may be motivated to contribute more.
Sense of efficacy