Building and Sustaining Community Online

Abstract

Many people participate in online communities. They ask questions in a Facebook group, learn makeup tips on TikTok, or share parenting advice on Reddit. People can connect to people across the globe or help mobilize and organize neighborhoods. However, many communities fail to sustain themselves over time. Creators, participants, and even the platforms have a vested interest in helping communities meet their individualized goals. This work aims to expand our understanding of the participants’ behaviors, which participants do various types of “work”, and how communities evolve over time. I take a historical, mixed-methods approach to look at the life of online communities on Reddit, a popular platform that hosts many online communities. This approach enables me to look at longer time-scales of the evolution of these communities, and explore how behaviors differ between subreddits and across time. I first explore different behaviors across eight subreddits, which I use to ground later analyses within the observed data. I then explore some of these behaviors more across a broader sample, and who does some of the behaviors. Lastly, I use some of the behaviors in a new context to compare subreddits used during a political campaign. My findings make theoretical and empirical contributions to research on online communities in human-computer interaction. I describe behaviors that occurred across a sample of 8 subreddits. These behaviors serve as the basis for a theoretical framework which is useful for comparing and understanding the evolution of online communities. My empirical findings suggest that behaviors and community characteristics differentially predict commonly used success metrics. I find that both creators and participants perform this community-building work. This work contributes to scholarship around behaviors and community characteristics that impact different measures of success. This work expands our understanding of some community-building behaviors and how these may be employed by creators, moderators, and everyday participants to shape or maintain their community.