Identifying Competition and Mutualism Between Online Groups
This addresses the inconsistency in prior research for researchers and designers in social computing and human-computer interaction, though it is incremental as it builds on existing ecological frameworks.
The paper tackled the problem of understanding how related online groups affect each other, such as through competition or mutualism, by introducing a time-series method based on community ecology and analyzing subreddit clusters, finding that mutualism is more common than competition.
Platforms often host multiple online groups with overlapping topics and members. How can researchers and designers understand how related groups affect each other? Inspired by population ecology, prior research in social computing and human-computer interaction has studied related groups by correlating group size with degrees of overlap in content and membership, but has produced puzzling results: overlap is associated with competition in some contexts but with mutualism in others. We suggest that this inconsistency results from aggregating intergroup relationships into an overall environmental effect that obscures the diversity of competition and mutualism among related groups. Drawing on the framework of community ecology, we introduce a time-series method for inferring competition and mutualism. We then use this framework to inform a large-scale analysis of clusters of subreddits that all have high user overlap. We find that mutualism is more common than competition.