No Community Can Do Everything: Why People Participate in Similar Online Communities
This addresses the problem of understanding user behavior in online platforms for researchers and platform designers, but it is incremental as it builds on prior quantitative analyses with qualitative insights.
The study investigated why people participate in overlapping online communities by analyzing interviews with active participants in related subreddits, finding that individuals join multiple communities to access diverse benefits like specific information, socialization, and broad audience attention, which no single community can provide.
Large-scale quantitative analyses have shown that individuals frequently talk to each other about similar things in different online spaces. Why do these overlapping communities exist? We provide an answer grounded in the analysis of 20 interviews with active participants in clusters of highly related subreddits. Within a broad topical area, there are a diversity of benefits an online community can confer. These include (a) specific information and discussion, (b) socialization with similar others, and (c) attention from the largest possible audience. A single community cannot meet all three needs. Our findings suggest that topical areas within an online community platform tend to become populated by groups of specialized communities with diverse sizes, topical boundaries, and rules. Compared with any single community, such systems of overlapping communities are able to provide a greater range of benefits.