Small worlds: the dynamics of networks between order and randomness
Small worlds: the dynamics of networks between order and randomness
The social life of small graphical chat spaces
Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Online Communities: Designing Usability and Supporting Socialbilty
Online Communities: Designing Usability and Supporting Socialbilty
Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier
Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI)
Friends, foes, and fringe: norms and structure in political discussion networks
dg.o '06 Proceedings of the 2006 international conference on Digital government research
Identifying subcommunities using cohesive subgroups in social hypertext
Proceedings of the eighteenth conference on Hypertext and hypermedia
The 'WeTube' in YouTube – creating an online community through video sharing
International Journal of Web Based Communities
Eliciting a sense of virtual community among knowledge contributors
ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems (TMIS)
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YouTube is a video sharing repository, enabling users to post, share and discuss videos. Its stated mission is to create "an online video community"; however, YouTube is not commonly thought of as a community. Our aim in this study is to answer the question whether users have a "sense of community" towards YouTube, and if such feelings exist are they reflected in the explicit ties among members. To accomplish this, YouTube was examined using two different and complementing methods. Using Grounded Theory, we performed a detailed analysis of more than 30 videos and their corresponding textual comments, which discussed two topics: users' feelings about the YouTube community, and users' accounts of interaction within the community. We then performed a structural analysis on the ties these users display on their YouTube channels. This analysis showed that although users perceive YouTube to be a cohesive community, the explicit relationships in the friendship and subscription network are almost random. We suggest that users' sense of community is not necessarily related to the structure of the YouTube network, and may result from subjective affinity towards other users. This study also points out the importance of triangulating qualitative and quantitative data to get a deeper understanding of the nature of an online community.