Connections: new ways of working in the networked organization
Connections: new ways of working in the networked organization
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
Information Systems Research
The experienced "sense" of a virtual community: characteristics and processes
ACM SIGMIS Database
Etiquette online: from nice to necessary
Communications of the ACM - Human-computer etiquette
Slash(dot) and burn: distributed moderation in a large online conversation space
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
You Are Who You Talk To: Detecting Roles in Usenet Newsgroups
HICSS '06 Proceedings of the 39th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - Volume 03
Talk to me: foundations for successful individual-group interactions in online communities
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Encouraging participation in virtual communities
Communications of the ACM - Spam and the ongoing battle for the inbox
International Journal of Information Management: The Journal for Information Professionals
Technology-mediated contributions: editing behaviors among new wikipedians
Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work
Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work
Content Contribution for Revenue Sharing and Reputation in Social Media: A Dynamic Structural Model
Journal of Management Information Systems
Why different motives matter in sustaining online contributions
Electronic Commerce Research and Applications
Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on World Wide Web
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Online discussion communities have become a widely used medium for interaction, enabling conversations across a broad range of topics and contexts. Their success, however, depends on participants' willingness to invest their time and attention in the absence of formal role and control structures. Why, then, would individuals choose to return repeatedly to a particular community and engage in the various behaviors that are necessary to keep conversation within the community going? Some studies of online communities argue that individuals are driven by self-interest, while others emphasize more altruistic motivations. To get beyond these inconsistent explanations, we offer a model that brings dissimilar rationales into a single conceptual framework and shows the validity of each rationale in explaining different online behaviors. Drawing on typologies of organizational commitment, we argue that members may have psychological bonds to a particular online community based on (a) need, (b) affect, and/or (c) obligation. We develop hypotheses that explain how each form of commitment to a community affects the likelihood that a member will engage in particular behaviors (reading threads, posting replies, moderating the discussion). Our results indicate that each form of community commitment has a unique impact on each behavior, with need-based commitment predicting thread reading, affect-based commitment predicting reply posting and moderating behaviors, and obligation-based commitment predicting only moderating behavior. Researchers seeking to understand how discussion-based communities function will benefit from this more precise theorizing of how each form of member commitment relates to different kinds of online behaviors. Community managers who seek to encourage particular behaviors may use our results to target the underlying form of commitment most likely to encourage the activities they wish to promote.