Information Systems Research
The Journal of Machine Learning Research
Talk amongst yourselves: inviting users to participate in online conversations
Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces
Knowledge sharing and yahoo answers: everyone knows something
Proceedings of the 17th international conference on World Wide Web
An empirical study of critical mass and online community survival
Proceedings of the 2010 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
Consequences of content diversity for online public spaces for local communities
Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work
A longitudinal study of follow predictors on twitter
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Specialization, homophily, and gender in a social curation site: findings from pinterest
Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing
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Although economists have long recognized the importance of a critical mass in growing a community, we know little about how it is achieved. This paper examines how initial topical focus influences communities' ability to attract a critical mass. When starting an online community, organizers need to define its initial scope. Topically narrow communities will probably attract a homogeneous group of interested in its content and compatible with each other. However, they are likely to attract fewer members than a diverse one because they offer only a subset of the topics. This paper reports an empirical analysis of longitudinal data collected from Twitter, where each new Twitter poster is considered the seed of a potential social collection. Users who focus the topics of their early tweets more narrowly ultimately attract more followers with more ties among them. Our results shed light on the development of online social networking structures.