Behavior Toward Newcomers and Contributions to Online Communities

Abstract

In this paper, we study whether and how behavior toward newcomers impacts their socialization outcomes in terms of retention and quality of contributions in online communities. By exploiting a natural experiment on a large deal-sharing platform, we find that an intervention that proactively reminds other community members to be more considerate of newcomers causes newcomer deals to receive 54% more comments with a more positive sentiment. The newcomers are 10% more likely to post another deal, suggesting an increase in retention. However, we do not observe any effect of the intervention on the quality of subsequent contributions. Our evidence suggests that the intervention merely caused a temporary shock to newcomers' first contributions but did not improve their learning or motivate greater efforts. We draw implications on the design of socialization processes to help communities improve the retention and performance of newcomers.

Keywords: Online communities, newcomers, socialization, natural experiment