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Latent Users in an Online User-Generated Content Community

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Abstract

Online communities depend on the persistent contributions of heterogeneous users with diverse motivations and ways of participating. As these online communities exist over time, it is possible that users change the way in which they contribute to the site. Through interviews with 31 long-term members of a user-generated content community who have decreased their participation on the site, we examined the meaning that these users gave to their contribution and how their new participation patterns related to their initial motivations. We complement the reader-to-leader framework (Preece and Shneiderman: AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 13–32, 2009) by propounding the concept of latent user to understand decreasing content contribution and user life-cycles in online communities. We showed that even though latent users decrease their content contribution, their participation becomes more selective and remained consistent with initial motivations to participate.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank members of the BIT Lab at Michigan State University for their feedback on this manuscript. We would also like to thank the members of Everything2 for supporting research in online community participation. This work was supported by NSF grant IIS-HCC-0812429. We would also like to thank Chandan Sarkar and Chris Hamrick for their help and feedback.

Notes

  1. 1

    http://h2g2.com/

  2. 2

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpedia

  3. 3

    All names are pseudonyms assigned to our respondents to protect their privacy

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departamento de Comunicacion, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Transversal 4 No. 42 - 00 Ed. 67 Sexto Piso, Bogota, Colombia

    Alcides Velasquez

  2. Department of Telecommunications, Information Studies, and Media, Michigan State University, 404 Wilson Rd. # 342, East Lansing, MI, 48824, USA

    Rick Wash

  3. School of Information, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 4388 North Quad 105 S. State St., Ann Arbor, MI, 48109, USA

    Cliff Lampe

  4. Department of Telecommunications, Information Studies, and Media, Michigan State University, 404 Wilson Rd. # 411, East Lansing, MI, 48824, USA

    Tor Bjornrud

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  1. Alcides Velasquez
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  2. Rick Wash
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Correspondence to Alcides Velasquez.

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Velasquez, A., Wash, R., Lampe, C. et al. Latent Users in an Online User-Generated Content Community. Comput Supported Coop Work 23, 21–50 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-013-9188-4

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