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Computer Science > Human-Computer Interaction

arXiv:1605.08841 (cs)
[Submitted on 28 May 2016]

Title:Surviving an "Eternal September" - How an Online Community Managed a Surge of Newcomers

Authors:Charles Kiene, Andrés Monroy-Hernández, Benjamin Mako Hill
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Abstract:We present a qualitative analysis of interviews with participants in the NoSleep community within Reddit where millions of fans and writers of horror fiction congregate. We explore how the community handled a massive, sudden, and sustained increase in new members. Although existing theory and stories like Usenet's infamous "Eternal September" suggest that large influxes of newcomers can hurt online communities, our interviews suggest that NoSleep survived without major incident. We propose that three features of NoSleep allowed it to manage the rapid influx of newcomers gracefully: (1) an active and well-coordinated group of administrators, (2) a shared sense of community which facilitated community moderation, and (3) technological systems that mitigated norm violations. We also point to several important trade-offs and limitations.
Comments: In Proceedings of the 34th Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2016). ACM, New York, NY, USA
Subjects: Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC); Computers and Society (cs.CY); Social and Information Networks (cs.SI)
Cite as: arXiv:1605.08841 [cs.HC]
  (or arXiv:1605.08841v1 [cs.HC] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1605.08841
Related DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858356

Submission history

From: Andres Monroy-Hernandez [view email]
[v1] Sat, 28 May 2016 03:58:52 UTC (62 KB)
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