Building successful online communities
by Robert E. Kraut · first published 2012
9mentions
7recommended by
7HN commenters
2012–2026first – last mentioned
100% recommend
Why HN recommends it
Evidence-based summary of research on encouraging contribution, commitment, and healthy norms in online communities; recommended to people designing or running community sites who want findings backed by studies.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
Uses insights from social science, psychology, and economics to offer advice on planning and managing an online community.
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For what it's worth, anyone who liked this post would probably really like this book: http://www.amazon.com/Building-Successful-Online-Communities...
on “Intro to Social Hacking: How we lowered our cancellation rate by 90%” ↗…polite comments on every single photo posted to Flickr for hours every day, for the first N months or years, in order to set the tone for all the users that would follow her. There's a new textbook out, Building Successful Online Communities, which seems to have done a great job in surveying the state of the art in online community building: http://successfulonlinecommunities.com/ Because it's really a sociological problem, the correct answer…
on “Ask HN: Is a truly 100% community built site possible?” ↗A nice book is Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design (The MIT Press) (English Edition) ASIN: B007RPF10U https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/building-successful-online-co... Once I found its content in a series of PDFs in the authors…
on “Ask HN: How do you create a successful community from zero?” ↗Here is a very good book that summarizes a lot of the scientific research about creating and fostering online communities. Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design Here are the chapters: * Encouraging Contribution to Online Communities * Encouraging Commitment to Online Communities * Regulating Behavior in Online Communities…
on “Ask HN: How are online communities established?” ↗"The Art of Community" by Jono Bacon "Building Successful Online Communities", by Kraut & Resnik
on “Ask HN: What's the best book or advice on building online community?” ↗"Social Architecture" by Hintjens. "Digital Habitats" by Wenger et al. I second "Building Successful Online Communities."
on “Ask HN: What's the best book or advice on building online community?” ↗…opportunity and equality of outcome. Just because everyone is treated equally doesn’t mean that the end result isn’t biased. Truly: there is no such thing as apolitical technology. I recommend MIT books Building Successful Online Communities. Also I’m reading the updated version of “Code” which has a bit about online communities I quote a lot: Lessig (1999) identifies four elements that regulate behavior online: Laws, norms, markets, and…
on “Supreme Court allows Reddit mods to anonymously defend Section 230” ↗This is a really great question, and well beyond my areas of expertise. What I can point you to is this excellent book by my colleague Bob Kraut and several of his colleagues, entitled Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design. It summarizes a lot of empirical research into design claims, about how to socialize newcomers, increasing contributions, quality of contributions, and more. https://direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/2912/Building-Success...…
on “Research in psychology: are we learning anything?” ↗…is usually true for the most horrible takes). I think it's cheaper and easier to do than you make out. If they can draw 5 responses per comment, they only need 7 comments total (round up). The book "Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design" by MIT press for where my head is at. How did you stumble on this comment thread in a nuked (for whatever reason) post anyway?
on “US inequality is getting worse in ways you might not expect” ↗