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Platforms often host multiple online groups with overlapping topics and members. How can researchers and designers understand how related groups affect each other? Inspired by population ecology, prior research in social computing and human-computer interaction has studied related groups by correlating group size with degrees of overlap in content and membership, but has produced puzzling results: overlap is associated with competition in some contexts but with mutual-ism in others. We suggest that this inconsistency results from aggregating intergroup relationships into an overall environmental effect that obscures the diversity of competition and mutualism among related groups. Drawing on the framework of community ecology, we introduce a time-series method for inferring competition and mutualism. We then use this frame-work to inform a large-scale analysis of clusters of subreddits that all have high user overlap. We find that mutualism is more common than competition.
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The Social Overload Thesis Revisited: Exploring the Mechanisms of Size-Dependent Participation Behavior in Voluntary Communities
Sociological and urban studies have consistently reported that human behavior exhibits a discernible correlation with population size, following a power-law function. Individuals residing in larger communities exhibit significantly higher levels of activity in contrast to their counterparts in smaller communities. However, the underlying processes responsible for such behavioral patterns remain unclear. The authors propose that organizational crowding tends to generate competitive pressure that results in social overload for individuals, who in turn divide time and energy among many groups while reducing the time spent in each. The social overload thesis predicts integration, rather than mutual exclusion of groups, when experiencing competition. A large-scale event participation dataset from 11 major U.S. technology clusters over a period of 10 years is used to test these hypotheses. The results support the mediating role of competition in the relationship between population size and participation intensity. The authors demonstrate the impact of competition on network structure.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2048670
- PAR ID:
- 10552691
- Publisher / Repository:
- Sage Journals
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World
- Volume:
- 9
- ISSN:
- 2378-0231
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1177/23780231231209140
