The effect of Participants' Interactions on the Sustainability of Online Communities

Social media has become an important online social venue where people can connect and communicate with each other. However, despite the increasing value of social media, researchers have noticed that the participants are not necessarily as active as it has been believed. It is also not uncommon that some online communities have not attracted enough participants and turned into “cyber ghost towns.” In this paper, we concentrate on investigating the effect of participants' interactions on the sustainability of online communities. Social network analysis is adopted as the underlying analytical method and used to estimate diverse social network measures as indicators of participants' interactions for sustainability analysis. Three types of social network indicators are examined. Moreover, Reddit, a leading social news and media aggregation website, is adopted as our data source for empirical evaluation. Some interesting and promising results are identified and discussed.