Online Communities and Interaction Spaces

“Online community” gets used for everything from a five-person Discord to the whole of Reddit. While framing my dissertation (Pathways into Cybercrime), I needed to be more precise. If you want to measure how a community shapes behaviour, you need to know what you mean by a community.

A working definition

The widely used definition: an online interaction space, supported by computer systems, where members interact socially around a shared interest or goal while following a set of policies. Taking those properties one at a time:

• Shared purpose or interest: the reason to be there.
• Interaction: often intense, with real emotional ties.
• Norms and conventions: shared language, etiquette, protocols. Early studies of IRC found conventions were what stopped meaning getting lost in text.
• Shared resources and mutual support: tutorials, tools, answers.
• A platform that mediates all of it.

Members are not participants

A finding I keep coming back to: most people who “join” a community never interact. Lurkers often make up the vast majority of members, and signing up is not the same as taking part. Research on online interaction spaces separates community membership (you joined) from participation in the interaction space (you’ve built relationships or created content). For data-driven research this is crucial: posting data describes the vocal few, not the community as a whole.

Big platforms complicate it further. Reddit as a whole has no shared purpose beyond “everything”. The real communities are the subreddits, and sometimes the sub-communities inside them.

Ways to classify communities

• By attributes: purpose, size, intensity of interaction, conventions.
• By relationship to physical communities: some mirror a real place or group; others exist only online.
• By boundedness: how clearly you can say who’s in and who’s out.
• Taxonomies for comparison: one study proposed six axes (purpose, economy, members, platform, content and interaction) and a tool for crowdsourcing ratings, so Facebook, Wikipedia, Reddit and an online game could be compared on the same chart.

What drives activity

Hogg and Szabo (2008) modelled a voting-and-linking community and found long-tailed distributions everywhere: a few users do most of the activity, and a few items get most of the attention. Visibility in the interface and recency drove what people engaged with, and popularity compounded (rich get richer). The practical upshot was a model that could spot users likely to become highly active from their early history.

Why belonging matters for the cybercrime question

Communities offer niche, safe spaces to explore shared interests, and social validation: status earned through peer feedback, which is particularly powerful for adolescents. Research on insular online communities describes how groups develop in-jokes and exclusivity that make membership feel like a VIP pass. That’s the mechanism behind the worry in my dissertation: if status comes from what you can break, a community can nudge people further than they meant to go. More in Hacking Forums as Learning Communities.

Lessons I took into product work

Long tails, lurkers and status loops show up in every product with users, internal developer platforms included. Design for the quiet majority, not just the vocal few who post. Measure participation, not sign-ups.

Sources

• Hogg, T. and Szabo, G. (2008). Diversity of online community activities. Proceedings of ACM Hypertext.
• More than communities: organising online interaction spaces (doctoral dissertation), drawing on Escobar et al. (2014) for the definition above.
• A classification schema for online communities (conference paper).
• A dive into online community properties: a taxonomy and the Community Scout tool (conference paper).
• Communal Quirks and Circlejerks: A Taxonomy of Processes Contributing to Insularity in Online Communities (2020). ICWSM.