Selecting an effective niche: an ecological view of the success of online communities

摘要: Online communities serve various important functions, but many fail to thrive. Research on community success has traditionally focused internal factors. In contrast, we take an ecological view understand how the of a is influenced by other communities. We measured community's relationship with - its "niche" through four dimensions: topic overlap, shared members, content linking, and offline organizational affiliation. used mixed-method approach, combining quantitative analysis 9495 online enterprise interviews members. Our results show that too little or much overlap in causes activity suffer. also this main result moderated predictable ways whether shares members with, links in, affiliation These findings provide new insight success, guiding designers effectively position their relation others.