Online Community

= there is an important difference between Social Network Sites and real online communities

Characteristics

Research

Andrea Peña-Calvin et al. :

"Online communities are increasingly permeating numerous aspects of our daily lives, from asking for support in a specialized forum to mediating our daily work practices [36]. The nature and overall purpose change from community to community, and there have been academic efforts to study and characterize them systematically and empirically [37]. In this sense, several typologies have been proposed to classify online communities.

Two influential works have contributed significantly to their classification and characterization. Porter introduced a system for categorizing online communities based on whether they are sponsored by an organization or initiated by an individual, as well as the type of relationship among community members, such as social, professional, or commercial connections. Armstrong and Hagel classified online communities into four categories: communities of interest, based on shared interests, communities of relationship, based on social relations, communities of transaction, based on economic exchange, and communities of fantasy, based on environments/personalities developed in virtual worlds.

Beyond general schemes to classify online communities, scholars have also focused on particular types of online communities and studied their characteristics. This is the case of Saldivar et al. who studied innovation communities, using exploratory data analysis, visualization techniques, and clustering tools to identify patterns that characterize these communities. Similarly, it was proposed an approach that combines quantitative and qualitative methods (surveys, descriptive statistics, social network analysis, text mining) to explore the organizational structure, shared goals, vocabulary sharing, and user interactions of an online music-sharing community.

Along this line, Soliman et al. [42] worked on characterizing political communities on Reddit after analyzing through content analysis (frequently used words, shared links) and descriptive statistics, a dataset of more than 100M posts and 5M users. In particular, they analyzed the content posted, the language used, the attention received, and the connection between subcommunities. Open-source software (OSS) communities were classified in [43]. Here, the authors suggest that OSS communities can be either exploration-oriented, utilityoriented, or service-oriented, depending on their structure and the role of their members.

Besides the exhaustive taxonomy to characterize blockchain networks, protocols, distributed ledgers, tokens, and digital wallets presented in [44], there is a lack of empirical studies that systematically examine blockchain-based online communities. Regardless of methodological similarities with previous work attempt to develop an approach through which DAOs, can be classified, characterizing their operative, financial, and governance aspects.

There have been some preliminary attempts at categorizing DAOs within the industry. Specifically, the blockchain startups DeepDAO and Messari provide some basic characterizations. DeepDao has a set of 12 topic-based categories to enable basic filtering of its DAO database. These categories are not exclusive, e.g., the DAO Decentraland is tagged with both “Gaming” and “non-fungible tokens (NFTs)” labels.

Moreover, when accessing a specific DAO, it is not available how it has been labeled. Messari follows a similar approach, with nine “types” and 24 “tags” to label DAOs, again nonexclusively. They help differentiate DAOs based on their topic (e.g., “metaverse” or “gaming”) or by describing specific characteristics (e.g., “has NFTs”). Our approach aims to build archetypes and a complex classification rather than merely using labels for filtering purposes."

(https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=10217072)

Discussion

Matt Rhodes:

"For some the internet offers people the opportunity for people to represent themselves in a way that suits them. They can make themselves sound much more exciting than they really are in social networks if they so choose, talking about a band they just love and not showing certain photos that might be embarrassing from the weekend.

In online communities, it is less easy to hide behind an identity. Social networks are about ‘me’ and as such it is relatively easy to create the identity that you want to portray, showing photos, having conversations and listing things in your profile that support this. Online communities are very different, they are about ‘us’ - a shared experience, aim, theme or topic. It is not your profile that counts, but your ideas, thoughts and contributions. These are less easy to hide behind an identity that may not be completely true.

This is why the overriding principle for behaviour in online communities is to be open, honest and truthful. In doing so, we often find that people find their own voice and online identity. As an online community develops and matures, we see the members grow and develop with it, finding the way they like to act and represent themselves online." (http://blog.freshnetworks.com/2009/02/identity-and-self-in-online-communities/)