Abstract
The rapid growth in the widespread acceptance and usage of the Internet and the ease of creating online communities have brought advantages in terms of swift access to information alongside ...ethical problems interrelated with the dark side of the workings of these communities. Relevant research approaching ethics and the dark side of online communities has received widespread publication in a diverse set of journals with a wide variety of objectives and readers that has left its academic contribution broadly fragmented. To help shrink this gap in the literature, this study, through undertaking a systematic review, seeks to map the research on ethics and the dark side of online communities to grasp where the literature has come from and where it is going and, consequently, provide opportunities for future research. This study applied a bibliometric approach based on analysis of the bibliographic coupling with the manual coding of documents to examine the literature on the ethics and the dark side of online communities to set out a holistic framework of its different facets. The content and the thematic analysis of 53 studies identified four thematic groups: quality of the information in online communities, virtual identities, safety in online communities, and the content of online communities. The findings of this study also highlight the various shortcomings in the literature on the ethics and dark side of online communities and lead to some research questions that justify future academic research.
How is value created in an online community (OC) over time? We explored this question through a longitudinal field study of an OC in the healthcare arena. We found that multiple kinds of value were ...produced and changed over time as different participants engaged with the OC and its evolving technology in various ways. To explain our findings, we theorize OC value as performed through the ongoing sociomaterial configuring of strategies, digital platforms, and stakeholder engagement. We develop a process perspective to explain these dynamics and identify multiple different kinds of value being created by an OC over time: financial, epistemic, ethical, service, reputational, and platform. Our research points to the importance of expanding the notion of OC users to encompass a broader understanding of stakeholders. It further suggests that creating OC value increasingly requires going beyond a dyadic relationship between the OC and the firm to encompassing a more complex relationship involving a wider ecosystem of stakeholders.
This article considers how the social-news and community site Reddit.com has become a hub for anti-feminist activism. Examining two recent cases of what are defined as “toxic technocultures” ...(#Gamergate and The Fappening), this work describes how Reddit’s design, algorithm, and platform politics implicitly support these kinds of cultures. In particular, this piece focuses on the ways in which Reddit’s karma point system, aggregation of material across subreddits, ease of subreddit and user account creation, governance structure, and policies around offensive content serve to provide fertile ground for anti-feminist and misogynistic activism. The ways in which these events and communities reflect certain problematic aspects of geek masculinity are also considered. This research is informed by the results of a long-term participant-observation and ethnographic study into Reddit’s culture and community and is grounded in actor-network theory.
There is substantial research on the effects of formal control structures (i.e., incentives, identities, organization, norms) on knowledge sharing leading to innovative outcomes in online ...communities. However, there is little research on how knowledge-sharing trajectories in temporary online crowds create innovative outcomes without these structures. Such research is particularly of interest in the context of temporary online crowds solicited with crowdsourcing in which there is only minimal structure for knowledge sharing. We identify eight types of crowdsourcing with different knowledge-sharing patterns. The focus of this study is on the one type of crowdsourcing—collaborative innovation challenges—in which there is the least restriction on knowledge sharing in the crowd. A content analysis was conducted of all time-stamped posts made in five different collaborative innovation challenges to identify different knowledge-sharing trajectories used. We found that a paradox-framed trajectory was more likely to be followed by innovative outcomes compared to three other knowledge-sharing trajectories. A paradox-framed trajectory is one in which a novel solution emerges when different participants post in the following sequence: (1) contributing a paradox associated with the problem objective, (2) sharing assumptions to validate the paradox, and (3) sharing initial ideas for resolving the paradox in a manner that meets the problem statement. Based on the findings, a theory of paradox-framed trajectories in temporary online crowds is presented along with implications for knowledge creation theories in general and online knowledge-creating communities in particular.
Online communities provide a forum for rich social interaction and identity development for billions of Internet users worldwide. In order to manage these communities, platform owners have ...increasingly turned to commercial content moderation, which includes both the use of moderation algorithms and the employment of professional moderators, rather than user-driven moderation, to detect and respond to anti-normative behaviors such as harassment and spread of offensive content. We present findings from semi-structured interviews with 56 volunteer moderators of online communities across three platforms (Twitch, Reddit, and Facebook), from which we derived a generalized model categorizing the ways moderators engage with their communities and explaining how these communities develop as a result. This model contains three processes: being and becoming a moderator; moderation tasks, actions, and responses; and rules and community development. In this work, we describe how moderators contribute to the development of meaningful communities, both with and without algorithmic support.
In recent years, the Western online beauty community has been embroiled in multiple racist scandals that have resulted in callout campaigns against various influencers and cosmetic companies. Through ...a multiplatform discourse analysis of two such scandals, this project explores how influencers, brands, and audiences utilize the affordances and norms of social media platforms to manage their roles and relationships throughout these callout campaigns. Four key strategies emerge: curation, critique, reframing, and silence. Despite the efforts of some audiences and influencers, these four strategies elided the broader social implications of brand and influencer racism as members of the community responded to the drama more than they critiqued the marginalization of people of color. Overall, this project provides insight into the dynamics at work in callout campaigns, theorizing the ways in which actors work to balance visibility, risk, labor, and control.
To manage work interdependencies, online communities draw on a variety of arm’s length coordination mechanisms offered by information technology platforms and associated practices. However, ...“unresolved interdependencies” remain that cannot be addressed by such arm’s length mechanisms. These interdependencies reflect, for example, unidentified or emerging knowledge-based dependencies between the community members or unaccounted relationships between ongoing community tasks. At the same time, online communities cannot resort to hierarchical coordination mechanisms such as incentives or command structures to address such interdependencies. So, how do they manage such interdependencies? To address this question, we conduct an exploratory, theory-generating case study involving qualitative and computational analyses of development activities within an open source software community: Rubinius. We analyze the ongoing management of interdependencies within the community and find that unresolved interdependencies are associated with alternatively structured sequences of activities, which we define as routines. In particular, we observe that two distinct classes of interdependencies—development and developer interdependencies—are associated with alternative forms of routine variation. We identify two generalized routine components—direct implementation and knowledge integration, which address these two distinct classes of unresolved interdependencies. In particular, direct implementation deals with development interdependencies within the code that are not already coordinated through modular interfaces, while knowledge integration resolves unaccounted interdependencies between developers. We conclude with implications for research into organizing principles for online communities and note the significance of our findings for the study of coordination in organization studies in general.
Online platforms train users to interact with each other through certain widespread interface designs. This article argues that an “implicit feudalism” informs the available options for community ...management on the dominant platforms for online communities. It is a pattern that grants user-administrators absolutist reign over their fiefdoms, with competition among them as the primary mechanism for quality control, typically under rules set by platform companies. Implicit feudalism emerged from technical conditions dating to early online networks. In light of alternative management mechanisms with more democratic features, it becomes all the more clear that implicit feudalism is not a necessary condition.
PDF
